Kindle Fails to Spark
I was very intrigued by Amazon’s new eBook reader when I first heard about it. I’ve played around with the Sony Reader, and it just seemed like the Kindle had a more refined implementation. E-ink is a fantastic technology - you’ve really got to see one of these displays in person to understand just how readable they are. With its incredibly low battery consumption, I figured the Kindle would be a great device to bring along my tour of the world.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm quickly died out when I perused the catalog of content available in the Amazon’s proprietary format. Not a single travel guide is available for the device. No Rough Guide or Lonely Planet or Let’s Go. I’ll be traveling through at least 10 different countries next year, and the greatest benefit I would’ve gotten from the Kindle is not having to lug fat guide books from place to place.
Extrapolating from this, the Kindle’s usefulness is directly proportional to the amount of content you need to carry. What I’ve seen thus far from their catalog is a heavy emphasis on novels and non-fiction best sellers. Yet the largest/heaviest pieces of content are reference materials. In this instance, I define reference materials as content which you don’t consume end to end and might not use that often, but when you do need it, its an immediate need.
There are dictionaries and the like available, but I’m talking about a broader set. Travel guides fall into this category, but so do textbooks. My brother is a med student, and he’s regularly forced to carry back-breaking loads of anatomy and orgo books across campus. Imagine how grateful he would be to instead carry a single 10 oz device complete with keyword searching?
Kindle itself is a compelling device, but there are definitely some missed opportunities that Amazon needs to capitalize on. For Amazon, being the content king that it is, there’s simply no excuse for anything less than a complete catalog.
14 Dec 2007 Dan
Good points, but even so, the Kindle is selling very well so far. They’re hard to find, and eBay resellers are getting double to triple the original price on them at the moment. We’ll see if the demand stays consistent…
dude, the Kindle is a revolution. if you have the time, read this article - the author totally captures why this is gonna change “text” the way ipod changed “audio”. on every level, this is like the first generation ipod (it didnt have enough content, was too bulky, got easier to use, etc etc). don’t worry about the catalog - who else is in a position the build a big catalog besides amazon? (sony? haha). look at it as a wireless text reading device - you can now read any blog/article/website/etc anywhere. mark my words, this is a landmark event in text/reading history.
article:
http://www.suntimes.com/business/672259,CST-FIN-Andy29.article
I completely agree that Amazon is perfectly capable of building up a decent catalog. That’s precisely why its so irksome - by the time they’ve got travel guides available for the Kindle, I’ll no longer need it.
This seems cool but why not integrate the “electronic paper” into a tablet PC so we can have everything at once.
The refresh rate on electronic paper is incredibly slow. The reason its got such great battery life is because an electrical current is only applied when the content that’s being rendered needs to change. If you were to apply E-ink to something like PC gaming, you’d get a frame rate of less than 1 FPS, and your battery would be shot pretty quickly.