It's been years since the concept of a digital convergence was seriously debated. Today, it's rare to see a single-function electronic device.
Digital still cameras can record video, and camcorders can take still photos. Even cheap cell phones include cameras. There are Web browsers in cell phones, cameras, televisions, and digital picture frames. In fact, it seems like it's only a matter of time before everything with a battery or power cord will be connected to the Internet.
So it's a little startling to see a new gizmo that does nothing but display text, especially when that text comes from a preprogrammed memory card...and it's extraordinary when the text came from the Internet in the first place.
Openmoko's WikiReader is a standalone Wikipedia browser with a touch screen and the complete text of Wikipedia on a memory card.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)I was initially incredulous when I heard about WikiReader, a $99 device from Openmoko designed solely for the purpose of reading Wikipedia articles. How useful could such a thing really be, I wondered.
The device, which was released about two weeks ago, displays the text only. The user interface couldn't be much simpler. Pushing the power button boots the device in less than two seconds. There's a search button for looking up individual articles, a history button for recalling previously viewed articles, and a button to open a random article from the collection. A parental-control feature allows blocking mature content (imperfectly, as I quickly learned).
And that's about it. It doesn't display images, references, discussion pages, or links to outside Web sites. (The latter point is reasonable enough because the device can't access the Internet anyway.) In fact, all 3 million Wikipedia articles viewable on WikiReader ship on a memory card in the device.
The content on the card is just a snapshot of the active Wikipedia database, complete with whatever errors or vandalism may have been present at the moment each article was copied. But overall, it's still an impressive amount of useful information. (Openmoko will offer quarterly updates that can be downloaded for free, or delivered on new memory cards twice per year for an annual cost of $29.)
Not long ago, distributing Wikipedia this way would have been impractical. Even today, an 8GB Micro SD card is a sub-$15 item in wholesale channels, which is a big chunk of the $99 retail price. Saving money here, however, would have compromised the usefulness of the device. (On the unit I tested, 4.18GB out of 7.4GB was actually used; perhaps some foreign-language versions of Wikipedia could fit on smaller, cheaper cards.)
The other elements of WikiReader show similar trade-offs. In an e-mail exchange, Openmoko President Sean Moss-Pultz told me that the Wikireader design began with the chips commonly used for electronic dictionaries--for example, Epson's S1C33E07 microcontroller. But whereas such devices usually have small screens and physical keyboards, allowing them to hit very low price points (e.g., this $21 device from Royal), Openmoko chose to go with a larger screen that displays about 13 lines of proportionally spaced text--roughly 40 characters per line, 80 words at a time.
Further, WikiReader has a capacitive touch screen, enabling the use of a virtual on-screen keyboard rather than a separate physical keyboard. The touchscreen--equipped with a tempered glass face that resists scratches better than plastic--also handles touch-drag scrolling and selecting links to other Wikipedia pages. As a result, WikiReader is smaller than most electronic dictionaries, but has a larger screen and is easier to use. (Click for more details on the WikiReader hardware platform.)
WikiReader is also more expensive than most electronic dictionaries, but again, the higher price was essential if WikiReader was to accomplish its mission. That mission is simple to express: make Wikipedia accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. At $99, this device may not be affordable by everyone in the world. On the other hand, it's a lot more affordable than even the least expensive laptops, including the original "$100 laptop" from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, which is still priced at $199 two years after it first went on sale.
Although the comparison is hardly fair, it's still relevant since the number of parents and schools in the world that can afford a $99 WikiReader is a lot larger than the number that can afford a laptop plus the necessary supporting infrastructure such as an Internet connection and power source. (By comparison, Openmoko says that two AAA alkaline batteries--cheap and widely available--will run the WikiReader for up to a year, and that's the only recurring cost to keep the unit operating.)
I expect the cost of manufacturing WikiReader will come down slowly over time, and the product itself may become more valuable as third-party developers begin to work with the WikiReader's open-source software. Openmoko began as an open-source cell phone project, and while WikiReader has nothing in common with that earlier work, the company still has some visibility in the open-source developer community.
WikiReader isn't quite easy enough for a cat to use.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The WikiReader software load is very simple. There's no OS, not even Linux; just one application to run the Wikipedia browser, for example. All of the software, along with the compressed Wikipedia database, is provided on the Micro SD card. There are some diagnostic programs, and there's even a simple four-function calculator "Easter egg" that comes up in response to a History-Power button combination.
The lack of a full OS is a matter of necessity, but this is the kind of necessity from which virtue is created. The near-instant boot time and ultra-low power consumption couldn't be matched with any flavor of Linux. Software development isn't as easy as it would be for a Linux PC application, but then, the device is simple, so it wouldn't be too difficult to develop new functionality for the WikiReader hardware. I'd like to see the usual combination of dictionary, thesaurus, and language translation found in many other devices, along with a more-advanced calculator.
