{"id":1929,"date":"2009-05-07T09:02:23","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T17:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=1929"},"modified":"2009-05-07T09:02:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T17:02:43","slug":"the-new-larger-kindle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2009\/05\/07\/the-new-larger-kindle\/","title":{"rendered":"The New, Larger Kindle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m thinking Apple ends up owning this sphere.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen the future of reading, and it’s the portable electronic device.\u00c2\u00a0 Those who say they love physical books are no different from those stating they love CDs.\u00c2\u00a0 Antiquarians destined for the scrapheap.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just like Napster and MP3s, you don’t get it until you try it.<\/p>\n

Felice gave me a Kindle for my birthday.\u00c2\u00a0 The experience is staggering!<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there’s a learning curve.\u00c2\u00a0 And some of the design choices are inane.\u00c2\u00a0 To go forward, you push the button on the right.\u00c2\u00a0 To go backward…you don’t push the button on the left, that also makes the pages go forward, you have to push the small button upper left to go in reverse.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t the iPod establish the rules back in 2001?\u00c2\u00a0 Right forward, left back?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe Amazon was worried about lefties, or did a bunch of research.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s where you get into trouble. The public has no idea of the future.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to go by your gut.\u00c2\u00a0 Not giving people what they think they need, but what they want!\u00c2\u00a0 This is what Steve Jobs specializes in.<\/p>\n

And the keyboard?\u00c2\u00a0 Anyone with an iPhone\/iPod Touch will immediately ask himself why it’s not a touch screen.\u00c2\u00a0 Hitting the letter buttons on the Kindle is akin to playing with a 1980’s electronic toy.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas the virtual keyboard on the iPhone\/iPod Touch may seem daunting at first, but is adapted to almost instantly and represents the future, not the past.<\/p>\n

But the reading experience…\u00c2\u00a0 Wow!<\/p>\n

I get an adrenaline rush in a bookstore.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything seems good.\u00c2\u00a0 So I end up buying books that don’t read as well when I get home.\u00c2\u00a0 And you actually have to go to the store.\u00c2\u00a0 Or the library.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas you can shop on the Kindle when you’re at home.<\/p>\n

But it’s better than that.\u00c2\u00a0 Because there are reviews in the Kindle store.\u00c2\u00a0 And the first chapter of every book is free!\u00c2\u00a0 If you were a real schnorrer, you could forgo buying anything!\u00c2\u00a0 Just download the first story in a collection, or read the introductory section and say you read the book.\u00c2\u00a0 These are not brief passages, these are not little excerpts, these samples can be forty pages or so.\u00c2\u00a0 At least that’s how long the sample of the Vanderbilt book is.<\/p>\n

I was reading the "New York Times".\u00c2\u00a0 And there was a fascinating review of a new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt <\/p>\n

\n
The Mogul Who Built Corporate America<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So I just fired up my Kindle and downloaded the sample!\u00c2\u00a0 I was thinking of buying it, but the average review wasn’t that high.\u00c2\u00a0 Digging deeper, I found that the book got either five star or one star reviews.\u00c2\u00a0 The one star reviews?\u00c2\u00a0 From Kindle owners!\u00c2\u00a0 They were bitching about the price!\u00c2\u00a0 In excess of twenty dollars!\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a whole coterie of dedicated Kindle shoppers who refuse to pay more than ten dollars a book, the usual Kindle price.<\/p>\n

Ten dollars.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s below wholesale!\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the price of a movie.\u00c2\u00a0 In a shitty theatre!\u00c2\u00a0 You get hours of enjoyment.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, you can’t transfer the book to someone else’s reader when you’re done, but at these prices, how much money will you end up spending in a year anyway?<\/p>\n

More than I am on books now.\u00c2\u00a0 The Kindle breeds excitement.\u00c2\u00a0 At your fingertips is a breadth of excitement and knowledge.\u00c2\u00a0 My little device is always at the ready, and calls me not only at night, but during the day, to delve into a story that tells me so much about the world but is not laden with the hit and run facts of today’s infotainment society.<\/p>\n

Fiction tells you more about life than non-fiction.\u00c2\u00a0 All these years later, to rediscover the experience of reading stories is thrilling.<\/p>\n

But I don’t expect the mainstream to join me on my adventure quite yet.\u00c2\u00a0 The buy-in price of the device is way too high, $349.\u00c2\u00a0 And the new Kindle, $489, this is not something for the masses!<\/p>\n

iPods got cheaper.<\/p>\n

Kindles are getting more expensive.<\/p>\n

Buy the third or fourth generation.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the fifth.\u00c2\u00a0 The ergonomics will be better and the price will be lower.<\/p>\n

But, as stated above, Apple might end up owning this market.\u00c2\u00a0 The notoriously tight-lipped company is supposedly readying a tablet.\u00c2\u00a0 With a screen many times the size of an iPhone\/iPod Touch.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll get that vaunted virtual keyboard, and backlighting, and a wireless subscription…<\/p>\n

That’s why the iPhone is so cheap, it’s subsidized by AT&T.\u00c2\u00a0 If you can buy a subsidized tablet, which works better than a Kindle, who is going to buy the Amazon product?<\/p>\n

And if you’ve got wireless connectivity, and can surf the Web, who is going to pay the "New York Times" a monthly fee to subscribe to the paper?<\/p>\n

That’s one of the keys to the Kindle DX.\u00c2\u00a0 With its larger screen, newspapers and magazines can be rendered in a format closer to their physical iterations.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, if you subscribe already, you get no break.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you go on vacation, you can’t buy day by day.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re so busy protecting their model that they’re turning potential customers off.\u00c2\u00a0 The same way the\u00c2\u00a0 music industry did at the beginning of this century.<\/p>\n

And speaking of the music industry…\u00c2\u00a0 Will Amazon and other e-book companies be forced to remove the DRM to gain wide acceptance?\u00c2\u00a0 Will books be torrented and not paid for?<\/p>\n

If you can read them on an Apple tablet, beware.\u00c2\u00a0 The proprietary encoding and sending to the Kindle protects publishers today.\u00c2\u00a0 But will they end up controlling the market tomorrow?<\/p>\n

When I go on the road, I travel with a cornucopia of reading material.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, with the above issues, I cannot forgo my three physical newspapers and multiple magazines quite yet.\u00c2\u00a0 But I will.\u00c2\u00a0 In the near future.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, how long does the physical newspaper have left?<\/p>\n

If you’re someone who owned the original five gig iPod, buy a Kindle today.<\/p>\n

If you own an iPod, know that you will own a portable, personal electronic reading device sooner rather than later, you just don’t know it yet.<\/p>\n

As for the Kindle DX…\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, a larger format with more capabilities is to be applauded.\u00c2\u00a0 But you could have had a similar-sized screen on the present Kindle if there were a virtual keyboard.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, the screen could have gone from edge to edge if the buttons were virtual, or on the side.\u00c2\u00a0 Amazon’s going in the right direction, but it cannot compete with Apple.\u00c2\u00a0 Which was not first to make MP3 players, but now owns the market.\u00c2\u00a0 Jobs says no one reads.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet he’s famous for stating that no one wants what he ends up launching later.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m thinking Apple ends up owning this sphere. I’ve seen the future of reading, and it’s the portable electronic device.\u00c2\u00a0 Those who say they love physical books are no different from those stating they love CDs.\u00c2\u00a0 Antiquarians destined for the scrapheap.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just like Napster and MP3s, you don’t get it until you try it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-v7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1931,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions\/1931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}