ZOMG REVOLUTION!You can see what is supposedly a picture of the thing
here. Its...kinda ugly.
Its going to fail. They talk like its going to be the iPod of books. While it sounds cool to be able to have a little device with a nice screen for reading that stores hundreds of books at a time...honestly, how many books do you really read at once? That you need to carry round with you at one time? MP3 players "work" because music is short and you can listen to different things depending on your mood. I'm not going to fire up a book based on my mood.
Oh but don't you see? They are going to connect to the EVDO wireless service so you can buy books on a whim! Theres also a bunch of bullshit about writers no longer just writing books by themselves, they will be community efforts. Oh, and ad supported books would be possible. And writers could go in and edit parts of a book after you've bought (and probably read) it. Just what I want, the contents of my books to change after I've read them. Ok for textbooks, bad for novels.
The only interesting thing with the wireless is subscriptions to things like newspapers. Get the paper sent to your device, you can search it for keywords since its digital, and it allows you to read it here and there without having to break out the big sheets of paper. This would be useful for my dad, you should see the giant backlog of wall street journals that are piling up.
Even with that bad stuff people could get on board with it. Hey, look at iTunes. I never expected people to pay for DRM-to-hell vendor lock-in music, not with the free alternative being so available online, but it happened. Thing is iPod has a "cool" vibe going for it. Young people love that stuff. Young people with lots of disposable income, the people that pay $2 for a 30 second music sample to use as a ringtone when you can get the full song for $1. Obviously, those people are idiots. And idiots don't think reading books is cool (outside of the latest trend books like Harry Potter.)
The final coffin nail: price. The device is $400. Well, thank you Amazon. How about remove the wireless junk and make it even a little cheaper? No one wants a device that costs that much to read books. Does it come with, say 20 free books? It should for that price.
And then theres the book prices themselves. New releases and stuff are $10, classics for $2. Subscribe to blogs for $1-2. Wait...what? Subscribe to a blog and PAY for it? Who the fuck is going to do that? And $10 for ebooks? Seriously? I know they want to make a profit but do you think the authors are going to get a bigger check every month because of the higher profits? Doubt it. I love this quote at the end:
Microsoft's Bill Hill has a riff where he runs through the energy-wasting, resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. "Do you really believe that we'll be doing that in 50 years?" he asks.
Thats an argument for ebooks, but read that again. We do all that to make a book and I can still buy a paperback for $10 or less.
Readers have long complained that new books cost too much; the $9.99 charge for new releases and best sellers is Amazon's answer. (You can also get classics for a song: I downloaded "Bleak House" for $1.99.) Bezos explains that it's only fair to charge less for e-books because you can't give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can't lend them out or resell them.
Eh, what? Thats not cheaper. At least not cheap enough compared to a real physical book without those restrictions. "Bleak House" for $2? You mean this
Bleak House that Project Gutenberg offers for free since its copyright expired? Hope you enjoyed paying for it...
Then theres theres the usual problem with a digital device called battery life. 30 hours of battery life. Nice. Sorta. For a device with a single non-backlit screen whose only job it is to display text. My DS gets something like 18 hours per charge, has 2 screens that are backlit and is processing a game at nearly all times when its on.
Well, you get the idea. I think the best comment I read on the story was "This isn't the 'iPod of books', its the 'Segway of books.'"
