Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: Literacy bridge)

Everyone's talking about the new Kindle, but here's a product that may present an even more radical innovation in the e-book sector: The Talking Book, created and distributed by the non-profit Literacy Bridge, is a low cost audio player/recorder with special features for Knowledge Sharing and Literacy Learning. It was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. The device involves an ecosystem to produce and share locally relevant audio content, allowing users to record their own messages and distribute them within local networks through a device-to-device copying capability. Other features include slow play for reading practice and some interactive features (for educational lessons and games).

The man behind Literacy Bridge is former Microsoft program manager Cliff Schmidt, who studied artificial intelligence and spent much of his time thinking about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. Schmidt believes that in a country like Ghana having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. As a next step, he envisions using the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could of course be used anywhere in the world.

While it may not have the media hype of the One Laptop per Child project (yet), the Talking Book may indeed yield greater impact. My colleague Jordan Kanarek nailed it: "The thinking behind the device is compelling, and the opportunities that come with using commodity components to create a rich service are fascinating."

Quite a kerfuffle has erupted over news in the last couple of days that Amazon is going to make print-on-demand (POD) publishers use Amazon's own internal printing service if they want to sell their books on the site.

Printing-on-demand has become a popular method for authors to bypass the large publishing houses with more niche or personal titles. And apparently the university presses have embraced it as well. So Amazon's announcement has some fairly wide-reaching effects.

Cries of "monopoly" are ringing out, with Amazon getting compared to Microsoft and the tactic being called a "landgrab".

Whether it rises to the level of being a true monopoly (and it's still a bit unclear exactly what the details of the change are), it does make clear how Amazon has shifted from being just a retailer to taking on some aspects of being a publisher. In so doing it blurs what has traditionally been a distinction and in this particular case makes me worried about the chilling effect on the nascent POD market. With a major channel potentially effectively closed off, will the other popular players like Lulu and Blurb be able to survive, along with the budding authors they have helped bring to the public eye? These companies have relied on the prestige of being able to seamlessly get a book published on Amazon in order to attract authors. If that option is removed, their appeal would seem to be dramatically reduced for an author who wishes to sell more than a handful of copies.

If you want lots more detail, here's a lengthy article and plenty of links at Writers Weekly. I'm guessing that the blow-back has only just begun.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET Networks)

Amazon has announced its entry into the eBook reader category with Kindle.

It's not in many people's hands yet or mine (CNET's reviewers have some first impressions), so these will have to be preliminary remarks. But I can say that I find it a schizophrenic device and hard to understand what it is trying to accomplish in its current form. It's easy enough to see where it's going, but ambition seems to have got ahead of what Amazon could actually deliver in the near term, and the ambition was not updated for reality. As a result, it comes across as very much a work in progress that lacks the elusive sexiness that can carry interesting yet unfinished products when they first come into the market.

First, it seems geared toward book geeks and authors, not the mainstream mass market. The price is too high for the hardware, and the price of downloaded books (nicely handled it seems, sans PC via cell phone network) is not that much less than what you will find the same book in hard copy on Amazon itself. More on that later.

The value proposition seems to be about carrying lots of books around in a device that does not grow physically in size, and for spur-of-the-moment purchases achieved through the wireless capability that does not require a monthly subscription. But much of Amazon's legacy has been built on delayed satisfaction--in other words, paying less to wait for delivery, rather than paying more and going to get it at a brick and mortar store right away. And they've been very successful at that, so it's unclear whether a mainstream market is really hankering for getting a book right now. Book geeks and authors, perhaps, but not most people.

OK, so perhaps the device has other compelling capabilities that outweigh more conventional books? The screen looks pretty good, a black on light gray "e-ink" type display that has high resolution and good contrast and supposedly works well outdoors. It looks like the screen in the Sony Reader, so it has competitive parity there. Battery life is supposedly days in duration, again similar to Sony's. However, because there is no backlight you cannot use it in the dark, so Amazon anachronistically offers an accessory clip-on reading light just you would use for a book!

