The gadget sites are peeing all over themselves this morning about Amazon’s launch of their own e-book device, the “Kindle”.
Taking a note from the playbooks of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought himself the cover story of Newsweek to introduce the device as a bit of “newsvertising”. Plus the gadget site bloggers all got one to play with and feed the fanboy frenzy.
The scavenger-picked skeletons of previous e-book devices litter the electronic desert, and the iPhone/iTouch has already been declared the Big Deal of 2007, so personally I’m not really sure why they came out with this product right now. It’s not as though Sony were selling bajillions of their e-book reader and so somebody had to get in the game post haste. (Side note: I actually saw one of these in person for the first time last week, and the clarity of the E-Ink display was very nice, but I would still never buy one)
Blogger and all-around media-smart-guy Rex Hammock lays out exactly what he sees as the biggest weaknesses of the Kindle (which seem to boil down to “it’s not the iPhone”). Meanwhile, blogger and all-around media-smart-guy Seth Godin has his own complaints as the writer of books he’d like to sell. He invokes the Gillette Principle: give away the readers to get people hooked on them, THEN sell them the books. Given the repeated failure of e-book readers, this is probably good advice.
The only real market I see for e-book readers in the long term is as a text-book device. School departments and students alike would benefit from not having to buy expensive text books and deal with the issues that revolve around them — reselling used books, maintaining storage of books, being able to update editions without having to buy all new books, not to mention the drudgery of carrying 50 pounds of textbooks on your back all day. Amazon or sony or somebody could make a huge amount of traction by giving a reader to every student at a university or a middle school and providing their required texts for one year. Otherwise, this is just another Unloved Toy destined to waste away with the Charlie-in-the-Box and the Polka-dotted Elephant.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
