Kindle Afire
Future of newspapers? Maybe in some form. That’s the Kindle buzz. A variety of reviews follow, including one from a pal who is a reader here. No techno-geek, he’s a crusty old Vietnam vet.
Bob emailed recently that he has married his Kindle to his iPhone, wanted to know if I knew about any of this:
My wife Rosemary gave me an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I don’t think I would have bought it for myself but, once I had it and used it… it has grown on me. It is just so convenient and very easy to read. I must like it because I sprang for a 4Gb SD card to plug into it, so I think I can now carry around two or three thousand of my favorite trashy books.
Then, today, I stumbled across news of a new iPhone App named Kindle. Free from Apple. So I downloaded the App to the iPhone I’ve been using for a year or two, which I think is a terrific piece of gear. Told the App who I was. It flashed a list of the books I have purchased from Amazon in the past for my Kindle and axed me which one I wanted first for the iPhone. I told it to give me Gwin’s book, “Baptism.” Two minutes later Baptism was on my iPhone, open to the last page I had read on my Kindle a month or so ago. I read a dozen more pages, turned off the iPhone, opened the Kindle and Baptism was there, already open to the last page I had just read. All free, or at least previously paid for.
On the Kindle you click a button to turn the page; on the iPhone you just flick your finger across the screen and the next page scrolls in sideways from the right. Neat-o. Very clear and crisp, with a choice of font sizes.
So now I can keep a library on the Kindle, a contraption smaller in size than most hardcover books, and do my offsite reading whenever and wherever I want on the iPhone that is always in my pocket. This is good stuff. The scary thing is, there has to be even better stuff in the pipeline.
Wicked scary. I love being scared like that. Screaming rollercoaster plunge scared. A pay-for-content vehicle that people rave about. Some thoughts on that after these user reviews. I have yet to lay hands on one, but I’m intrigued.
Randy Neal at Knoxviews shows you in detail what it looks like and how it works. Looks cool.
My initial reaction after playing with it for a few minutes: “This is a remarkable thing.”
Knoxville’s existential brunchist Russ McBee:
My Kindle arrived a couple of days ago, and I haven’t been able to put it down since … Its convenience is only surpassed by its readability; the Kindle has almost completely eliminated the eye strain I would get from reading a standard LCD display for hours at a time.
When I turned it on for the first time, it automatically downloaded the books I had ordered while waiting for it to arrive. I sat down to read at about 6:00 PM, and the next thing I knew, it was 11:30 PM. I felt no eye strain at all after that marathon. There is no way I could have spent that much time reading on an LCD without my eyes complaining.
McBee explains the technological differences, discusses ergonomics and concludes.
For me, the Kindle is a liberating technology; the almost total elimination of eye strain, the ease of use, and the availability of vast amounts of content through Amazon’s Kindle Store have given me a refreshed and rejuvenated hunger for reading, and I’m grateful for that.
… Although the subscription prices for some titles may be debatable, it’s important to note that all Kindle content is free of advertisements. For me, that automatically commands a premium.
I haven’t subscribed to a daily paper in about 15 years … so I’ve kind of startled myself by taking out a Kindle subscription to the Washington Post …
This is a point I think newspaper publishers might be missing: people who subscribe to the Kindle edition probably aren’t likely to be subscribers to the dead-tree version. I think they’re likelier to be people like me, who have been reading the free edition of the paper on the Web for years now.
Jack Lail at Random Mumblings:
… we’re at version two. Most technology products don’t really get prime time until version 3. Hey, I’m not into the Kool-Aid so far as to believe it’s the answer, but it could one be one of many needed answers.
Reynolds, from whose site I surfed into the above reviews:
… what might save newspapers? Well, I’ve been reading the Financial Times on the Kindle 2, and I’ve found it quite enjoyable, and, surprisingly, have found myself reading the paper in depth in spite of the Kindle’s okay-but-not-great newspaper navigation setup. It’s easy to read, you don’t get ink on your fingers, and there’s nothing to throw away or recycle when you’re done. Driving back from DC yesterday, I let the Insta-Wife drive a good deal and spent several hours happily reading things on the Kindle and I like it a lot. And it lasted the whole trip with plenty of battery power left, though I really didn’t use it much while in DC. I’m planning on subscribing to some other newspapers, as I find the experience of reading news on the Kindle better than I expected.
In more formal reviews, CNET product review offers the good, the bad and the bottom line. Technroll here.
OK, one bad quickie review from my wife, the author.
