PDF capabilities in Kindle: Newsweek puff job reveals more details
Having knocked the Amazon Kindle earlier, let me also serve up some positives from Newsweek—beyond Jeff Bezos’ laudable belief that customers shouldn’t have to pay as much for DRMed books.
First off, at 10 ounces, the Soviet-ugly Kindle doesn’t weigh much more than the Sony Reader. Second, you can cruise the Net and send back a PDF for storage in your Amazon library. But will the Kindle read DRMed PDF, not just Mobipocket or whatever other in-house format Amazon is using? That much isn’t clear? Nor do we know how well the Web browser will work and how well the results will be displayed in E Ink, which doesn’t refresh as quickly as LCDs. [Update: The Kindle will read PDF only by conversion---and not the DRMed variety. - Nov. 22, 2007]
Here, via MobileRead, is a list of other details gleaned from Newsweek and elsewhere—followed by my thoughts on the problematic Newsweek article itself:
- 6-inch E Ink screen
- Price: $399
- weighs 10.3 ounces
- 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours
- has a “sleep mode”
- built-in memory holds 200 e-books
- allows searches within e-books
- wireless capability through “Whispernet” (based on EVDO) which extends the Amazon store
- “buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process.”
- Over 88,000 e-book titles will be available on launch
- NYTimes bestsellers priced at $9.99
- First chapter of almost any e-book for free
- Available newspaper subscriptions: the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde
- Available magazine subscriptions: The Atlantic
- Subscriptions to blogs also cost you something!
- Lookup features for Wikipedia, Google Search
- Private Kindle e-mail addresses to communicate with other Kindle users
- Development of the Kindle began in 2004
In the Newsweek piece, Steve Levy commendably mentions Brewester Kahle of the Internet Archive (who’s rightly concerned about DRM and rightly excited about One Laptop Per Child’s XO an e-book machine) and Bob Stein and Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book (on the issues of shared annotations and other impact on the lone-author model) and Jim Gerber of Google (on liberals and conservatives annotating each other’s books).
But all in all, the effect is one of a puff piece. Does not Levy fully understand the dangers of publishers and readers relying so heavily on a company that so far hasn’t even committed the Kindle to honoring mainstream industry format standards? There is no direct mention of the IDPF’s .epub standard. The perky subhead in Newsweek’s online edition more or less sums up the tone: “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind’s most divine creations: the book itself.” That’s not all. Consider this caption under a photo of Bezos with words superimposed on him: “A Man of Letters: Amazon’s Bezos wants to change the way we read.” Ah, shades of the media’s depictions of Bill Gates as Andrew Carnegie II!
Perhaps Newsweek would better serve its readers by also considering extent of Bezo’s long-term commitment to books.
“Now Jeff is a brilliant, brilliant man and he did an amazing job of branding” Amazon “as ‘books,’ and then one day a couple of years later, he told us in an all hands—and this wasn’t secret, but it’s important for us to know—he said, ‘We can’t ride on books and music and video forever,” a former Amazon employee has said in a recent talk. “Why? Because they’re all digitizable. Who buys a CD in China right now? They have to move into hard lines. They have to move into clothes and auctions and all this other stuff. They have to move into services. They have to, right? Because in the fullness of time—and Bezos is quite the visionary—he thinks no one is going to buy books anymore. And if your brand is tied to something that’s dying then the brand is no good anymore.” As noted earlier in the TeleBlog, you can even watch Steve Yegge say those very words.
Are the quotes accurate? Remember, they extend to E and P books. I can see some exciting business models built on interactive services rather than sales of individual copies, but here, Bezos seems to be dissing book-selling as “dying.” I’d welcome clarifications.
Related: Amazon-sized egos? Kindle reader to shun IDPF e-book standard? And, yes, the ugly box is the FINAL design, in my Publishers Weekly blog.
Technorati Tags: Amazon , Jeff Bezos , Bezos , Newsweek , Steve Levy , Bob Stein , Ben Vershbow , Future of the Book
November 18th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Will be interested to see if there is a charge for the EVDO portion. $400 list price and a data charge on top of that does not seem to be a viable business model to me.
November 18th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Hi, Paul. In fairness to Amazon, I can recall reading somewhere that the Kindle will also do WiFi. True? We shouldn’t take the EVDO-only scenario for granted. Thanks. David
November 18th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
WTF? Kindle TOUCHSCREEN?
>>>You can jot down a gloss on the page of the book you’re reading, or capture passages with an electronic version of a highlight pen.
Huh? What?
November 18th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
>>>In 1994, for instance, fiction writer Annie Proulx was quoted as saying, “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.”
Listen, Proulx, I wouldn’t read your crap on GOLD PAPER that I could then sell afterwards! Some writers should just STFU. It’s not as if what they say is either 1) True, 2) Sensible, or 3) What they have written and still write is ACTUALLY WORTH THE TIME TO READ.