But it's in the look and feel where things really fall apart. The industrial design is, frankly, ugly. It has none of the visceral "gotta have it I don't care what it costs" appeal of an iPod or iPhone. The Sony Reader is rather bland but it looks good next to Kindle (the Reader is also smaller and lighter with the same size screen). There is a gray grippy area on the back with a random pattern of embossed letters molded into it--an amusing detail but not particularly iconic. The whole design is unresolved and dated looking, with unsophisticated form, surface, color, and graphic detailing. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the goal was to make it nonflashy as a design. Well, mission accomplished there, but it goes beyond nonflashy to be actually unattractive, at least to my eyes.

The keyboard on the Kindle is a real puzzle--it looks '80s old school and not at all up to scratch in a BlackBerry and Treo world. It is also very large and fixed in place, but if you're reading fiction and light nonfiction, then there's relatively little need to type. A slide-out keyboard like IM-centric slider cell phones have would been far better.

A keyboard is much more useful for blog and newspaper reading, and the ambition of providing a "BlackBerry for blogs," as Guy Kawasaki calls Kindle, is compelling for heavy blog readers. But here, the ambition overreaches the realities of the shipping device, as blogs without color photos, embedded YouTube videos, and links to external sites are far less interesting (since there's no general purpose wireless data connection, normal Web surfing is impossible). And for the privilege of reading an inferior version of a blog, you actually pay 99 cents per month per blog.

The large buttons along the side of the device for flipping pages also look pretty old school in an iPhone world and seem like they will be easy to hit accidentally. There is a huge "Next Page" button on the right, and a large "Previous Page" button on the left, following the left-back/right-forward convention...except there's also a small Next Page button on the left too. Schizophrenic. Is Jeff Bezos left-handed?

Lastly we come to pricing: $399 for the device itself on its face seems expensive given the quality of the hardware compared with what you get in less expensive MP3 players and cell phones that do, for the lay person, basically the same thing if not more. Book downloads themselves on Kindle cost $9.99. Compare that with an average price of about $15 for the books on Amazon's Best of 2007 book list, and you'd have to buy 80 books to make up the difference in price between hard copy and Kindle reader, plus downloads. That's a lot of books, more than most mainstream readers will buy over quite a few years. The capacity of Kindle is about 200 books, and that is more books than some people will ever own in their lifetime. So unless you put a high premium on portability, the hardware price is a big hurdle. Again, the pricing seems set up more for book geeks and authors who will read far more than the mass market audience.

Inevitably the iPod is a point of comparison. It was decried as too expensive when it launched, but it succeeded because it took a systems approach to solving the heretofore complex problem of getting my music onto my MP3 player, and because it looked damn good doing it. James Patterson, best-selling author and endorser of Kindle, claims it simplifies life, but I'm not clear how difficult people find it to purchase a book or magazine in a store, or to order a book online, have it delivered to their house, open the box, and start reading. That would be more OK if the device was so screamingly evocative, so sleek, so thin, so gorgeous, so mind-blowingly innovative to use that you would knock over your grandmother in the mad dash out the door to get one. But sadly, it is none of these things. Instead, it feels like Jeff Hawkins' Foleo--not a bad idea, but 5 to 10 years too late both in concept and execution.

In a video Bezos talks about how much effort and thought went into Kindle. Firsthand experience will have to be the true test, but right now this seems like a half-baked product. At 4:51 into the video, there is the book "Fiasco" prominently shown next to the Kindle. Hopefully this is not a foreshadowing of what is in store for Kindle.

(Credit: Amazon)

It's been a busy week in digital music, to say the least. Today Zune 2 was announced, and Amazon finally launched its MP3 download service, though it's currently still in Beta.

