Amazon’s Kindle, an iPod for books

By abhishek at 20 November, 2007, 6:40 am

Kindle Here’s a small riddle! What weighs a little more than 10 ounces, is about the size of a paperback book and costs $399? It is Amazon’s Kindle, a device which helps you read upto 200 eBooks with a built in 256 Mb memory (and another 180 Mb free). Like a cell phone, it has wireless connectivity to the web allowing the users to download e-books, subscribe to magazines and blogs directly from Amazon.com. This is for the first time that Amazon has ventured in the computer hardware market and it is being compared to Apple’s iPod which changed the way music was consumed. While users can download content from Amazon in the proprietary Kindle format (AZW), one can download any free content on the web and it supports plain text (html and txt) as well. So, for the device to work, you needn’t buy books from Amazon bookstore only. The beaming Jeff Bezos (Image Source: Newsweek) foresees that the device will “revolutionalise” the way books are read.

“The problem with e-books up to now is that that are not comfortable to read,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in an interview. “We wanted to make a device with a seamless, integrated service.” If you discount his jargon filled CEO language, I think he has a point. The last time I read an eBook of 200 pages, I could not get beyond 10 pages because I got bored scrolling down after a few minutes.

Amazon hopes to add another revenue stream to its business, possibly through advertising. The stock price of Amazon is standing pretty at $100 which as doubled in this year alone.

No Synching required

Unlike an Apple iPod which mates with only one computer (to get it to do otherwise is a tedious process), Amazon claims that one can quickly click and drag files from any computer without any need synchronisation. So, it will work like your regular pen drive!

Will it work in India (if its launched seriously)?

I don’t think so! And its steep price is hardly a reason why it will fail in India. For instance, an iPod is expensive. Lets face it. But, we, by default are a music loving country and songs (pirated and otherwise) are easily transferable. And iPod also has the vanity factor which we borrow from the west under the ‘Demonstration Effect ‘ from the theory of demand which they taught me in Economics. But, our reading habits are not something to boast about. The application of such an electronic device is very interesting. People in countries like UK and USA read in trains and buses while commuting to work. So, a device like Kindle which lights itself up in the dark is very useful. I can’t imagine reading in a Thane or a Dombivali fast local!

Also, the charm of the bookmark, the smell of those pages as you flip by them as they grow old is all part of the reading experience which the electronic device robs me of. Yup, I am of the old school!

What will work in India?

There is a company which has tried a novel way to lure people into reading. They had to answer a simple question, How can a non reader be converted into a reader? And it led them to find out that most people today spend a significant percentage of their time on the web checking their emails. So, why not send one page of the story everyday and the user can read that off like he would normally read an email in a jiffy. A page a day keeps the reading troubles away (ah! That rhymes too) since you do not see it as a burden, but, a part of your everyday life!

Happy reading!

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