Technovia

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Luddite dream of Jeff Bezos

Nick Carr notes that the launch of Kindle is being used by a bunch of anti-Gutenbergians as another excuse to trounce the book in general:

"But Kelly and his fellow-travelers are wrong, and Bezos is right. The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it."

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Kindle

Lots of Amazon Kindle detail emerging - reports round up

The press conference is over, people have their hands on some of the first Kindles, and lots more details are emerging.

Gizmodo has a video on how to use the Kindle, which shows off the e-ink quite nicely. It also has a hands-on session with lots and lots of pictures. Also included is details of the formats which the Kindle will support:

"What file formats are supported? Kindle (.azw), text (.txt), unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi, .prc), Audible (.aa) and MP3 (.mp3)."

CrunchGear also has a hands-on, with some very nice pictures, as does Engadget.

Robert Scoble tells us all about the deal which bloggers are getting for allowing their RSS feeds to be sold - 30% of the fee which Amazon charges. On a $0.99 monthly charge, that could add up to a tidy little sum. Bloggers who are interested in getting their blogs up to be distributed to Kindle users can contact Amazon via a link on the Kindle Store page.

John Gruber raises a very, very smart little point:

"What if Amazon gave you a free Kindle e-book version of every physical book you’ve ever purchased from Amazon?"

What a brilliant marketing ploy that would be!

Overall, Kindle is a really, really interesting product - more groundbreaking in many ways than something like the iPhone - and I wish it well. As long as the DRM doesn't suck.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Daring Fireball, Robert Scoble, Kindle

Kindle: What about RSS?

An interesting little note on GigaOM:

"Disclosure: Our RSS feed is part of the Kindle device, and we are under NDA to comment about its features."

Am I to take it from that that Kindle is also an RSS reader? And that certain blogs have already been "approached" to be part of the default set of feeds? That would certainly explain why Scoble is under NDA too.


Technorati Tags: amazon, kindle, Robert Scoble, GIgaOM

Meet the Amazon ebook reader: Kindle

Newsweek has the scoop: Amazon is to introduce an ebook reader called Kindle. What's interesting about this compared to the Sony eBook reader is that it's completely self-contained. Instead of being tied to a PC for downloads, it uses a system based on EVDO to download its own content.

What none of the reports seem to talk about is the form of digital rights management (DRM) which Kindle uses. In theory, if it's a totally closed product, then it shouldn't need much - but in practice, I suspect it will be heavily tied to Amazon, and regularly check back with Amazon to determine if the content it's carrying is licensed to you.

However, if it relies on any kind of key-checking system over that EVDO, then Robert Scoble is going to be disappointed:

"All I’ll say until tomorrow is you gotta try this device. It’s not perfect, but for long-form reading it is a wonderful device. I am going to buy one of my own. It’d really be great to have on our trip to Europe for the plane ride next month cause my Mac’s batteries only last two hours each (I have two of them) and the flight is 10 hours."

EVDO doesn't work in Europe, so if it has to check content keys, it won't work.

The DRM question is vital to the success of Kindle. If it offers less convenience than a book, if it fails for example to allow you to lend copies to friends - or even sell on your own copy permanently to someone else - then it will ultimately fail. The only way it would succeed in these circumstances is either to be incredibly cheap (it isn't) or have so many great features you'd be a fool not to buy it. As far as I can see, there's no features here that are truly compelling enough to justify the losses involved in not having a physical object.

Of course, I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon

Cory on ebooks

Cory Doctorow has a great thread on his new book Eastern Standard Tribe in which he discusses how releasing it (and his previous novel) for free download helped sales and points to the future of the publishing industry. I'll have more to say about this later...