While the Amazon Kindle is making great strides to bring everyone back to the book and to invest modern devices with the old-world charms of book reading, we have to worry that the new Kindle 2 is really the beginning of the end for book readers everywhere.
We recently sent someone a book as a file, and the person that received it said they couldn’t read it. They felt it would cost them too much in paper to print it, and they weren’t prepared to sit at their desks long enough to read 298 pages. And that set us thinking, where do people read? And what is acceptable to take there.
Bed, while traveling, in the sitting room in front of a fire, on holiday around a swimming pool, and for lunchtime breaks at work. In almost every one of these occasions people are also happy having their mobile phone nearby and we have begun to wonder if perhaps that’s the right format for an eBook, not a specialized reader.
And beyond that we are beginning to wonder if perhaps most books are now dispensable in that the form of entertainment that books offered is perhaps being replaced by the internet and social networking sites. Are books, in fact, compatible with a future which is full of tiny connected devices. In the same way that some people believe that handsets can only become TVs if they have specialized content created for them, could this be the same for books ‘ could they need to evolve through the portable device revolution in themselves. Perhaps we don’t need the new Kindle 2 in order to read books, instead we need a new kind of book perhaps?
It’s just that the amount of reading that we do, getting through our everyday life, is going up and up, and the internet is where most reading now goes on. Hands up who have accessed Wikipedia 100 time for each book they have read lately? We bet it’s a dominant percentage. How many times have you heard people say they don’t read as much as they used to ‘ when in actual fact this is because in their job or elsewhere in their life they are attuned to the internet all day, where they are reading.
The truth is that we are entering an era of mind blistering multi-tasking to cope with the mind-numbing boredom of most single activities ‘ like watching TV with all those adverts on.
Do we multi-task better while reading a book, watching TV, while IM’ing our friends or do we do it better looking up the history of the place where the TV story is located on Wikipedia using our wi-fi connected iPhone, PSP or handset.
Regardless of this speculation there will be a market for ebook readers, and that may be in the millions, but we don’t see everyone on the planet ever owning one, so it’s not a 5 billion device universe like a handset, not even a fraction of that.
Which is why there are so may ‘so what?’ messages greeting the Kindle news on the internet, telling them to get an iPhone (which also reads ebooks). Quite clearly the handset will become the device of choice to always have on you, it will also become a general purpose device which does everything you could require of it, In the same way the PC became a general purpose stationary or fixed device, the handset is all set to be the portable general purpose device of tomorrow.
If books ARE to be read in that world, then eventually it should be through a software upgrade to a handset. We already know from Kindle 1 that sending what is usually a 700 Kb file is cheaper over the cellular network than over any other physical distribution means, so it is the way to save the rain forest. Now we have to settle on what device will read it.
As handsets go through a kind of merger with the laptop, through netbooks and UMPCs and half way houses with bigger video capable screens, they look set to overcome many of the obstacles to having them carry ebooks. What is really required from Amazon (or Sony) is a book platform like say acrobat, which defines the features of a reader and a software platform sold which includes any intellectual property required and goes onto multiple device types. In fact Adobe is a more natural developer of this device than Amazon.
There is already a CDMA network and deal which is Kindle ready on the Sprint network, so why not simply extend that to more devices.
Looking at the Amazon Kindle 2 we get a feel for what needs to be added to a handset in order to see this process through to its natural end point. Weight has not come down at all and it must at 10.2 ounces, but the device is smaller, easier to hold in your hand. It uses the same Electronic Ink to display the book in a format which reduces eye strain, it is readable in sunlight and has dictionary and thesaurus functions built in.
On the new device the resolution has improved and it supports more shading levels and the optimum screen appears to be the same 6 inch screen of the first device ‘ somehow that has to be attacked by the handset makers.
Pages turn 20% faster, the keyboard is qwerty with more reactive buttons say reports, and it powers up from a USB port, but many of the other options are mostly cosmetic.
The power and volume switches have moved, the wireless on switch has disappeared, navigation options have changed and a joystick added. This is the type of thing which happens when you get the upgrade to your handset, they move the camera shutter button, and make the navigation buttons give you a haptics buzz, but nothing fundamental has happened to be Kindle except the loss of the SD card slot.
Apparently the new Kindle has the speech to text capability that came out of the original Dragon work, which came before that out of IBM, and that’s a feature which we would love to see on handsets in the future anyway, except for one thing, when we last played with it, it hardly worked at all, never mind worked well.
Although the new device will hold 1500 books it now also holds a copy of the books you’ve bought on the Amazon servers, like a rights locker for content you have bought. We’re not sure if you have to buy it once again though if you delete it from your reader. Allowing downloads for free would impact on the Kindle business model, which has the download price bundled into the book purchase price. But it’s so cheap that multiple downloads per book could be budgeted for without really hurting this model.
The other news item about Kindle is that Amazon is already planning to port the books that it sells so they can play on a wide variety of mobile phones in the near future. Which implies that the company, unlike Apple iTunes, is more interested in selling books than selling devices, and is covering both outcomes.
None of those improvements are beyond the modern Smart Phone. Today the real estate on the mother board of a top end handset is becoming compressed every generation and there is room and power left over for more components and more function. Screens are getting bigger and better and the proliferation of too many controls or multiple functions evaporates when you use a touch screen, because they are software loaded. And of course a software platform can be loaded on a PC, a GPS device as well as a phone, giving it a wider audience and wider function.
As the features of Smart Phones come down towards the mid-range, the fact that this is a phone, that it will fit in a pocket, that it already has a cellular connection on it, and that multiple device types can buy books from multiple stores, not just Amazon, all make it fairly inevitable that the Kindle 2 may do well, but we suspect there may never be a Kindle 3, and the main function of Amazon’s Kindle range may simply be to remind people who don’t read enough that there are more and more places where you can do that today.