I'd like a Kindle 2, but I don't really think it should cost more than $50-79. $99 at an absolute maximum. The current prices for all these e-readers just strike me as completely out to lunch.

I'm not sure how anyone other than Amazon can make any money trying to move them. The only reason they have any chance is because of the content deals they have and of course their bookstore "heritage."

But really, at even at $99 I'd expect a better design (form and function) with a bigger screen.

When the first PCs came out, they cost many thousands of dollars. When GPS receivers first came out, they were many hundreds of dollars. Now you can get a laptop for a hundred bucks, and get GPS in your phone for virtually no extra cost.

I don't really see what's new about this particular case. It sucks for someone who wants one, but it's what virtually everyone does when they have a new technology until everyone starts competing and forcing prices down.

That said, I want one too, and will keep an eye on the product space for something that fits into my budget a bit better. Not ruling out the Kindle 2 itself some day, but not during the initial launch period.

I wouldn't buy a Kindle (prefer paper books), but the price *does* include lifetime (of the company/device) wireless internet access, which to me would be worth perhaps $5/month.

So, more than $50-$99 basic value there, but not enough for me to want one.

Cheers

My understanding is that ePaper technologies currently cost a fortune. I imagine that the majority of the cost is in the display.

Amazon does have a good market, as they are the hardware vendor and the content vendor. It's exactly equivalent to Apple, the iPod, and iTMS.

And the books are good deals, ignoring the initial cost of the hardware. I was just looking at getting Neal Stephenson's Anathem. It's $29.95 retail, $19.77 at Amazon, and $9.99 for the Kindle version. Not to mention that it's nice to save trees, and, hopefully, publishers will catch on that they never have to let a book go out of print.

The ability to purchase books directly from the device is very nice, as are the free samples: seemingly every available book has a free chapter. Personally, I don't do much flipping around in novels, so that doesn't bother me. And there's a search function, which would be helpful with tech stuff, if I ever bought tech stuff in book form anymore. Plus, the ability to carry a library around with you is nice. No need to pack five books for your vacation, not knowing what mood you'll be in.

It also obviates the need for large-print books, which is good for a lot of people.

My only complaints with it are: page turning takes a little too long, but if you anticipate properly, it's not a big deal; newspaper subscriptions cost too much, but considering that basically all of a newspaper's profit comes from the cover price (advertising pretty much only pays for printing), it's understandable; and paying for RSS feeds is a little ridiculous, especially since web browsing is free.

When was the last time you were reading and said to yourself, "You know, I'm enjoying this story, but I wish the book was bigger"?

I did forget about that part. That doesn't apply to the other products on the market though. And some of them cost even more.

The case of computers and GPS and everything else coming down in price is somewhat fair, but this is using many of the same technologies that have already been cost reduced. Not to mention the products (though not Kindle) have been around for a few years already. Relatively speaking though, e-ink is still fairly new, but one of its great promises was low cost. I'm not seeing that in any reader device yet.

I can't think of the last time actually. But I'm feeling it looking at the Kindle, mainly because its screen isn't as big as a lot of the books I already have. Not even many paperbacks.

The borders around the screen are too wide on the new Kindle. Expanding the screen (proportionally) would fill in the excess space and provide more reading room. And of course the ability to simply make the text/print bigger.

In addition to a bigger screen it needs higher contrast and newer display tech to get the white portions of the page to really appear white. Full colour would be excellent for magazine reading, but I'm not even going that far yet. We can wait 4 more years for that.

Same here! "They turned the pages, which were yellow...the first time."

...although of course in making that point I've sort-of negated it, seeing as I couldn't hyperlink to my paper-book copy of the story.

Peter

Is this to grip the device, like a border on a book? I haven't even seen or held the old version, so I don't know if the old one was fine as it was.

I briefly though about getting a Kindle (1). My boss has one and loves it. For some reason, it just doesn't sit well with me. There is something comforting about have bookshelves full of old books that you can go back and revisit that you remember just by seeing the spine. I guess it seems impersonal.

