On February 9th, Amazon will announce the updated version of its hot selling ereader — the Kindle.
Unofficially dubbed the Kindle 2, the new version is supposedly more streamlined and less “klugy” than the original version. Pictures of what might be the Kindle 2 were leaked to the Boy Genius Report at the beginning of October.
The original Kindle is on the left; supposedly the Kindle 2 is on the right.
At that time, the expectation was that the Kindle 2 would be unveiled by Amazon in time for Christmas sales (if not necessarily Christmas delivery). However, on October 23, Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Kindle, and sales skyrocketed, apparently leaving Amazon with too few Kindle 1s or even 2s for the stocking.
No further pictures have leaked since October 3, and there is a suggestion that Jeff Bezos had subsequently called for a software redesign that delayed the Kindle 2 until February.
The Kindle 2 will debut at the same price as the Kindle’s current price, $359; Amazon’s website is taking orders for Kindle delivery at that price in “three to five weeks.”
But the issue that I want to address is not what the Kindle 2 will look like but rather is whether the Kindle a gadet (or toy) whose time has come and gone.
Ereaders have been around for years.
The Sony Librie EBR-1000EP in 2004 was was designed for the Japanese market; the new major inovation was the Sony Reader (PRS-700), which was introduced into the US in November 2006. It used an “epaper” surface that was not backlit (unlike a computer laptop ot terminal) and thus easy on the eyes. Amazon’s Kindle debuted a year later in November 2007 and uses the Whispernet (Sprint EVDO) to deliver books wirelessly to the device.
The problem with the Kindle is that the Kindle books are in a propriety format. Microsoft Word documents and Adobe PDFs, the formats used by most businesses, must be translated, either by the customer or by Amazon before they can be read by the Kindle.
Finally, not all new or older books are available to the Kindle. Publishers must decide whether to format new books for for the Kindle which versions then sell for less than hard cover books. Also, older books are less likely to be available for the Kindle as publishers must whether they will receive a good ROI (return on investment) if they go back into their data files and reformat them for the Kindle.
Finally, the simple fact is that the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Nokia 810 and other smart devices have bypassed the Kindle for book and text reading. Stanza and similar programs have made it possible to read books on the small screens, and one is much more likely to see people reading books (or newspapers) on the IPhone or iPod Touch than on a Kindle.
The former are multi purpose devices, while the latter are single purpose devices.
The Kindle cannot play Los Lobos, cannot show your son’s baseball pictures nor your daughter’s wedding videos, and and the Kindle can certainly not make a telephone call.
The move in technology today is to multipurpose devices, not back to single purpose devices.
Kindle’s early adopters were, in my opinion, revolutionaries whose revolution has been surpassed by the smart device.
As Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Inc., notes in ComputerWord, “We at Gartner are struggling to see what the compelling value proposition of the Kindle is for the average consumer,”…”For the average consumer, a paperback book and a printed newspaper still work pretty good.”
Peter B. Hayward
Copyright © 2009 Peter B. Hayward. All Rights Reserved
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