I tried one out at a book club the other night. I hate it. There’s no cover. It’s like having sex with a blow-up doll.
Yes, dear. I know, the romance of print. It’s kind of how I feel about sailboats and 747s. Sometimes I like to feel the wind and spray. Other times I need to get across the ocean fast. This thing sounds a little more pleasant than being jammed in a can full of strangers at 30,000 feet … which now that I think of it, sounds a lot like the Internet.
Anyway, honey, I’m a tabloid man. We’re not above appealing to people’s cheap lusts. We’ve been speculating in my ink-on-pulp business for a while that a reloadable, portable reading device that approximates the newspaper experience in a more satisfying way than a Blackberry screen, coupled with a easy electronic distribution and subscription system, is the future. Amazon apparently has all three. I suspect it needs to get cheaper … $359 is still a little dear for me and I suspect a lot of others these days. I suspect it also needs to be more portable … something you can roll up and swat flies with.
Then, there’s the question going forward of whether ADHD nation is going to need more than a twit or a txt worth of content on any given subject. That probably favors tabloids like the Boston Herald more than august institutions like the Washington Post and Financial Times cited by Kindle reviewers above, but I’ve always considered that one of the great contributions of the Internet, text messaging, all that, is that it got kids reading and writing again. Eventually, most of them will have careers, kids, mortgages. Then they’ll want to read more. Maybe they’ll even be interested in syntax, spelling.
Hold everything. Jim Romenesko at Poynter emails with an issue that wants ironing out:
Kindle has a BIG problem the way it is now. I subscribe to the WSJ through it and there’s not a single update through the day. That makes no sense considering the Kindle is “always on” and news orgs can push content to it around the clock. A major disappointment at this stage.
Make an issue that wants irony out. Sounds like it may be mimicking the print experience too well.
As my boss said about this Internet thing and our industry’s self-cannibalizing efforts to get a foothold on it, if you don’t eat your lunch someone else will eat it for you. Shameless opportunism: Like Kindle? Get yours here. By the way, to the reader who recently bought one, thanks for the business. Let me know how it’s working out for you.
And to all my crusty old Vietnam vet pals … stop calling Bob “Crusty.”
Topics: Internet, books, geekism, media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:11 am on Wednesday, March 18, 2009
3 Responses to “Kindle Afire”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
March 18th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
They want to see crusty, I’ll show ‘em crusty.
By the way, I am still happy with the gizmo but far less happy with Amazon very recently. They are monkeying with Kindle book download pricing and it is REALLY aggravating. Larry Gwin recommended Mullaney’s “superb combat memoir entitled The Unforgiving Minute” to me, so I went to Amazon today and they have priced the Kindle version only a dollar or two under the hard copy book. The implication when Kindle first arrived was in the $9.99 area. I hate to think I got took.
Bait & switch comes to mind, and I let them know that in a crusty email that no human will ever lay eyes on.
Bob
March 18th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Jules:
If your people are really considering going electronic reader distribution, take a quick look around http://www.baen.com/library/ (Bean Free Library) and the Webscriptions link at the top of that page too.
In particular, look at the variety of formats available. What you want to avoid, if at all possible, is going with any format that is exclusive to a single ereader gizmo.
There’s a wide variety of protected formats that only work on specific gizmos and that is building in distribution limits from the jump.
Good for the gizmo makers, but not so smart at all for the publishers.
I got my ereader addiction from EBookReader. That’s the old “rocketbook” iirc, resold in a new name. Its saving grace, for me, is the lower entry price of the gizmo but it is very limited by protected format.
On the plus side, there’s free content that works on many, if not most, gizmos. I’ve got all the old Roman and Greek classics, Federalist Papers, Histories, etc etc for free from places such as ManyBooks and Gutenberg.
Also, I think I recall reading that Moby Reader is available for Kindle. That opens up the Kindle gizmo to content not specific to Amazon, if true.
March 19th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
The Amazon Kindle Price Thick Plottens…
Yesterday, Craig Mullaney’s “The Unforgiving Minute” Kindle edition was $15-plus. There were complaints entered on the product page. I checked this morning and they had it down to $11.99. Curiouser, I looked again a half-hour ago and it was now $9.99. So I bought it. If I had bought it yesterday at $15.99, I would today be a very unhappy customer, and probably no longer a customer. For six bucks they would have lost me for good.
They keep screwing with folks, they’re gonna run out of folks. I wonder if the Sony reader action yesterday maybe got the attention of somebody at Amazon who can think.