I also am not sure about the whole electronic reading thing. I've had a subscription to Safari for at least a couple years. One thing it taught me was that it is a great way to find books I'm interested in, but for any real reading, I'll grab the print book anyway.

I won't even go into the data mining that ordering all your books from one place provides. That scares me too.

What do you see as the advantages of an electronic book such as Kindle?

One huge advantage is search. The ability to keep a title "in print" indefinitely. The ability for a new edition (update) without having to purchase a new physical item. The reduction in pulp/paper processing which means less trees chopped down.

Don't get me wrong, I love books as well and having something like the Kindle doesn't mean I would never buy a real physical book again. It's true that for a lot of material I'd go straight to a digital version, but I still see room for select books. This is unlike my current music situation where I don't buy digital-only versions of music, but instead CDs serve as a starting point and archival media.

The first Kindle was very poorly designed, what with the awkward angles and really bad button placement. The new Kindle is better, but even for grabbing purposes, the borders around the screen are too big. This is likely a product of the particular screen they sourced rather than a specific design requirement.

I think as a starting point this type of device is workable, but in the future I'd like to see something that bridges the gap between cold electronic device and warm analog page-turning a little better. Perhaps something with multiple flexible pages. It would be very handy to be able to look at two pages at once in many circumstances. There's a lot of room for growth in this product segment.

I'm not a fan of having a single source for content either. Hopefully this will be worked out in the future as more devices come to market and some additional "standards" are developed. I prefer to see it closer to the digital music marketplace rather than the iPhone app market for example. But with an even more level playing field.

That I can definately agree with. There are times when I want to go back to see what/where/how/why something occured and had to skim through various parts of the book to find that section again. Good call on the search function.

My thought was a device that had ePaper on the front and back and an accelerometer. It starts by loading the first page on the front and the second page on the back. To turn the page, you flip the device over, at which point it loads page 3 on the front, etc.

This helps with the page refresh and also helps it feel a little more like a real book, while being currently feasible. Fails on the seeing-two-pages-at-once front, though. Also doesn't help on the flipping back. Maybe waiting about 5-10 seconds to load the new page on the dark side would help a little. Still, most cases of multi-page flipping is better solved by search anyway.

A device that had multiple flexible pages would be neat, but that's definitely a ways off.

The screen on the original is somewhere between the size of a mass-market paperback and a trade paperback. But the "printing" goes right up to the edge of the screen, whereas books have margins. (Yes, in reality, the text doesn't quite go to the edge of the Kindle, but its margins are far smaller than that of a paper book.)

Actually, one of the problems I've always had with paper books is that my hand is always covering up part of the text. I like the fact that there's more of a border.

I have an emotional attachment to paper books, too. I totally understand. And there is the issue of Amazon's DRM (though I understand it more with books and other single-experience media than music).

And I could have sworn I saw someone complain about margin notes. You can actually take notes on the Kindle and search them. I can understand if that's not enough, but it might be information you didn't have.

Single source for content? That's like saying the iPod has a single source for content. You can put all sorts of formats on the Kindle, it's just that you might have to use their email conversion thingie to do some of them (PDF, Word, etc.)

First you lamented that it's too expensive, now you just wish it was better. Both of these problems can be solved by... waiting a while. It took several years to get from crappy portable MP3 units to the iPod.

Not everyone hits a home run so early on like the Empeg guys did. Given how new usable e-paper technology is, I'm happy the devices and price points are where they are.

Yes, single source. There's only Amazon. You want to convert any of your existing files (as you mentioned), you have to use their (Amazon's) conversion process. You're tied to Amazon, unlike the iPod, onto which you have always been able to put your own content without having to first send it to Apple.

With an iPod you can also buy music at any number of other vendors selling music. It so happens it's non-DRM of course.

At a minimum I would have liked to see native PDF support, such that you could convert your own documents to PDF and put them on the Kindle without Amazon as a middleman.

