Amazon Kindle A Flop?

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Amazon’s Kimble has only been out for a day and already people are saying it’s a flop. The reasons given range from “it’s ugly” and “expensive” to plain ol’ “impractical” and, to be honest, most of these points are hard to dispute. Check it this article and see what you think.

Are e-books that much better than books? I certainly don't think so. I don't know about you, but I can only read one book at a time and carrying a stack of paper is just as easy as carrying a 10 ounce device. Would it be nice to download books without going to the store? I guess. But if I buy my books from Amazon, I don't need to leave home anyway.
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It definitely is ugly. Looks like something from the 80s. I'd have to hold it and check it out first to really judge it though. I think I'll stick to books though.
 
good article..and lets not forget if you do want an ereader you an get the sony for $300 :rolleyes:
 
Get rid of all the buttons on the bottom, get rid of everything wireless (usb sync instead), make it $200, and I'd buy it today. I just want a nice, simple ebook reader with access to a good online ebook store. I trust Amazon to end up with a really, really good selection of ebooks, but the device is just too expensive. Basically, give me something like the Sony Reader with access to the Kindle bookstore, and I'm set.
 
Reason #5 - They nickel and dime you to death. If they had a cell phone model with this thing and gave you the device, but charged you a monthly fee for their 'service' then I would be all over. $29/month for all the books/other content you want.
 
You can buy like 25+ books for the price of a Kindle.

It reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting.
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While I can appreciate no backlighting during the day, for $400 I still have to use a book light?


Positive things that don't really matter
1) No curvy, springy pages to deal with as you read.
2) No dog-earring.
2) Highlighting is not permanent.
3) If you tend to hold books with one hand, your thumb and pinky can become friends again.
4) Umm...saves trees, maybe?

Probably more, but it's not worth pondering any further.
 
Sure, some different colors would be nice, but as far as usability it looks like it is going to be very useful...And the price will go down as more get out and production ramps up. Overall this is a nice product that is on the cutting edge....
 
GJSNeptune said:
You can buy like 25+ books for the price of a Kindle.


While I can appreciate no backlighting during the day, for $400 I still have to use a book light?


Positive things that don't really matter
1) No curvy, springy pages to deal with as you read.
2) No dog-earring.
2) Highlighting is not permanent.
3) If you tend to hold books with one hand, your thumb and pinky can become friends again.
4) Umm...saves trees, maybe?

Probably more, but it's not worth pondering any further.
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Your post pretty much sums it up--both positives and negatives. Maybe if they gave you a $100 credit toward ebook purchases? Really, I'd love to have a device like this, but like you said, it's too expensive and:

GJSNeptune said:
for $400 I still have to use a book light?
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:p
 
Comte said:
Sure, some different colors would be nice, but as far as usability it looks like it is going to be very useful...And the price will go down as more get out and production ramps up. Overall this is a nice product that is on the cutting edge....
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Uhhh.... might wanna repost when you're not on mushrooms.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Schwa!?
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Think of it this way....You need a reference book, but dont have time to go to the library....Bam, its on your kindle. Or you need 10 reference manuals to repair something, bam, its right there on your kindle....

Heck, if you work it right, you could write that thing off on your taxes as a business expense....I can see this being very useful once production ramps up, and prices drop...
 
aznbumbaclot said:
Textbooks are still too expensive as well :confused:
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Exactly the point I was going to make. It seems like hitting up the universities and students would make it an easy sell. The first thing I thought of when the e-book concept hit a few years back was 'man, that would've been great in college - one of these holding all my textbooks rather than carrying 5 or so every day'. High schools could benefit too - no more locker trips between classes, just load all the textbook material on to the ebook.
 
I agree with some points but disagree with other. Yeah it's ugly and overpriced but I disagree that ebooks don't offer any benefits.

I took a two week vacation to Bonaire earlier this year. Instead of hauling a bunch of books with me all I had to take was my ebook reader.

The thing that pisses me off is that once again the ebook is being tied to the device. Even though Amazon owns MOBI the kindle can't read encrypted MOBI books purchased elsewhere. To make matters worse, the "Kindle" format is just a MOBI format with a different extension. You can actually download the Kindle manual, change the extension and read it with the MOBI reader.
 
Comte said:
Think of it this way....You need a reference book, but dont have time to go to the library....Bam, its on your kindle. Or you need 10 reference manuals to repair something, bam, its right there on your kindle....

Heck, if you work it right, you could write that thing off on your taxes as a business expense....I can see this being very useful once production ramps up, and prices drop...
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Heck, if you expect reference books and manuals to be available in digital format, maybe you are on shrooms.

Are these reference books or manuals free? You've already spent $400 for the device, or your parents got it for you as a going-off-to-college present. If you don't have time to go to the library, do you have time to research? If you're not a student living on campus, there's Google. If you aren't even a student, there's Google.

