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TECHNOLOGY : BOOKS: ELECTRONIC:
The Kindle Electronic Book from Amazon




Our Digital Life
Let's Hope Kindle Is Only Chapter One
11.19.07, 6:00 PM ET
Forbes
Andy Greenberg
<http://www.forbes.com/technology/personaltech/2007/11/19/
kindle-ipod-amazon-technology-personaltech-
cx_ag_1119kindle.html>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2ypjh5>


Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos has done the seemingly impossible:
He's created a piece of technology more bookish than a book.

The Kindle, launched Monday, is a slim handheld device that
holds around 200 novels' worth of words and--using electronic
ink technology that physically arranges a dark chemical under
the screen--displays them so crisply that the text is only
barely distinguishable from ink on a page. Unlike the Sony
Reader, a device launched about a year ago that uses the same
e-ink display technology, the Kindle connects to Amazon's
servers with an EVDO cellular connection to download books
from a stock of more than 90,000 titles, and can pull an
entire novel's text directly onto the device wirelessly in
less than a minute.

Weighing just over 10 ounces and displaying text on a 6-inch
diagonal screen, the Kindle does a remarkable job of
reproducing the feel of a book. The passive display
technology produces no light, so a two-hour charge of its
battery lasts for 30 hours of uninterrupted reading. In fact,
it only takes thumbing through a few digital pages of a novel
to forget that you're using a newfangled gadget and become
completely immersed in its content. The goal, says Bezos, was
to create a device that "disappears completely and lets you
enter the author's world."

Video: Amazon's Kindle E-Book

But from a design perspective, the sooner the
Kindle "disappears" the better. Amazon's reader is in many
ways the anti-iPhone. It does one thing very well:
downloading and displaying text. Unlike Steve Jobs'
wondertoy, it's not likely to become a status symbol for hip
digerati.

The Kindle is an off-white, asymmetrical tablet. Its screen
is entirely gray-scale and never gets brighter than a dingy
gray; images look as if they were printed in a Depression-era
newspaper. Menus are navigated with a clunky up-and-down
click-wheel, and when they load, the screen flashes black
like a TI-82 calculator.

The Kindle's business model has another set of problems. To
avoid a monthly subscription fee, Amazon is charging a wallet-
taxing $399 for the device--then $9.99 or so for every book
that you download from Amazon's "Kindle Store." Publishers
seem reluctant to put their entire stock into the discounted
e-book format. Bezos brags that 101 of the 112 current New
York Times best sellers and new releases are available for
download. Just don't ask about best sellers from past years.
I went searching for Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and came
back with only I Am Charlotte Simmons.

For content that's already available on the Web, the Kindle
is even less practical. A variety of magazines, including
Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, Time and Forbes are available by
subscription or individual purchase: for instance, $1.50 will
get you a single issue of Forbes, or $2.49 will get you a
month's subscription.


----------------------------------------

November 20, 2007, 12:59 pm
Electronic Books: If It Ain’t Broke . . .
By Damon Darlin
Tags: Amazon.com, e books, kindle
New York Times
<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/electronic-books-if-
it-aint-broke/>

At $400, Amazon’s Kindle seems rather expensive. The books
may be cheap, but you would have to read well over 40 of them
before you began to save any money. And really, who reads 40
books a year? Or even in two years?

By the time you started to recoup your investment, the
machine would die or become outmoded. Numerous people have
commented that if the paper book was invented today, it would
be heralded as a technological breakthrough: light, portable,
easy to share, no silly DRM problems, and it really isn’t
that expensive given the value of entertainment a reader can
wring out of it. The paper book is a good product. It isn’t
broken. It doesn’t need to be fixed with a technological
solution.
In other words, the Kindle don’t make much economic sense.


Except for one group: college students. They buy dozens of
books each term and can easily read 40 books in a year. The
thing would start saving them money within a year. (And they
would have less weight to lug around in the meantime. That
has to be worth something.)

----------------------------------------

Tuesday, November 20, 2007 8:11 AM PT
Posted by Harry McCracken
5 Arguments For the Continued Viability of the Book
PC World
<http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/005951.html<


I take a lot of six-hour plane flights, and am usually
reading multiple books at any given time. Which makes me an
ideal target customer for Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader.
Lugging even one hardcover book on a trip is a hassle; the
Kindle can contain the equivalent of hundreds of 'em in a
package that's slimmer than a typical paperback.

