After three years in the making, Amazon has launched a wireless portable reading device called Kindle which they hope can improve “the book.” When I saw the price tag that read $399, I couldn’t help but initially think “who’s going to buy this at that price.” After reading about all that Kindle has to offer, I could easily see this turning into a “must-have” for book enthusiasts and something people would be willing to spend the money on.
One of the best features about Kindle is that it’s wireless. You have instant access to over 90,000 blogs, books, magazines, and newspapers. Say you’re on the train on your way to work and you wanted a new book to read to pass the time. All you’d have to do is power-up your Kindle and you could select what you wanted to read. The best part – no service or data plan is required! It uses Sprint’s high-speed data network so that you have instant access to the reading material that you want to read. Once you selected the material you wanted, it would be sent to your device.
Other features:
- Search Wikipedia for free
- Everything is backed-up at Kindle.com (if you lose the device or it breaks, you can get it all back)
- Sharp and natural display with no glare (looks nothing like reading on a computer screen)
- Light weight! Weighs only 10.3 ounces and can carry 200 books at a time
Obviously the content that you want is going to cost because as we all know, books aren’t free. Here’s a look at some of their prices: a monthly subscription to a newspaper will be $13.99 while a monthly subscription to a magazine will be $1.49 per month. Prices for books will vary, and if you wanted to read a blog, the monthly subscription fee is $1.99. Personally, I think it would be better if they offered plans for blogs like for $5 or $6 so that you could read as many blogs as you wanted. $1.99 per month could really ad up if there are multiple blogs you like to keep track of.
It’ll be interesting to see if many people will buy it, but also if this will help out the e-book business which has been a flop. Given the price, I don’t think it’ll be something that people will instantly run out to buy, so Amazon better have some marketing tricks up their sleeves if they want this to turn into something more than Sony’s Portable Reader System.
After watching the 6 minute demo at Amazon i have a few thoughts on the device:
1.Could of had a touch screen option
2.I am ok paying for papers,books,magazines but not so for blogs
3.Looks very 1990’s and not stylish or modern
4.Not fan of the qwerty keyboard or mouse style at side could of had better design
5.If it was in Europe would it use 3G or like the iPhone for connection
It looks terrible, and at $400…are they %$^#&ing joking?
Please, Apple, do what you did for music and invent a nice-looking, simple-to-use eBook reader. iBook.
The reason eBooks haven’t taken off is simply because no one has got the format/device right – now Amazon included.
I don’t think that the price is absolutely terrible because it includes the built-in wireless service, but all of those buttons at the bottom make it a lot larger than it really needs to be. So I agree with Richard and Michael above that the design could be better.
A touchscreen option might have been nice as Richard suggested, and that would have removed the need for some of the buttons at the bottom. The only issue with that is many middle-aged people that I know don’t really like the touchscreens for typing. They prefer the Blackberry-styled keys, and this would be right up their alley. I’m sure Amazon has a target market that they are trying to hit, and I’m sure their research affected the design.
If Apple were to invent a nice-looking eBook reader, it would probably be pretty costly too seeing how much their current products are.
I thought $400 seemed like a lot, but maybe the electronic-paper display is expensive. The built-in wireless probably drives up the cost too. I think they probably would have made it touch-screen if they could have, but maybe they couldn’t do that with the electronic-paper display. Touch-screen seems a bit unresponsive sometimes anyways.
Next year when I’m going to college I think this could be very useful though. If they have a lot of college books that I need, for low prices, that would be a really big selling point for me.
I didn’t think about that. If they did sell text books on there at reduced costs it would be really awesome. Unfortunately they would all be in black and white.
Not to mention Apple wouldn’t use a better format, it would be locked down, probably using some newly developed proprietary format. And if there’s one thing Apple isn’t into, it’s competitive pricing.
IMHO an ebook reader should be simply an e-ink display with an SD storage slot, and minimal processing power, just enough to do decode and display various formats: PDF, ODF, DOC, HTML, etc… And it should be sub $100, cause if it’s anywhere near the price of the current offerings, you’re better off just getting a laptop for the same price.
I think the sub $100 price would be perfect, although I don’t know if I could see anybody offering a reader for that price.