Which medium offers an easier index or glossary, a tangible book or a one-page-at-a-time electronic device? Okay, perhaps you can search for words like you can on a computer, but can you specify to search in the index, or will it highlight up every instance of it?

What about diagrams and figures? Can you turn the Kindle sideways for larger "pages?" What about certain "references" that use distinguishing colors? I don't think Amazon was thinking research during the design process. Fireside, bedside reading at most.

I thought of more positives. No sopping wet newspapers. No subscription card tear-outs. No mess of sale ads you always ignore. And I guess the potential tree-saving is still important.

Ultimately, it's a $400 device out of the 80s trying to spark a non-existent market.


But anyway, how did any of that relate to my "Schwa!?," which was regarding your "different colors" and "cutting edge" claim?

:confused:
 
I find it funny that one of the major selling points in the launch was the lack of a monthly fee, and one poster here wants one. All those little $30-$50 a month fees eat you alive if you don't watch it, especially since they are charged regardless of usage.

The design is supposedly derived from ergonomic studies and aims to create a comfortable, book-like feel in the hand. If it succeeds at that, great, but of course you can't tell unless you can take it for a test drive somewhere. I don't care if it's ugly as long as the design fits the usage well. Still, it looks like you're carrying around an office phone minus the handset.

The circa-1983 monochrome LCD isn't very sexy (Tandy Model 100, anyone?). I'm guessing it's for cost and battery life, but in the age of screens like the iPhone's, many people will look at this and laugh.

I see only three ways to make this product a success (but if Amazon would do them, it could succeed despite the easy jabs by the pundits):

1. It turns out to be much better in the hand than it looks to the eye.

2. Price for the unit drops to around $100.

3. Price for books drops to half of the retail for an equivalent paperback for hot recent titles, and much less for older or non-mainstream books. My best guess on the pricing is that they are basing it on the fact that hardcovers are usually published first and cost 2-3x more than paperbacks, so to get a book on the Kindle when it was brand-new would make the price seem cheaper. But I think most people think of book pricing in terms of paperback, which is about the same as or less than Kindle pricing.

Bezos and company have been drinking their own Koolaid, too caught up in developing the product to see it objectively, or they never would have tried this with a straight face. If they don't adjust to reality very quickly, it will disappear without a trace.
 
In reality modern books are ugly as hell also, and they smell nasty. Even worse when they sit in the sun and age a bit. I'd rather step back a century and have everything on hemp scrolls again. Scrolls are much sexier.
I would expect more from the hardocp community to open there minds up a bit and think, "How can I mod this" and make it look the way I would want it to look.
Also you can't believe everything you read. All Kindle's sold out in 5.5 hours. I would buy one, but i have my trusty laptop to do all of the Kindle functions and more.
 
solotech said:
In reality modern books are ugly as hell also, and they smell nasty. Even worse when they sit in the sun and age a bit. I'd rather step back a century and have everything on hemp scrolls again. Scrolls are much sexier.
I would expect more from the hardocp community to open there minds up a bit and think, "How can I mod this" and make it look the way I would want it to look.
Also you can't believe everything you read. All Kindle's sold out in 5.5 hours. I would buy one, but i have my trusty laptop to do all of the Kindle functions and more.
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Speaking of hemp, been overindulging lately?;)

You'd have to go back more than a 1000 years, not just a century, to find a time when paper was not the most common medium, and then it would be animal hide, not hemp (parchment, vellum). Way back, you sometimes got papyrus (made from pressed reeds of the same name). No hemp.

If that thing sold out with no positive end-user feedback and a $400 price, it is even better proof than the iPhone that something is seriously wrong with the brains of shoppers right now.
 
solotech said:
I would expect more from the hardocp community to open there minds up a bit and think, "How can I mod this" and make it look the way I would want it to look.
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I don't think anyone here's going to spend $400 to mod something their laptop, PDA, and/or eBook device is capable of.

So, assuming the Kindle did indeed sell out, how many were there? A few hundred? :D
 
If you want to go back to scrolls, vellum, papyrus, etc., you have to wear the clothes that go with them. Ladies like a good Renaissance man, right?
 
Commander Suzdal said:
Speaking of hemp, been overindulging lately?;)

You'd have to go back more than a 1000 years, not just a century, to find a time when paper was not the most common medium, and then it would be animal hide, not hemp (parchment, vellum). Way back, you sometimes got papyrus (made from pressed reeds of the same name). No hemp.

If that thing sold out with no positive end-user feedback and a $400 price, it is even better proof than the iPhone that something is seriously wrong with the brains of shoppers right now.
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Lol, I wrote century thinking a thousand years. Oy, long day already! I defiantly have the turkeyday vacation on my mind making my day drag!
Hopefully the reviews will start coming in the next couple of days.
 