In the meantime, WikiReader does the one thing it was meant to do, and I think that's good enough.
(My thanks to Pat Meier-Johnson of Pat Meier Associates for bringing WikiReader to my attention. Also, thanks to Openmoko for providing a review unit and answering my questions.)
I'm very impressed by the Nook, Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader. It's clear B&N has studied Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle very carefully.
The Nook has almost all of the major features of both product lines, plus a few more, with few competitive disadvantages. B&N has also followed Amazon's lead on support services. The Nook has a very good online e-book store as well as applications to support e-book reading on Macs, Windows machines, and smartphones.
(Credit:
Barnes & Noble)
The Nook doesn't ship until the end of November, but here's what I found most significant from the announcement and the pages at nook.com:
Industrial design
I think the Nook is attractive and well-designed. It looks better than the Kindle 2, but not as good as Sony's Reader Touch Edition, which offers a larger screen in a smaller form factor. Also, Sony's forthcoming Reader Daily Edition is only slightly larger than the Nook, but offers a much larger screen.
Secondary color display
This feature surprised me. It seems expensive and insufficiently functional for what must be a significant added cost. The low resolution of this display (480 x 144, according to a CNET blog post) means it won't be useful for much beyond the basic user-interface features B&N has already described: book covers, menus, and a keyboard for note-taking. (Although I should note for the record that while B&N says "Its full-color touchscreen encourages you to bookmark, add notes, and highlight passages," I haven't found a photo on the company Web site depicting the virtual keyboard shown in some of the pre-release images. Perhaps that's one of the features still under development.)
By comparison, the secondary color screen built into the Alex e-book reader from Spring Design, shown in another recent CNET story, is large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it's also large enough to be very much in the way, leading to an awkward device. Spring Design and B&N need to make up their minds-- are they making e-book readers or something else?
... Read more
This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com)But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.
Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.
Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.
This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.
On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.
(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)
For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.
It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.
On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.
At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.
The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.
In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?
But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.
(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)
This is the third part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the second post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news", I described the limitations of the DX for news reading.
The textbook market represents an even greater challenge for the Kindle DX. There's a lot of variety among textbooks. Some textbooks will work well enough on the DX's display, but most, I think, will not.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)I think the key issues here are how each textbook is used, and what kind of illustrations are present in it.
Textbooks that are fundamentally like collections of stories, such as those in sociology, history, and literature, will likely be most suitable for use as e-books. These texts are read sequentially, so that the reading ratio (the time spent reading vs. the time spent finding the next thing to read or waiting for the display to update) can be high, and they can usually be written so as not to rely on complex color illustrations. (Though complex color illustrations are still valuable, and the Kindle DX doesn't support them.)
Texts for the natural and formal sciences will not work so well.
A biology textbook without color is almost inconceivable, except that if you have a Kindle, it's pretty easy to see how that works. Just download the sample for the Kindle edition of Steven Daniel Garber's "Biology: A Self-Teaching Guide".
Right up front, you'll get a hint that all may not be well. The e-book includes a disclaimer: "Due to the nature of digital conversion, some of the images included in this e-book may lack the detail and clarity of the originals."
And indeed, that's true. Much of the fine detail that would be visible in a printed copy of this book is lost here. Remember, textbooks are commonly printed on offset presses with more than ten times the linear resolution of a Kindle display.
And even if a reader were willing to zoom in to see the fine detail on an illustration (and if the Kindle DX allows it, which the earlier Kindle models often don't), the lack of color is utterly crippling. Biology textbooks rely on photomicrographs of cells in which subtle color gradations are essential to understanding the cell structure.
Perhaps some of these figures could be replaced by line drawings carefully crafted to communicate the same facts without relying on color, but some photographs are irreplaceable.
And line drawings have their own problems. I downloaded the Kindle sample version of "History of the Ancient World" by Susan Wise Bauer and looked at the book's maps on my Kindle. Some are fine, but many have notations that are virtually illegible at a normal reading distance, to the point where I can be sure that 50% more linear resolution isn't going to help enough.
For math, science, and engineering, I think the Kindle DX will also be inadequate. I remember studying these subjects, and what I remember about using the textbooks is frequently flipping back and forth through the pages to compare new material to old and find the applicable explanations and formulas when answering review questions at the end of each chapter.
The Kindle DX simply doesn't support page flipping. Backing up twenty pages takes two seconds with a paper textbook, but most of a minute on a Kindle.