>>>(I’ve been reading Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” on my iPhone, a device that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming months.)
LEVY JUST LEAKED! Apple will do ebooks! (For those who have forgotten, Levy wrote the history of the Mac. He knows Apple Insiders! Has probably been under NDA for this too!)
>>>Readers have long complained that new books cost too much; the $9.99 charge for new releases and best sellers is Amazon’s answer.
That answer is not good enough for me. Ebooks must not go beyond $4.99.
>>>(You can also get classics for a song: I downloaded “Bleak House” for $1.99.)
He brags he paid for FREE?
>>>”The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.
Yeah, good luck with that notion. I read the products of individual people, not their frikkin FAN CLUB. (You know how absolutely USELESS most posts on an author’s website are?)
>>>”Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.
Kill. Me. NOW.
Eh. I’d be surprised if the Kindle went anywhere. That design is fugly. I don’t care that it has wireless and you can search in a text. Most people will look at that array of keys and throw up their hands in disgust. The visceral response will be, Hey, I don’t have to learn anything NEW to read a BOOK!
November 18th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Steve Levy himself asks: Is the Kindle Ugly?
Well, the bloody NAME is. WTF kind of name is that, anyway?
November 18th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Gosh, Mike,
Proulx (like John Updike in his BookExpo speech) are interesting and profound writers. They may not be correct on the technological issues, but I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss their thoughts and insights into the nature of reading.
And please, give writers a break. They say a lot of crazy things over a lifetime. The difference between writers and nonwriters is that most of their idiotic thoughts end up on paper or a webpage somewhere. Finding a thing or two they were wrong about 10 years ago is an easy and trivial task. Speculating on the future is a risky venture, but I’d rather people keep speculating than just STFU.
I didn’t like the name either, but after discussing this with someone in marketing, I’m not so sure. It’s two syllables, easy-to-pronounce and has all sorts of connotations. The name is irrelevant of course; the technology and rendering is the key thing.
November 18th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
My complaint with the article (which generally is well written and insightful) is that Steve Levy interviews too many CEO’s and industry leaders. These kinds of people are usually the last people to listen to when trying to understand societal trends. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Levy article is that he not once mentions the word “Mobipocket.” In my mind, it’s more important to know what Mobipocket is all about than to hear what Bezos and CEOs have to say about the future of reading.
November 18th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
[...] highly of the Kindle, which has been fueling a debate among e-book advocates for some months now. David Rothman at the TeleRead blog is in a bit of a froth about the Kindle’s “Soviet-ugly” appearance and the [...]
November 18th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
>>>Proulx (like John Updike in his BookExpo speech) are interesting and profound writers.
To you. To me: dull and pretentious.
And I do give writers a break. But Proulx a writer? Puhleeze. You slander.
November 18th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Well, Robert, it’s back to the F word—formats. Steve Levy needed to mention not just Mobi but .epub and also educate people on DRM compatibility issues, which the current .epub specs don’t address. Other issues exist such as whether Amazon would be the best place for the largest collection of shared annotations, if that happened (the IDPF doesn’t even have an annotations standard for .epub). Jeff Bezos is really proposing for Amazon to function as a library. You’re welcome to disagree with me, these things are so subjective, but I don’t see how the article can be insightful without decent exploration of such issues. Meanwhile you’re spot on about Steve L’s infatuation with CEO quotes. Great point! By the way, I shouldn’t single out just SL for blame. Haven’t the newsweeklies cut back on the number of researchers? Perhaps in the past, he’d have had more help so he wouldn’t be so bleepin’ oblivious to the full import of the Tower of eBabel. Thanks. David
November 20th, 2007 at 1:46 am
I just can’t imagine ever, ever paying $400 for a device that only does one thing—especially when I suspect the mini-laptop/UMPC/OLPC/whatever movement is on the verge of a breakthrough (once they get overt this ridiculous ‘only sell the expensive ones on the open market’ thing and let Average Joe or Jane by a $100 model at every Walmart in the world) and I’ll be able to spend half for a machine which does twice as much and is not format-locked and requiring ongoing subscription money.
My Palm m125 from years and years ago does more. Granted, its screen is less readable, but if they tweaked that, I would be quite happy with a device exactly like my Palm.
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:13 am
[...] when most of the bloggers had not owned, uses or lived with a kindle. Were they pissed that Amazon chose to give old media (Newsweek) the scoop? And where are the in-depth comparisons to the product it is going head to head with (the Sony [...]
March 10th, 2008 at 4:12 am
I have one. I like it. Needs pdf though. Other than that its cool. I dont want to sound like im selling it. I read alot of digital format. So much that sitting in front of my computer READING has become part of my job. I am a computer programmer and keeping up on tech is not for the unread. Not that i needed to be anymore lazy than working from home. But now i can work on the couch. The newspaper and stuff is nice too. Just needs pdf so i can transfer my large pdf book library to the thing. Anyways.. I like it.