An e-book reader that just may catch on

The Kindle is the latest in a long line of e-book readers. Will it succeed where others have failed?
The New York Times

The story "An e-book reader that just may catch on" published November 23, 2007 at 3:20 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[slickuser]

Waste of money! Do not buy!

Wait for Apple's ultra portable notebook/tablet. It may be little expensive. This (Kindle) is a piece of junk. Do you want to carry your notebook and this junk when you travel?

[rthutchison]

I bought it and I love it

Take your bitterness elsewhere Apple fanboy.

[winterkm]

not a waste of money

oh, so this is what happens when Apple gets beaten to the punch...

Amazon has trumped Apple on this one - and now Apple needs to play catchup. The integrated nature of the Kindle and the direct connect to a huge library of current and past books, blows anything else away.

Apple decided to start with that silly, overhyped iPhone instead of going after something people might really want...

Amazon has created a real game-changer here.

Amazon 1, Apple 0.

[Draxon]

Appple Ultra small laptop a rumor

Have you used it? I doubt it. And you may want to make a note that the ultra thin apple laptop is a RUMOR, and was a rumor started by the same people who predicted the "astroid" music interface device that never appeared.

[cmcmanis]

Just may knock the market back by 2 years

The Kindle represents all that was bad in the 90's "own the road" strategies. The extortionate pricing of content (especially nominally 'free' content) will cause the Kindle to fail spectacularly and the result will be that people will be left thinking "If Amazon can't make this work, nobody can" rather than subsidizing the cost (aka losing money) on the readers to create a vast number of 'seats' in which electronic print content can be sold. It is sad that Amazon will probably put much more deserving companies like iRex Technologies (a *MUCH* better reader) out of business because their access to investment capital will dry up when Amazon decides to exit the market.

[winterkm]

probably won't though

The content and pricing will be essential to Amazon's success. They are an extremely intelligent company that we should see react appropriately to make this work. They will be monitoring sales, pricing very closely and adjust as needed. It is clear they have made a huge investment in this. We are just at the very beginning of their rollout.

We should see significant competition around this space as well, which should benefit innovative companies in this space.

[geneven]

Price drop coming

I predict that the Kindle's price in one year will be at least $200 less than it is now.

In the meantime, I'm not interested, for example, in paying for content that I can download for free and read portably on my Nokia N800. It might be nice to buy some of those books at a reduced rate when the Kindle itself is cheaper. I am not impressed at being able to carry hundreds of books in a portable device. I have hundreds of books in my laptop now, and quite a few on my N800.

[richardbpowell]

E-book reader manufacturers just can't seem to see the target market.

As a member of the IT department of a K12 school system, I see the target market for the e-book reader every day at work. I only wish the e-book manufacturers could see the correct market for their invention. Targeting the early adopter market for this gadget is not the right play to make this idea work. The early adopers of a $400 gadget that only displays books and documents will be too few and far between to bring the price down.
The key to a successful e-book reader launch is to target a market that $400 makes sense to first. Once adopted by that market, the price can come down to a sensible level that's affordable to the masses. So, what market would make sense for the launch? Textbooks are the best market to start a success e-book launch. Textbooks are huge and expensive. Most importantly, at the K12 level the school districts are the purchasers of the textbooks. Anyone that's in the K12 textbook scene should be able to attest to the fact that $400 per e-book reader could save school districts money. In the past, the few times textbooks were marketed for the e-book readers, it was at the collegiate level. There's not as strong a push for the e-book reader's to succeed at the collegiate level, since the weight and cost of textbooks is mostly passed directly to the college student. Not many days pass in K12 systems without parents fussing about backpacks being too heavy. Also, many K12 school systems are loosing books due to mismanagement. K12 school systems spend millions on textbooks each year. An e-book reader could save K12 schools money in a hurry- even at the $400 price point of the Kindle. Amazon needs backing from K12 textbook publishers to get a big market first. Make the e-book reader work at the K12 level and possibly the collegiate level may see advantages and jump in too. As the price drops way down from the success at these markets, then the masses would adopt. At $400 the Kindle is not going to make sense for most users, even early adopters. They, instead, snatched up every $399 laptop Dell put up for sale last week. The laptop deal was so hot, it was a sellout before the end of the first day of a seven day sale!

[dharmafool]

Good points

I would think Apple is very well positioned to seize the textbook e-reader market. Oh, but they don't have a product yet.

I'm all for the move to e-readers because it will save trees. I'm all for the demise of newspapers for the same reason.

Yes, we're stumbling toward the right device design and marketing plan for an important new tool. We've been down this road many times before, with other important tools. The payoff will be huge to the e-reader companies that succeed, and to all who depend on Our Mother Earth.

I wish Kindle all the best. I will definitely be following its progress.

[montex66]

Pay to read MY files? No Way.

If you want to upload a file that you made to the Kindle, you
have to pay Amazon 10 cents for the privilege of doing so. I
don't know about the rest of you, but I would NEVER pay
someone else so I could read my work. It doesn't matter how
cheap it is to do so, it's the principle. This is the deal killer for
the Kindle.

Add to that you have to pay Amazon $1.99 to subscribe to a
blog that is otherwise free. I can get a two whole Sunday
newspapers for that. It's ridiculous to think anyone is going to
pay Amazon twice the price of a song from iTunes just to read a
blog they can get free on the internet.

[Sandpiper532]

Good Idea!

I think the Kindle will be great when it gets a little cheaper. The older I get the harder it is for me to hold either paper or hard back books and to keep them opened. Plus the size of the font can be changed to make it easier to read. I can't wait for it to be affordable.

[long.ann]

e-book is not cozy enough

Add a low vibration and a cat purr and add just a little warmth. That's an e-book with benefits.

[rcrusoe]

No "Retro Reader" for me

This thing looks like something from the 80's. And it costs
$400?

E-Books are likely to catch on, but Kindle v1.0 isn't, IMO, going
to be the first one that does.

Besides, the books are so expensive that you would have to be a
voracious reader to even break even on the cost of this thing.

Nope. No Kindle for me.

[Indigo Blues]

Another Failure to Deliver

1) Price - For $400, you can buy a low-end laptop or an iPhone, a device targeted to read books isn't mass-market viable at this price. A book reader for the masses shouldn't exceed $99 because otherwise, it's just another weird device for high-paid geeks.

2) Doesn't handle the most common industry standards, natively. Paying extra to read .txt and .pdf files?! That's ludicrous!

3) Content way too expensive. At $5.99 for a book that's out in paperback, they're telling me that the price for the paper and processing and publishing of a paperback book is about a buck. Obviously, it's more economical to chop down trees and plant new ones, than it is to acquire digital content, and something's very wrong with that.

All that, before we even consider the interface and battery life and ergonomics of Bezos' latest pie-in-the-sky fiasco. Everyone's making a huge deal out of this as if it's a radical new concept, but those who've been hoping for a reasonably priced, capable book reader for the past few years have watched the efforts of Sony fail through two iterations, and it seems that Bezos has learned nothing from the lessons of the competition.

Save your money for the day when some company decides do the product properly.