Amazon has finally launched its E-Book reader, Kindle, available now for 399 $ with access to 88,000 books including 100 of the 112 New York Times best sellers.
The entire idea sounds pretty exciting, especially considering that the big A will pick up all the “phone bills” for its Whispernet service, which is based on Sprint’s EVDO.
Whispernet allows Kindle owners to wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, dowload and receive content and works out the box — no setup required. Newspaper subscriptions cost $5.99 to $14.99 per month and Kindle Magazines cost between $1.25 and $3.49 per month — each is available for a free 2 week trial. Oddly, blogs will cost you $0.99 per month to subscribe. Just running down the specs again: internal storage for 200 titles (more via SD expansion), 10.3 ounces.
Today Seth Goding was advocating Amazon’s debut in the publishing world, or rather, virtual publishing.
I love the idea and fully recognize its potential, definitely the future, I’m afraid not mine. I love reading books, I do read every night and love my collection, which I always display proudly on my shelf. Not quite so proudly right now because I have exceeded the amount of avilable space and have started piling books all over the place, but I’m working on that.
Update: GigaOm has an interesting article I completely agree with. Inexpensive ebook reader and earn money through the books. Whoever is likely to buy an ebook reader is certainly not looking to a technology packed gizmo.
Update: Kindle hardware features
- It doesn’t use a generic RSS aggregator — it’s Amazon-selected blogs only (and they “want every blog they can get”). Blogs that are aggregated by the Kindle get a revenue share with Amazon, since it costs money to get those publications.
- The side scroller is, as we expected, a polarized PNLCD (pneumatic LCD). It looks amazing.
- It’s SD only, not SDHC.
- It uses the Kindle file format (which is a variant of structured HTML), but also accepts Word and PDF files (but only via email since they need to be converted by Amazon), Mobi, HTML, plaintext, and image files like JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Sorry, no RTF.
- Oh yes, it supports Audible! Oh, and a little, unused file format called MP3.
- It has a user-replaceable, 1530mAh battery
- You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.
- Amazon is also releasing the Digital Text Platform, which allows users to upload their own content to the Kindle store for sale and download.
- The $9.99 price point is the sweet spot, but there are books for sale from the Gutenberg project for under $1 (if you don’t want to download them for free yourself), and upwards of that quoted $10 price point as well.
- Amazon wouldn’t say who makes the device, just that “it’s an OEM in China.”
