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back to article Amazon's $399 folly book reader

Reading has never been cheaper, and for most of us, requires no additional machinery - only the source material itself. So why do we need to pay the online retailer Amazon.com $399 to read books? That's the cost of the company's Kindle, a gadget with an 800 x 600 E Ink screen. Apparently the company has been working on the …

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  1. A J Stiles

    A Solution looking for a Problem

    I'm not at all convinced.

    Digital Photo Frames are much cheaper now than when they were originally introduced -- I've already seen them this side of £50. It surely can't be long now before some far-eastern manufacturer adds in the ability to display plain text files (if they haven't already -- I haven't got one to experiment with). And from there, the next obvious extension would be HTML (an open standard) or PDF (a near-enough open standard).

    But who'd want anything like that -- an open standard being adopted from the ground up?

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  2. jubtastic1

    Never going to be a real market for this tech.

    By the time they get these gadgets down to a price where joe public doesn't just point and laugh, the market for them will have already been borged by Smartphones.

    Only positive aspect is that they encourage epaper development, because I want eWallpaper™ stuck on my walls one day.

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  3. Edwin

    I think they're early...

    eBook readers have been around for years, but until e-Ink displays arrived, battery life was a real problem.

    Now, however, the problem is in price - e-Ink is verrrry expensive - I understand the display is a substantial part of the cost ($100?) of manufacturing these things.

    On the other hand - I've just bought my Sony PRS-500 for $200 on eBay - new. I have a decent-sized library of eBooks that will keep me company when I travel (which is often), and perhaps I'll buy some at some point - imagine - read a review, and own the book 5 minutes later.

    In any case, eBook readers may do for the dead tree industry what digital music players did for the CD business - but not yet. There's a Dutch startup (iRex) that makes a great eBook reader that lets you annotate (on a touch screen) as you go. The idea is to replace 20kg backpacks for schoolgoing children. The problem at the moment is that not all school books are available digitally, and it's a rather hefty investment at €600 (although potentially cheaper than all the dead tree editions - depending on the eBook cost).

    Amazon's mistake is to overhype an overpriced product. Sony has already tried, but I think it's flopping with everyone except niche markets and early adopters.

    Once the price of the readers comes down, it could really take off... Until then, the market is getting crowded

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  4. Tony Humphreys
    Coat

    How much!

    200 quid PLUS 5p everytime you want to transfer something you already own.

    Vendor lock in does not even come close.

    E-paper is damn fine though, I think i'll stick to my iliadreader for now, plus I can get mobipocket books for it - and transfer all my PDF's free.

    The Kindle is Betamax all over again! Now, can I get Howard the Duck for it.

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  5. Damian
    Thumb Up

    Have to agree with Anonymous Coward

    www.baen.com have been producing DRM free ebooks cheaply for years and I have a library of approx 200 that I have on my N95 which I can read in almost every situation from waiting in a long queue to sitting on the train.

    Awesome service.

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  6. Leo Maxwell
    Thumb Up

    My boot is empty!

    We are trialling an iLiad as a laptop replacement for our field service engineers.

    All they need is access to Technical manuals and part lists in PDF format.

    So far the results are encouraging, smaller and lighter than a laptop, nice clear screen, replaces a car boot full of technical manuals.

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  7. Josh Korn

    There *is* a market, but not the one you'd expect

    It's for geeks like me. Sorry.

    I've got an entire bookshelf of tech books -- the ones that become obsolete in a year or two. All of them are hugely overpriced, not to mention very bulky to lug around. And of course, they're a colossal waste of paper.

    Earlier this year, I discovered the joy of ebooks. Instead of having to shell out almost $100 for an obscure COM/.NET Interop book (I did say it was geeky!) and have to wait for as long as two weeks (time that I couldn't afford to lose), I was able to get hold of the ebook for $40 and download it on the spot.

    And since those ebooks are Rights-managed, putting one on a reader and then lending the reader to a colleague mimics pretty closely what I'd do with a paper book.

    But the best measure of an ebook reader (and so far, I've only held the Sony one in hand) is this one. You can take it with you to the can.

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