GJSNeptune said:
If you want to go back to scrolls, vellum, papyrus, etc., you have to wear the clothes that go with them. Ladies like a good Renaissance man, right?
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Yeah, stylin' it the Renaissance way! Wearing my tights, my big floppy hat with a feather in it, gnawing on a roast turkey leg, typin' away on my Tandy 100!
 
Well, don't go too far back. If you're carrying around papyrus, you might find yourself being stalked by an angry Assyrian who wants to impale you on a stake.
 
No thank you. I'll take my books. Sometimes it's nice to get away from modern technology for a couple hours. Curling up to a good book in my favorite chair is going to be a preferred pastime for me until I can no longer hold up a book to my face.
 
It's ugly and has an awkward looking keyboard. I'm all for a day where we're walking about with StarTrek-esque PDA e-book affairs but they need to make that thing look good and touchscreen, for that much cash.
 
As other have said, the price is one of the major things against it.
The openness is not one, look at apple, the "consumer" does not really know what other
formats are out there so will go with what is hyped the most.

I think that once they found out that there is no backlight it might slow sales a bit, one of the things about reading books is being able to do it in bed, and having to have the light on all the time is just weir if you have an electronic device,

Why none of the companies have not just slapped some leds around the screen is beyond me.

As for Ebooks in general, I can have every Sci-fi author on a single DVD and not have to fill up a whole room with books, let alone the weight of them when you have to move .

I just need a txt/pfd/rtf/LIT/HTML reader with a decent screen size, and a back light (color semi-optional)
Though for LIT it is either MS or a converter so far
 
aznbumbaclot said:
Textbooks are still too expensive as well :confused:
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well even if they do come in electronic form, it'll still be expensive...

gotta take advantage of all the low income students right?

SamuraiInBlack said:
No thank you. I'll take my books. Sometimes it's nice to get away from modern technology for a couple hours. Curling up to a good book in my favorite chair is going to be a preferred pastime for me until I can no longer hold up a book to my face.
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i agree

there's just something about a reading a paper book.... must be the paper
 
It seems some of the people reading this article don't understand the technology behind this thing.

Don't judge this thing by its looks. Just the always-available wikipedia access makes it an awesome device. The "80's-era" graphics are a result of the E-Ink tech used for the screen. It makes for extremely low energy drain and high visibility with low eye strain. Every E-book reader uses E-Ink because of this.

I don't think it's necessarily worth $400, but it's a lot better than the other e-book readers out there. If they cut the price to $200 and increased the storage, it would be worth it.
 
The real trick to eliminating books is replicating the comfortable viewing. The only way to do that is through front lit displays with absolute contrast. Havn't we been hearing about flexible paper that can display crisp text that isn't backlit?

Make the e-reader tablet semi-flexible and make it out of a front lit panel and you'll replace books overnight. Even working on this wonderfully huge monitor sitting in front of me, I would prefer to do long sessions of reading on something that's not trying to create contrast by blinding me with white backgrounds.
 
Why carry another electronic device? I read e-books on my Motorola Razr V3.

1. Convert the .txt file to a Java midlet. http://tequilacat.org/dev/br/index-en.html

2. Install it to my phone with P2K Tools and a USB cable.

The .txt to java conversion program allows you to set the font size, screen colors and orientation. The test is very easy to see.

I'm sure that this can be done with other phones as well as by other means.
 
Prometheusg said:
It seems some of the people reading this article don't understand the technology behind this thing.

Don't judge this thing by its looks. Just the always-available wikipedia access makes it an awesome device. The "80's-era" graphics are a result of the E-Ink tech used for the screen. It makes for extremely low energy drain and high visibility with low eye strain. Every E-book reader uses E-Ink because of this.

I don't think it's necessarily worth $400, but it's a lot better than the other e-book readers out there. If they cut the price to $200 and increased the storage, it would be worth it.
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Yeah, that's it--we're stooopid! If you call a 30-year-old reflective LCD "E-Ink" that makes it super-techmo-logical!

Or perhaps you're a sucker for buzzwords and marketing--it's a hard judgment call either way...
 
E-Ink still has another 3-4 versions to go through until turning a page is done in an instant.
You still need to be able to read in low/no light without having to spend MORE money.
Another way to do it is a flip open top that shines the leds that way (better than the surrounded Led's I was thinking about?)

AND it STILL needs to read a hell of a lot more supported formats

I WANT an good affordable E-book, but I refuse to buy overpriced,half done products
 
Thats not surprising. Im thinking people who are into technology are going to have a laptop when traveling anyway. People who arent tech savvy wouldnt buy this thing anyway.
 
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