Amazon has made deals with several major publishers to bring texts to the Kindle DX, and with several major universities to support the DX in some classes next fall. These are encouraging announcements, but these are just experiments, not evidence of the DX's suitability.
I'll be interested to see whether Amazon, its publishing partners, and these universities initially limit themselves to the low-hanging fruit in history and literature classes, or go after some of the more challenging courses.
Ultimately, I don't think any e-book reader is really the right answer for educational use. The better solution is to adapt textbooks and other educational materials such as exams to notebook computers, which can support more types of content (including full-motion video) and provide valuable interactivity.
And the even better answer, in the long run, is to develop systems that are even more tightly focused on education, with long-life batteries, rugged construction, and specific software and hardware features that aren't generally found in laptop PCs. I've been studying this problem for a long time (since I was in college myself!) and if there's interest, I'll go into more detail in a future post.
As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.
Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)Here are the basic facts:
It's 7.2" wide and 10.4" tall, just a little smaller than I expected. With so many things in our lives adapted to the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, it seems to me that would have been a better target for the DX. (Internationally, A4 paper serves the same purpose at 8.3 x 11.7 inches, so perhaps 8.3 x 11.0 inches would have been a good compromise.)
The DX's monochrome E Ink display is much smaller than I was hoping for, only 9.7" diagonal. Like the original Kindle, much of the space on the front of the unit is occupied by page-turning buttons and a physical keyboard.
The screen has 1,200 x 824 pixels, about the number on the LCD of a 12" Dell Latitude E4200 laptop, so the Kindle DX's linear resolution is significantly higher than that of most notebook displays. However, it's about 10% lower than that of the 6" E Ink display on the Kindle 2 (150 dpi vs. 167 dpi).
As Amazon says, the DX's display is about 2.5 times larger than the Kindle 2's screen. But that's in square inches. In pixels, it's only 50% taller and 37% wider.
That's a key point, I think, because of the markets Amazon says the DX was developed for: newspapers and textbooks. I'll deal with these topics in two subsequent posts ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks").
The Kindle DX does have a few unique advantages over the earlier Kindles. It supports rotation, providing a landscape display mode, a feature long available on Sony's Reader. Also like the Sony Reader, the DX has PDF support. On the Reader, PDF documents support zooming to a certain point, but even when zoomed in all the way in landscape mode, illustrations in PDFs of technical books are often unreadable. I expect the same will be true of the Kindle DX.
Oddly, Amazon isn't retrofitting these features to the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 may lack the position sensor that makes rotation automatic on the Kindle DX, but it could still allow manual rotation. PDF support should be even easier to add.
Perhaps Amazon is holding these features back from the Kindle 2 to promote sales of the DX, but if so, I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Although it isn't particularly a Kindle DX feature, I'll mention something disappointing that I came across while browsing through Amazon's Kindle pages just now. Since the Kindle was launched, users have been able to email documents in various formats such as Word, HTML, PDF, and JPEG to their Kindles to name@kindle.com, where they go through an Amazon server that converts them, if necessary, into a Kindle-friendly format and downloads them automatically to the user's Kindle.
The fee for this super-convenient conversion and download service was ten cents per document. But now, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte. For PDF files and image-rich Word documents that exceed a megabyte in size-- a common situation-- the cost of this convenience has tripled or worse. Fortunately, Amazon still supports the "name@free.kindle.com" method, which results in the converted documents showing up in the user's email, from where they can be manually moved to the Kindle via USB.
I'm surprised that Amazon didn't equip the DX with an improved web browser. As far as I can tell, the DX has the same browser as the Kindle 2. It's still called "experimental," at least. The screen size of the Kindle 2 (800 x 600 pixels) is a little on the small side for effective web browsing, but the Kindle DX's screen is big enough to display almost any web page, especially in landscape mode.
Now, I'll move on to the two new markets for which the Kindle DX was developed. See "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks".
Last September, I wrote a piece about a new e-book reader under development at Plastic Logic (see "E-books: The flexible future").
At the time, the company was hoping to ship its still unnamed e-book reader in the first half of this year. I was really looking forward to it, since it provides a unique combination of two valuable features: a big screen and enough flexibility to tolerate a little bit of bending. (I worry about my Kindle getting crunched in my briefcase.)
Monday night, I was watching the local news from KGO-TV in San Francisco, and caught a story on Plastic Logic. The reporter mentioned that the reader was due out "next year"-- so I sent an email to Plastic Logic's media-relations contact to check on that.
It turns out the report was correct. There are three reasons for the delay:
1) It's taking longer than expected to prepare Plastic Logic's factory in Germany to produce the devices, and the company wants to have plenty of inventory so that early buyers won't be disappointed, as many Kindle customers were in 2007.