My point of complaining it's too expensive and wanting more go hand in hand. At the current price point I expect a lot more. At the current implementation level, I expect a much lower price point.

I really have no clue what Amazon's costs are, but I suspect they're no where near what the retail price of the Kindle is. I have a feeling there's a (very) large markup. But that aside, my complaints aren't that a company shouldn't try to make as much money as possible. It's that I don't feel it's a decent value proposition at the current price when taken in the context of the current state of technology (and other not-like but capable multi-use products).

Unless I'm mistaken, Kindle supports .txt, .mobi, and .prc files, as well as MP3 and Audible audio formats, without conversion or any emailing to Amazon.

Forget "implementation level" versus price point. The demand is there, regardless of what the current implementation level is. Stupid easy access to Amazon's catalog is a huge selling point that the other e-readers can't touch. The iTunes store was a big part of the iPod's success, just as Amazon's store has sold a lot of Kindles, despite the device's limitations. You can't look at the device capabilities in isolation and say it's not worth it. Access to the store's library is worth something, and poeple have voted with their credit cards.

I agree. It's definitely worth something. However...



Worth is a personal assessment, and as we agree, can be greater than the price of the parts. I'm looking at the big picture as it stands today, and at this time, it simply isn't worth it to me, which is what I wrote about when I started the thread.

Sure, there's some demand there. But compare it to the demand for a music player and it's somewhat insignificant. The demand at $79 would be greater, that much is a given. Would it be more than 4x greater (since it's less than 1/4 the retail price)? I don't know. I suspect Amazon have crunched some numbers in trying to pick the price point of both the device and books in an attempt to maximize profits. But that doesn't change the value proposition for me nor a lot of other people.

The devices will have to be sub-$100 to achieve mass-market success, IMO.

Just looking the thread over again, responding to some things I didn't before:


The Kindle allows you to change the size of the text already. Yeah, you get fewer words on the page, but the issue of larger fonts is already resolved.


I've never had any problems with the contrast at all. And, really? The background isn't white enough? Who cares? Do you call newspapers to complain that they print on newsprint?

You are not mistaken.

I think Bruno is inferring too much from the lack of PDF support, whose stated cause is that the Kindle's resolution is simply too low to support 8½×11 PDFs.

But you can absolutely install other eBook formats, either via USB or by downloading directly from the builtin web browser, neither of which costs anything, and does not pass through Amazon's hands.

Newsprint? Damn, might as well spend some time making a time-machine so I can go back to 1983 when newspapers were still relevant.

Magazines and first editions aren't printed on newsprint. Yeah, I'd prefer not to read grey on grey.

The font issue hasn't been resolved because the screen is too small to allow much zooming without significantly sacrificing the page composition.



Ok, that I wasn't aware of. I was under the impression that the Kindle didn't support other ebook formats out of the box without a conversion process. This certainly makes the device a little more capable.

There is no page composition on the Kindle, or, AFAIK, any other eBook reader. It's text and it gets rendered however the reader wants to render it. It's not like the Kindle is displaying rasterized images of text.

From the main Kindle page:

I didn't mean to imply that resizing would ruin a pre-determined composition, just that the relative composition of the zoomed/enlarged result itself may not be ideal given such a small screen.

I do find it strange that the thing can't handle HTML directly, yet it has built-in web browsing capability.

I'm sure the product segment will improve. It just isn't getting there fast enough. Let's hope the new Kindle design spurs development and we start to see more competition and innovation. I'm confident that even while the price remains the same as the previous version, K2 will pick up more sales, due in part to it not being a complete design abomination like rev 1.

Here's what I would change in the physical design, without getting beyond the technology available right now by requesting things like colour screens.

Widen and lengthen the screen.
Make the screen proportionally taller than it is now.
Make the overall height of the device shorter to eliminate the space currently used by the keyboard.
Put the keyboard onto a slide-out section that can be tucked away behind the screen.
Jig the button positions to make it all fit together nicely.
Move the headphone jack to the bottom.

