As anyone who has recently visited the Amazon home page can tell you, the second generation Amazon Kindle has been announced. For the most part, this e-book reader seems pretty similar to the first, with tweaks to the software, a sleeker design, and text-to-speech capabilities.But as the Economist points out, the Kindle is not yet the "new iPod" as Amazon hopes. Instead, it is a device for passionate readers (it can hold up to 1,500 books) and those who want the convenience of being able to purchase and read a new title in a matter of seconds. I've seen a few of these devices on the subways on New York City, held by professionals on their long commutes rather than carrying multiple (heavier) printed books. Publishing professionals long for the day when the Kindle or a similar e-book reader could be a manuscript reader (or is it already?), to make it easier to wade through the hundreds of heavy pages of solicited submissions. (Forget the slush pile).
However, in the end, I really don't see the Kindle having mass appeal just yet. Amazon has been very closed about their sales figures, so no one really knows how popular the Kindle really is. But they have been promoting their device like crazy, calling it a "revolutionary wireless reading device". I don't know about revolutionary, just maybe the most well-known and well-funded. There have been many e-book readers before, so it was bound to happen that a stronger company would undertake the challenge. All in all, it seems to be a rather conservative device and pretty much what one would expect from an e-book reader.
What comes next? I really don't see any e-book reader replacing the comfort of curling up with a printed book any time soon, but it is a convenience if you need to read (and carry) a lot of books around. Perhaps if the Kindle is able to add highlighting capabilities, it will make great strides in the arena of scholarly books, appealing to students who are tried to purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks that they rarely use. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and with all this publicity and the huge push behind the device, consumers will decide that it really is popular and buy it for themselves.
Personally, I'm waiting to see if Apple will have a rebuttal for this new leap in technology. They've already enabled the iPhones to download and read public domain books for free. Will they unveil a separate device, the iRead perhaps, to really revolutionize the field?
2 comments:
The iPod is so much more convenient to carry around, its many functions so versatile, no one would want to go back to the good old times of the Walkman with tapes or CDs. The Kindle is still in its infant stage, and even if it succeeds to find a niche, I doubt it could ever overtake the place of a printed book. Besides, reading from a portable screen is already possible, why would anyone want to carry one more devise around?
The idea of reading on a screen makes me shudder. Sure, it might be more convenient, especially if it were all on one device like you suggest. I certainly wouldn't want to carry around an iPod and a Kindle AND a cell phone. Yet, if books are inevitably becoming portable ebooks, at least the Kindle's screen is supposedly easier to read from. I think the lighting and size of the screen on an iPod/iPhone would drive me crazy.
I'll stick with the paper and ink version, thankyouverymuch. :)
On a separate note, can you imagine how terrible it would be if that one device was lost? Cell phone/music/books/schedule/GPS/everything... gone! What a nightmare!
Post a Comment