2) The product itself is evolving with "more features and functionality."
3) Plastic Logic decided not to press for a product launch in the middle of the current recession.
I imagine the decision to wait a year was difficult for Plastic Logic, but it makes sense to me. The e-book market is still developing, and it barely exists at all for business users, the company's intended market.
Being the first to market with a large-format professional e-book reader hasn't given Irex Technologies any obvious advantage. The Irex 1000 series models (described in depth here on CNET) are fine products, but most people I talk to haven't even heard of them.
Similarly, Sony's Reader beat Amazon's Kindle to market by over a year, but today the Kindle is pretty much synonymous with the consumer e-book market.
So in summary, I don't think 2010 is too late. Plastic Logic will get its chance to succeed. All it has to do now is deliver a great product.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal this week, Amazon.com's e-book reader, the Kindle, is out of stock.
The Journal credits Oprah Winfrey, who recommended the Kindle on her show in October.
I saw this effect myself in the page views for old blog posts here--the daily view count for some of my old Kindle posts, especially my comparison of the Kindle with Sony's Reader, spiked the very next day, and it remains higher today than it was before that show aired.
Amazon's Web site reports delivery delays of 11 weeks to 13 weeks, which means that it might even come as late as Washington's Birthday (to be celebrated February 16).
Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.
(Credit: Amazon.com)The larger message in the Journal article is that the Kindle's success proves that "e-book readers are for real," which is a conclusion about which I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I think that many of us knew that already. On the other, sales of Kindle-compatible e-books are still trivial, compared with sales of paper books, so what has really been proved?
I think that all we can really say today about e-books is that they're good for some people. We don't really know how much demand there is for e-books, as they exist today, because market awareness still isn't very high outside the usual "early adopter" community.
But I know one thing for sure: there's a lot of room for improvement. The Kindle's apparent successor has been spotted online, Sony's third-generation Reader was recently released, and I wrote about a good-looking prototype e-book reader from Plastic Logic in September.
All three of these are improvements over the current Kindle in various ways, but they all fall short of the economy, robustness, and readability of paper books.
It seems to me that at this rate, it could be 20 years before e-books begin to outsell paper books.
However popular the Kindle is, it can never address the whole market, as long as it's so closely associated with one bookseller. Without a single dominant platform, we'll never get a single commercial standard for e-book distribution. At the Baen Free Library, Project Gutenberg, and independent e-book sellers such as eBooks.com, customers face an excessive variety of format choices.
For this reason, I'm almost sorry that Amazon sells the Kindle under its own name. I understand why the online retailer chose to develop the Kindle--anything the company can do to promote book sales is good, in the long run--but it might have been better if the Kindle design had been licensed to multiple competing suppliers.
Frankly, I think that even Sony might dump its proprietary platform, if Amazon were more open with the Kindle. My guess is that Sony's Reader business has yet to break even, and given the competition from the Kindle's superior features and celebrity endorsements, it could be a long time before it does.
The Kindle has the potential to become the standard e-book platform, with commercial e-books from Amazon's Kindle store, Amazon's own Web site for free Mobipocket books, and support for direct online downloads from independent Web sites (see Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.com, for example).
It would also be good to see more competition among suppliers of e-book display technology. E Ink owns the whole market, and the company's progress to date has been fairly slow. Sony's third-generation PRS-700 uses an E Ink display virtually identical to that found in the original PRS-500, which came out more than two years ago.
The sooner we reach the point of sub-$100 readers, the sooner we can build a multimillion-customer market for e-books, and the sooner we can start talking seriously about how "e-book readers are for real."
Interesting news from the DemoFall conference held this week in San Diego:
Plastic Logic--a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates--demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.
This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony's Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.
And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won't break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn't mean invulnerable, but it's a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.
Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype. I see some minor problems in the prototype's display--some dead lines and odd drawing glitches--but nothing that should interfere with the scheduled launch.
More importantly, even as a prototype, the display's contrast ratio seems to be better than that of the Kindle or Reader, mostly by virtue of the white being whiter--I'd have to make a direct comparison to be sure, though. I also see all of the critical features I want in an e-book reader: good display resolution... Read more
Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.
Since then, I've been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I've been pretty lucky--the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I've also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.
A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals--writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.
This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there's a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and... Read more
A friend of mine told me recently about Tor.com, a new site managed by Tor Books, part of the Macmillan publishing group.
There's something cool going on there for just the next few days. And if you've bought an Amazon Kindle or a Sony Reader--or just like to read e-books on your laptop, cell phone, or other system--you'll want to scoot right over to the "Freebies Bonanza" page. [Update-- this content is no longer available.]
... Read more