The Kindle v1 is much less atrocious in person than it is in pictures. I think this is due to the fact that it is smaller than a picture seems to indicate. Still not exactly a looker.

Indeed. I wonder who thought up that design. And I can't imagine how it got past product testing with those forward and back buttons spanning the entire sides of the screen. That was the #1 complaint I heard about the first model by far.

I love the idea of the Kindle, but I just don't read enough books or have the money to spend on it. I don't think it's grossly overpriced, just a tad high, but I know that'll come down in the future as the display tech improves.

Where I could see this being really useful is if your local library system supplies ebooks. Mine does, but I haven't taken a look at the selection. I mean, I'm very happy to see that Amazon ebooks are less expensive than physical copies, but I still think they're a few dollars too much on average, just like I think digital music is about twice as expensive as it should be, given the difference in cost to the company putting them out.

Just as a point of reference:

One big advantage that nobody has addressed is space.

SWMBO and I are downsizing considerably when we move to Mexico, in that we will have less than 20% of the floor space we had in our two recently inhabited separate households. We don't have room for our large collection of books.

Truth be told, I am not-completely-facetiously hoping that some enterprising burglar will steal my school bus full of household goods and on his way out of town stop by our apartment and strip it down to the wallpaper. It would be SO much simpler to go to Mexico with nothing but the clothes on our backs and my Visa card... Not surprisingly, SWMBO sees things differently.

tanstaafl.

Thank you for that, Peter. It's been so may years since I read that story.

Memories...

tanstaafl.

The price of books that aren't new are a little high. You're looking at paying the same for the Kindle version as the in-print paperback. I'd find a price of $5 for an electronic version of an $8 paperback reasonable.

The paperback obviously has the advantage of being able to be read by two (or more) people with a single purchase as well. It's not tied to your biometric scan. The Kindle books are tied to the one device right?

Yes, that's true. Well, both the Kindle and the book purchase are tied to your Amazon account.

The wikipedia page on kindle has a bunch of neat facts about what formats work and where you can get more content.

Seems like the Kindle's PID (product ID used with its DRM) was reverse engineered which has allowed the use of encrypted mobi format books to be read on the Kindle. Otherwise the Kindle only supports non-DRM mobi titles. Kindles own format is a variation of mobi.

Fictionwise has used this information and now serves up their mobi book catalog in Kindle-compatible versions. So there are a few places to get books from besides Amazon.

I'm not sure what it's going to take to make the ebook reader as ubiquitous as the portable MP3 player, but it's not going to be this generation of device/platform. It's a market I'll keep my eye on though. If I weren't interested I wouldn't have started the thread after all.

I have V1, They got a lot of stuff right, Some not so much.

They did pay some attention to how it's held, some of the angles are there, to keep corners from digging into your hand. There just aren't enough different ways to hold onto it. That's mostly because of the full length, out to the edge buttons.

The page buttons are very good for their purpose. The touch is just right. They do get in the way of holding it. It's almost impossible to hold with your fingers are under the cg. Thumbs want to rest on the page turning buttons, where a secure grip turns pages.

The keyboard makes for secure grasp area, but the weight is cantilevered. The leverage makes an otherwise lite object, tiering to hold.

These devices need to be graspable in a variety of ways. What works when seated upright, doesn't work well for reading in bed. Hands also tend to cramp, if they hold an e-book the same way for too long.

The 2.0 seems to address some of the problems, I suspect the side buttons are still in the wrong place with respect to the CG, and they still wrap around the side a bit.

Oh Yes, they moved the earphone jack and vol. buttons from the bottom. That was good, it's difficult to lounge, read, and listen to music with the plug digging into your chest.

edit: Web browsing is quite sucky, E-ink just doesn't have the refresh rate needed to deal with HTML bling if it doesn't render in a straight forward manner. Forget things like rollovers.

edit: perhaps they should have used touchpad tek for the page turning. A swipe bar under the page would work.