The Amazon Kindle Review By John Blossom: Is The Future Of Book Publishing Here?
Still in doubt about whether to get an Amazon Kindle? Not fully convinced that these new ebook reader devices have the form factor and usability traits you are expecting? John Blossom has taken the time to go out and borrow an Amazon Kindle from his close-by public library, and has played with it for over two weeks before writing this review.
Photo credit: Mike Elgan
If you have not yet heard about it, the Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader launched a year ago, in November 2007.
Since its debut, the Amazon Kindle has received very controversial opinions regarding its usability and its role in the new emerging ebook industry.
The key question that so many technologists and media opinion leaders have expressed has yet gone unanswered: Is the new device a revolutionary new medium waiting for technology and pricing to give it way into the world mass markets or is its role the one of a dedicated information-consulting portable unit that has yet to find its ideal applications.
Not saving some genuine skepticism, content media analyst John Blossom shares with you here his in-depth review of the Amazon Kindle.
Intro by Daniele Bazzano
Life With Kindle: A Page-Turning Device That Can Satisfy. For Now.
by John Blossom
Basic Functions
Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to a bad cold that caught me unexpectedly, but it was long enough to appreciate the ins and outs of this increasingly popular device.
A Kindle starts up easily enough by sliding a slim switch on the back of the unit, though its being next to a switch that activates the unit's wireless networking capabilities makes this something a bit awkward to do by habit. You have to flip the Kindle unit over to make sure that you're hitting the right switch most time. There are a lot of little ergonomic issues like this in the Kindle, ideas that look good in the design phase that perhaps could have been better thought out in real life. The keyboard of a Kindle falls into that category also, being barely usable for hunting and pecking but with a slippery and ambiguous feel that makes it unthinkable to use it for more than a few must-do tasks.
Overall, though, many of the key features are remarkably easy to use.
The unit boots up quickly and its basic page turning functions are remarkably intuitive, with large broad keys on each side of the unit for turning forward and backwards. A Kindle will boot up to where you were last looking at content, so it's not always necessary to bookmark where you were last reading - same when you return to a specific book. There is a small scroll wheel at the bottom of a thin channel that parallels the main screen: scroll the wheel and a kind-of cursor will move up and down next to the screen and allow you to select from pop-up menus or to click on links. I thought that this would be a really inconvenient interface but you get used to it fairly easily. I can see how its steadiness will be useful in bumpy environments like subway trains.
So for basic functions and navigation control you can give it a "weird but usable" rating for the most part.
The Kindle Display
The eInk display was somewhat disappointing in that the background was rather grayish rather than whitish, which made many illustrations almost impossible to make out clearly and made it a little more difficult to use in dim light. But in spite of this the display was remarkably readable for text - especially when the font size was bumped up a bit. Whew - for those of us who rely on reading glasses or progressive lenses, this is a blessing. There are plenty of great books that I'd love to pore through that have bitsy little print that wears my eyes out very quickly.
With a Kindle you don't get print fatigue or the fatigue of looking at a backit screen. With bumped-up font sizes there's not that much information on any given page but the ease of turning to a new page of content makes up for that mild inconvenience easily. I found that I really enjoyed reading materials on the Kindle once I got settled in for a good sit-down.
Web Access
The early Kindle models now available do provide Web access, but except for a handful of Web sites well adapted to the unit it's largely an exercise in fumbling through awkwardly formatted content - and also a feature that led to the unit freezing twice. A push of a bent paper clip into the unit's reset hole got it back to good order, but this is not a unit meant to replace mobile units with more robust Web browsing capabilities.
Still, for a quick sneak peek at the headlines, it beats going back to the PC sometimes.
The wireless service was quite good at my home, so chances are it will perform reasonably well with its network connectivity turned on wherever broadband services perform well. However, leaving the wireless connection does drain the batteries far more quickly than normal local -only reading would. In reading-only mode the Kindle batteries last for many days of typical use.
It's certainly a unit that I would consider as a convenience for future book purchases, especially given Amazon's pricing that enables one to purchase both a printed book and a Kindle-compatible copy for one purchase price, or get a Kindle-only copy for an even steeper discount.
But what of gift books - or, for that matter, the huge library of printed books already at my disposal?
Marketing Strategy
The huge gap in Kindle's market strategy is a lack of "hooks" to keep people attached to their existing libraries and to be able to move on to new books once their usefulness has run their course. There's no real concept of a "used" market for Kindle books, much less the ability to add significant value to them in a way that could be onpassed to others.
More importantly there is little ability to use a Kindle book to activate online content.
For example, if I am reading a passage and would like to research a specific person or historical event mentioned in the book, there are no "hooks" to online content that would make that easy - nor any way to store that research with my Kindle book copy for future reference. It's still a fairly unimaginative approach to book marketing. This may reflect the generally conservative approach to book packaging and marketing that still grips many publishing houses, but this conservatism now competes with a demographic curve that is racing against the clock.
The Future of Book Publishing
Like the music industry print publishers have locked in their future to proprietary technologies to protect existing business models, but in the process of doing so they may have sold away their futures.
With an explosion of different kinds of portable devices reaching the marketplace today and the promise of an even more complex array of devices fitting people's lifestyles in the future, why on earth would an entire industry select a proprietary platform to develop their future revenues? In a few years I believe that we will look at experiments such as the iPod and the Kindle much as people today look back on proprietary electronic content services such as Compuserve or the original AOL and ask themselves, what were we thinking?
The future of book publishing will rest on more open publishing platforms that enable book content to move to the contexts and popular devices in which it's valued most far more effectively and that will enable others to add value around a given book independent of its initial publisher.
Book publishers already are more aware that their best strengths lie in talent management, providing services that leverage as many aspects of an author's value as rapidly and as effectively as possible through the lifecycle of a given work of authorship. But expect that more nimble companies who see the ability to manage talented authors more effectively through a variety of publishing media to challenge traditional publishing houses over the next few years, especially those who are best able to leveral social media outlets to build and maintain loyal communities of readers and commenters.
The Kindle is a nifty little device, but it's just a hint of where the future of book publishing could take us in the not too distant future.
The Amazon Kindle - Video Reviews
Is New Amazon Kindle Book Reader Really That Great?
AmazonKindle - Duration: 9:10Hear Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos discuss the vision behind Kindle, and see reactions from bestselling authors who used Kindle, including Toni Morrison, James Patterson, Michael Lewis, Neil Gaiman, Anita Diamant, Daniel Handler, and Guy Kawasaki.
Review of Amazon Kindle
markbotplus - Duration: 5:12I'm reviewing the Amazon Kindle using my Canon TX1. When I say page turns... I mean Kindle page turns. When I say pages... I mean the amount of text content that is typically on one paper back page. It takes about 2 page turns to get the same content as one paperback page at the 2 sized font.
Amazon Kindle
ApFaqTech - Duration: 2:03Here is the review for the Amazon Kindle. The Amazon Kindle is available on Amazon.com for $399.99 It uses the Sprint EVDO network to access data much like a cell phone without a wireless hotspot and most of all, it is free. It has 256 MB of internal storage and provides an SD memory card slot along with a USB mini slot, along with a headphone jack.
Photo credits:
Basic Functions - Cnet News
The Kindle Display - Eric Lauritzen
Web Access - Reuters
Marketing Strategy - Gadgets and Gizmos
The Future of Book Publishing - Men's Vogue
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published as "Life with Kindle: A Page-Turning Device That Can Satisfy. For Now." on September 8th 2008.
About the author
John Blossom's career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
John Blossom -Reference: Shore [ Read more ]
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