Today we saw the unveiling of Amazon's second attempt at the digital ink iBoook (no relation to Apple's PPC laptop), the Kindle 2.0. As an avid reader with 24' worth of shelf filled with paperbacks, I would love to free up some space and take a good chunk of my library with me to pick and choose on a whim while traveling or in everyday use. Anyone else fell the same?
Digital ink with these eBook readers seems like a prime solution, but Amazon seems to be the only one who is trying to bring their business model up to par with Apples success with their iPod&iTMS success.
If can be called the leader in online book sales, it's Amazon. They have most of the contacts and market clout to ease the contract negotiation and lobby for pricing models and features they want *cough*anti*cough*drm*cough*.
I'd like to know what you people think of the whole situation for Amazon, and maybe fill me in on some details I haven't been able to find.
• Do you think they can be a similar success with their hardware/content design and pricing? Is there a market already in place for ebooks, or will one have to develop as the digital music file market did with iTunes once the iPod caught on?
• All the info I can find on Kindle seems to want you to upload your files to their server to process and send to your Kindle instead of having local storage and processing of files. I happen to like managing my library and and having it accessible on my home network. Yes, this kindle has plenty of space for many, many titles, but I'd prefer to manage formatting and kindle contents from my machine, independent of Amazon's store. They say you can add your files via a USB connection, but they want you to use their service.
Is this part of their model fine with all of you? Or are their control freaks out there like me who want the option to keep their files local instead of in the 'cloud'?
• Then there's the "experimental" features like web browsing, RSS feeds. etc along with "major" paper subscriptions. I don't know about you, but I'm not fond of the the NYTimes or Washington Post and their types to begin with, so most of my news comes from other sources. Kindle ads made it seem like they're trying to entice flailing publications like these into the digital age and who can blame them when these possible pitiful business partners can't seem to make money off of the current trend of people getting their news online.
My question here is, why would they eventually offer support of
any RSS feed or news site? Amazon seems to want to format content for their reader themselves, so it would be a command and control model instead of letting users do whatever they want. Without some app like local library management that would process sites and feeds for you, you'd have to depend on Amazon to keep it all straight. Do you think a library app like iTunes (iReader?) is necessary for making this kind of content "
just work"? Or is this cloud stuff truly viable and has all the snafus worked out?
• Then there's the physical content comparison. WIth iTunes, it was CDs (and DVDs for some of the more adventurous types). You pop in a disk and have iTunes or another converter save it down to digital files. No need to re-buy things you already own.
With Amazon, you have your books. Some are cheap paperbacks, some are pricey hardcover collections. To rip these, you're going to need to either invest in a "bookripper" from Atiz:
http://www.atiz.com/
and spend hours along with $1000s to keep your books in good shape, or buy something like a Fujitsu ScanSnap:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001554FBE
and stop by your local print/copy store where for a dollar a book, they'll usually cleanly cut the spine off so you can feed big stacks of pages into the scanner to make PDFs to be run through OCR software, editted for accuracy in a word processor, and handed off to amazon to be converted to .azw format and sent to your kindle. Whew! That's not exactly the automated, nondestructive process we're all looking for, though I might be willing to try the second method since many of my titles are wearing out.
Without the ability to easily import your existing content, how do you think this effects growth for this market? Do you think Amazon will at some point, offer some discount, transferral process to entice people into the Amazon-Kindle marketplace? Even if they have a mail-in trade (physical-for-digital file exchange), do you think people with many titles would be willing to give up the copy they control? What if they partnered with local Borders stores and slapped some recycling justification on the whole scheme?
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I see a lot of ways this could go for Amazon. Now that they've gotten past what looked like a college freshman's first attempt at industrial design, do you think they've got a future? Now is obviously not the best market for investment, but do you think Amazon would be seeing more Venture Capital backing its efforts if this was 2 years ago? Would you put your money behind Amazon's efforts?
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