So I'm intrigued by the idea, at the very least--and plan to
try the $399 EVDO-enabled Kindle out shortly to see just how
good the reading experience is. (We'll also have a review up
shortly by my colleague Melissa Perenson--who, like many
people who have gotten their hands on the device, found both
plenty to like and plenty to quibble about.)

Meanwhile, I've been ruminating on Steven Levy's long article
about the Kindle in the current Newsweek. Actually, Levy's
piece is only partly about the Kindle--it's about where
digital technology could be taking books. Technology could
put all the books ever written into one Kindle-like device;
it could turn books from static, unchanging items into ones
that are subject to continuous evolution; it could make them
conversations rather than one-way transfers of ideas from
author to reader.

----------------------------------------

Amazon Unveils Wireless Kindle E-Book Reader
With the $399 Kindle, Amazon's first hardware offering,
users can download thousands of titles, plus periodicals
and Web fare from Whispernet.
Melissa J. Perenson, PC World
Monday, November 19, 2007 7:00 AM PST
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139777/article.html>

The Kindle, Amazon's first foray into making its own
hardware, weighs 10.3 ounces, can contain up to 200 books,
has a keyboard, and uses electronic ink display technology.
It is on sale today at Amazon.com.

<snip>

How It Works
Kindle operates without ever connecting to a PC. Instead, the
device can download books--any of 90,000 at launch--directly
via the built-in EvDO radio connection to Amazon's new
Whispernet service.

Books take less than a minute to download, and their price
varies, but new releases and New York Times bestsellers cost
$9.99.

The service runs on the Sprint EvDO network; it carries no
service charges or contracts--that's all covered in the
background by Amazon.

In addition to books, Kindle can automatically download
newspapers and blogs, in a return of "push" technology. The
device also has a dictionary and Wikipedia access.

The Kindle service also includes newspapers, magazines, and
blogs. Publications that you subscribe to are delivered
directly to the device. Choices include The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the San Jose
Mercury News, Time, Fortune, The Atlantic Monthly, Le Monde,
and Slate.

More than 300 of the most popular blogs with their full
content also are available. You subscribe to the blogs you
want, and they're updated throughout the day.

----------------------------------------


A new chapter for e-book producers
Amazon hopes gadget will be a best seller, but will
literature lovers feel the need?
By Wailin Wong | Tribune staff reporter
November 20, 2007
Chicago Tribune
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/
chi-tue_digitalbooknov20,0,1033938.story?
coll=chi_business_mezz>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2wo7fl>

Consumers have mobile phones and digital music players. They
write e-mails, surf the Web and watch videos on YouTube. Yet
digital publishers and manufacturers are still trying to
convince consumers to modernize that most old-fashioned
medium: the book.

On Monday Amazon.com entered the fray with Kindle, a $399
device that will try to do for books what the iPod did for
music: use a new gadget to promote a digital-based industry.

It's a flashy idea tied to the digital media revolution that
has already upended both the music business and newspapers,
which are scrambling to adjust. But book publishers,
particularly those of literary fiction and narrative non-
fiction, have struggled to find a digital format that offers
immediate and significant improvements over the time-tested
combination of paper, ink and binding.

"Fundamentally, you've got a very portable device at the
moment -- the paperback book," said Eric Price, associate
publisher at Grove/Atlantic in New York.

Amazon's long-rumored Kindle is itself the size of a
paperback and weighs 10.3 ounces. The company will make more
than 90,000 books available electronically, including best
sellers and new releases, many of which cost $9.99 each.

One of the Kindle's main features is its ability to download
content without being connected to a computer. Amazon's
reader uses a wireless broadband standard used by mobile
phone service providers. Kindle owners must have Amazon
accounts to use the device, which can hold more than 200
titles at one time.

1-minute download

"It can provide instant access," said Steven Kessel, Amazon's
senior vice president of worldwide digital media. "So you
think of a book and you go to the store that's connected on
the device you buy, and that book is downloaded in less than
a minute."

Industry players say that while "e-books" have gained
popularity in educational circles and other niches,
mainstream consumers have been reluctant to adopt the new
technology because they want it to replicate the experience
of physically handling a book, something the digital format
has not delivered on yet.


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Temple University
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