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New e-readers get a big push
Amazon's Kindle, the electronic book reader
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: Entrepreneurs have been trying to figure out better ways to get the printed word into people's hands ever since Gutenberg printed that first Bible 500 years ago. The latest evolution -- the e-reader -- has been around for a while. And so far, sales have been fine. But that may be changing, as Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman tells us from the Entrepreneurship Desk at Oregon Public Broadcasting.
MITCHELL HARTMAN: When you go looking for e-readers these days, there are only two choices with any depth on their e-bookshelves: Sony and Amazon. In spite of its clunky buttons, Sony's "Reader" has been dubbed "sleek and sexy" by tech reviewers. As for Amazon's Kindle 2, company VP Ian Freed says it offers lots of market muscle, and all the benefits of Wi-Fi.
IAN FREED: We put an advanced cell phone radio in the Kindle, which means wherever you are, you can actually shop from the Kindle and get books delivered in under 60 seconds.
It even knows how to read out loud!
E-BOOK: On the island once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. And it has been told in another book called "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," how they had a remarkable adventure...
Imagine that for 250 pages. Still, Wall Street analysts seem impressed with the rest of the Kindle's technology, as well as a new app for the iPhone. But new competition is coming. Fujitsu is launching a $1,000 color reader, it'll be great for graphic novels and surfing the Web. The game-changer, though, could come from Silicon Valley start-up Plastic Logic early next year.
RICHARD ARCHULETA: You can bend it, you can roll it, and the image stays on there.
Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta is waving one of his e-reader prototypes in the air. It's like a letter-sized pad of paper and just about as flexible. The screen isn't glass so it won't break if you drop it or jam it in a briefcase. It's got Wi-Fi and a touch screen. You can load and annotate textbooks, Word documents, whatever.
ARCHULETA: What you see with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader and other products on the market, is they don't do a great job at letting you work with the documents that you create yourself.
Sounds like Archuleta wants to offer us more or less, a laptop computer, instead. Which technology analyst Carl Howe of the Yankee Group says makes perfect sense.
CARL HOWE: If people can stop thinking about them as it's a way to read a book, and start thinking about them as a way that they can read not only books but also newspapers and Web sites and blogs, then I think we might be seeing a more mainstream product.
And mainstream media companies are already getting involved. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is reportedly working on a large-format color e-reader. The Hearst Corporation's got one in the works as well. They're hoping to sell paid subscriptions for their online newspapers and magazines. One possible model: you'll get the media content as a package deal for the first year. News would update and download automatically to the company's e-reader, which you'd have to buy first, of course. Figuring out what to charge won't be easy, though. David Carnoy of CNET thinks putting the right price on the Kindle, has been Amazon's biggest challenge.
DAVID CARNOY: It's over $400 to buy one of these things, and obviously a lot of people are saying, well, in a year I don't buy $400 worth of books.
I asked Ian Freed if Amazon's price might come down?
FREED: No. The Kindle is a great value, being able to take 1,500 books with you, getting New York Times bestsellers and most new releases for $9.99 or less. We have no plans to do that.
Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe thinks the right price is more like $100 to $200, if that.
HOWE: The best way to market these products is simply, if you buy enough books from my bookstore, then you get the book reader for free.
It might take a giveaway to get consumers to cart around yet another electronic device for their reading material. After all, why pay a few hundred dollars just to read stuff you can increasingly get on your netbook or even your cell phone.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
NVIDIA is making a Mobile Internet Device, with full color screen, WiFi, 3G network connectivity, based on Google's Android OpSys, for $99. So why the hell does it cost $350+ for a much simpler device that only displays text in black and white??????
I have had a Kindle since December 2007, my daughter has one and my wife just got a K2. I go everywhere with it and use it for books, newspapers (the NYTimes), magazines (New Yorker) and both personal and professional documents (which I have converted by Amazon). These devices are in early development and will only get better (and cheaper). Interestingly, I did not hear any errors in the broadcast (pace Dana Garvey): nobody said the Kindle cost $400, the Kindle vp stated clearly that it was equipped with an advanced cellphone radio (that conferred the benefits of wifi), no one said that it could be used for book reading only, and it is often referred to as an "ereader" (despite the program of the same name) because it is more than a book reader. In any case, I recommend it, whatever you call it.
I have the iRex Digital Reader. It is similar in size to the yet released Plastic Logic Reader. What people have to take into account when comparing to a tablet PC is the screen. E-ink is not backlit or reflective. The reading experience is the same as reading a book. Your eyes don't get tired or strain when viewing the screen for extended periods of time. The tablet PC would have to have similar qualities and if it had an e-ink screen then the page refresh rates have to improve.
The fact that people are looking for the functionality of a laptop in these ebook devices leads me to believe that the future of digital reading will be conducted on tablet computers rather than dedicated ebook devices. After all, the success of the iPhone is predicated on always being connected and the ability to have one device that does many things.
There are a number of software ebook readers out there: bookworm, stanza, and BookGlutton (which I'm associated with). Particularly with the rise of netbooks and mobile devices these are worth looking into.
After listening to the piece on the e-Readers, I had to jump in and comment. I could use an e-reader for the several hundred pages of documentation that my work needs me to carry around when I'm on call. I could use it to read the LA Times and the WSJ. I could use it to study the technical manuals on the new technologies that I'm learning. But not at $400.00.
I just listened to the podcast and come from a family of committed book readers. Until I had problems with delivery of some magazines on a regular basis and got tired of canceling my newspaper whenever I took an early train or flight (and saw papers in my neighbors' driveways as I left my house but knew that mine would not be there until after 7 am), I thought I wanted a newspaper every morning and books to take to bed at night. I am very happy with my Kindle2, a gift from my oldest son. I was very surprised that he is doing pretty much as I with it: newspapers, magazines and technical papers that we send to Amazon and get back in Kindle format. I have the New York Times app on my iPhone but I would rather get the New York Times on my Kindle. I am very frustrated with The Economist on my iPhone - both scale and the requirement of an internet connection. Even for early flights, I get the Kindle versions of the paper before I board the plane. The size of the Kindle is ideal for planes compared with taking out even a small laptop to read technical papers. I have purchased my first Kindle book which I will then have available while I try to set up a WordPress website for a friend. Most of the books I want to read are not on the Kindle, but I do have over 1000 papers that I will eventually put on the Kindle and read.
I am on an Executive Committee for a non-profit and I put the meeting agenda on my Kindle. This was a very reassuring way to be paperless because I wasn't on my computer and possibly doing email instead of paying attention to the meetind while looking at the agenda.
I was surprised by the inaccuracies in this report. The Kindle 2 is not $400; it is $359. It does not have Wi-Fi capability; it connects to Sprint's cellular network. One of the people interviewed makes a statement to the effect that the market needs a device that can be used to read personal documents, newspapers and magazines, in addition to books. The Kindle does all this already. Finally, users of these devices don't call them "e-readers," to my knowledge. They are called "e-book readers." There is an e-book reader software application called eReader, and the company that owns it has an online store called ereader.com. I would like to hear a follow-up story that gives consumers a clearer picture of the array of e-book readers that are already on the market.
Mitchell Hartman left out the ultimate denouement for his story: finish the last sentence with "...from your cell phone OR, from the Library, for FREE!!!" I "cart around" a book everyday when I ride the train for 30 minutes into work, along with my laptop, like everyone else.....
