Amazon.com
Amazon did indeed make the announcement today about the new Kindle. Unfortunately, they did not cut the price.
I believe that, once electronic readers reach critical mass, we’ll have a whole new era of easy self-publishing and open-source literature.
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What would “critical mass” be for these things? At what price would they sell in numbers required for anything resembling market dominance? What real benefit do these toys offer vs. the one or two books the average person reads every year?
I smell a very fancy, very sexy gimmick. Uh-murcans just don’t read enough to make this thing a real success, I fear. I can see some sort of hybrid between the iPod and the Kindle being a market standard in a few years, perhaps. But not just a digital book.
It’s gotta be all-in-one these days, but maybe Amazon has already figured that out…
Americans read more books — or at least buy more books– than we might think. We do know that book sales have been increasing steadily for years, that there is a brisk and increasing business in the sale of used books online, and that the sale of electronic books for November 2008 were up 108 percent from the year before.
Publishers Weekly agrees with you that Apple will get into this business. And remember, the Kindle will do not just books, but any kind of text. It remains to be seen whether Sony will stay in this market, but if Sony, Amazon, and Apple unleash a surge of innovation, competition, and marketing in this area, I have little doubt that we’ll see a revolution. If Apple comes into the market, we’d have critical mass probably two years later.
This piece in Publishers Weekly weighs the trends:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6516743.html
We gotta have an all-in-one, a tablet much the size of the Kindle, one that enables us to do it all from one machine, something you can throw in a bag and take with: recipes in the kitchen, directions on the road, newspapers in the cafe, email anywhere and all the time, etc.
Maybe Amazon envisions the Kindle as being this very thing. The black and white screen seems to kill that possibility, but it is the right size.
But sometimes I think technological possibilities far outpace the desire of most of us to embrace those possibilities. I mean, I like the smell of paper.
Though I always got annoyed at the “curve” of books, where the words approach the binding and cross the little hill there at the crack of the book. Flat is sometimes good, I suppose….
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