I gave it a short try and found that overall it is a competent start. It's not a significant step beyond iTunes in terms of functionality or usability (more on that in a moment), though it's price/quality ratio is very good: 89-99 cents for 256kbps bit rate, DRM-free MP3s. Albums vary a lot in price, from a bit over $4 to $8.99 so far as I can tell. This is a good deal if, like me, you prefer a higher bitrate than iTunes has historically offered and you don't use an iPod as your main device. (I use a SonyEricsson W810 Walkman phone as my main device. I've had three hard-drive based iPods go south on me so I'm reluctant to get another, and I just like carrying one less device around. Plus it has a radio and I'm an NPR junkie.)

So what does the Amazon MP3 store do well and not so well?

Pro's:

• It automatically puts stuff into iTunes for you if you use the Amazon downloader application. Tracks seem to be kept outside of the iTunes folder hierarchy. I actually like this as it means it's easy to find the unprotected tracks to put onto my Walkman phone.

  Track previews are of standard 30sec length with good fidelity, and fade in and out. Nice that you can preview a whole album at once (it moves automatically from on track to the next). Very responsive action of the previews.
  

• The recommendations seem good and on-target so far from my limited experience. As it should it taps into CDs that I've bought in the past so it's not just relying on my short mp3 buying history.
  
• The functionality and interface are much simpler than the iTunes Music Store, which in my mind is a plus. The iTMS has become very cluttered as more media types have got loaded on.
  
• Album art is downloaded too, and shows up correctly in iTunes.

Cons:

• I got separate emails for each track or album purchase--why can't I get a summarized report of a session like iTunes gives me?
  
• The process for buying individual tracks is cumbersome. 1. Hit buy button. 2. Get taken to a confirmation page. 3. Hit "Back" button on browser to go back to the previous page and pick another track. They need some AJAX goodness to make this more efficient, and need to allow non-contiguous selection of multiple tracks to buy them all in one go.
  
• To make the process most efficient you have to first install the small Amazon Downloader. This worked OK in Safari, however in Camino the tracks didn't automatically start downloading for me, I had to double-click the icon in the Camino download window to kickstart the Amazon Downloader. Once going the UI was decent enough and integration with iTunes was flawless.
  
• The look of the store is Amazon standard, which IMHO is utilitarian but not very attractive. Music is treated like everything else on Amazon, whether you're spending a lot or a little.
  
• When I do a search and get dozens of results back, I can't sort by album, song title, artist, etc. This can make it pretty hard to find a specific song.
  
• Strangely they are not pulling in user reviews from the CDs of the same albums. Hopefully this will change as it makes no sense to have a separate stock of reviews for MP3s.
  
• Music selection is pretty slim right now. Even though 2 million songs sounds like a lot, you quickly realize it isn't. Do a search on U2, for example, and you get a bunch of covers, but nothing original. Amazon has both EMI and Universal and it claims thousands of other labels, but there are obvious large gaps. Presumably this will fill in over time. But for comparison, remember that the iTunes Music store launched with only 200,000 songs and itt took quite a long time to feel like it wasn't plagued with gaps, and given the current state of maturity of the market Amazon should be able to fill it much faster.

The two biggest question marks in my mind about whether Amazon will be successful with this venture are:

1. Will they actually continue to put effort behind it? Lately Amazon has been in serious fast-follower mode, and throwing in every gee-gaw and feature that seems to be popular elsewhere. You like wiki's? We got 'em! Carousel navigation for no obvious reason? Check! You can almost imagine Amazon as an extension of Jeff Bezos' short attention span. To be successful in this area they are going to have to stick with it, which is going to require effort and deal-making that Amazon doesn't typically do.

2. Can they pull together the strengths of their customer network and massive mine of data, and then layer game-changing functionality on top of it? A me-too entry is not going to be enough to make a major dent in Apple's dominance. Leveraging their strengths is a good start for Amazon, but I'm more sanguine about whether they can get beyond their current fast-follower approach to really do something fresh and attention-grabbing.

(Cnet blogger Michael Horowitz also has a review of the service. Unlike him I had to confirm my login info before being able to make a song purchase.)