Here we’re all about the interface between humans and their machines and we look for that bit of innovation that will truly make technology “user friendly”. I’m a big audio book reader, just out of necessity due to a vision impairment but Mike, another writer here at Whiz Bang is a hardcore book reader, the old fashioned kind, you know with pages and such. He has recently been reading a lot of digital books though, either on his phone or on a PDA. So when the Amazon Kendle was announced he was quite excited. There have been a number of critics complaining about various features of the device, and I have some criticisms myself, but I wonder if enough has been said about the true innovation of the device.
People are inherently spontaneous personalities. When we want something, we want it now. That’s a problem that Amazon has had to contend with since its inception. If I order from Amazon I have to wait several days where I could go to a big box store and get whatever it is that I want right away. Now, with that said let’s talk for a minute about what digital books do for us. If we are traveling, or if we find ourselves waiting at a doctor’s office, being able to pull out a digital device crammed full of books, magazines, and newspapers is much more convenient than carrying a giant bag of heavy books. So, what if a company created a device that not only allowed you to read a book anytime anywhere but it also allowed you to immediately buy a new book with a couple of button pushes virtually anywhere you find yourself. Well my friends, that’s the Kendle.
The device is a digital book reader that works with the digital ink which features high contrast and is easy to read in nearly any light. So, stores books and it’s easy to read, what else does it do? Here’s the big interface innovation, the one that makes it the most exciting, the device has EVDO built into it via Sprint. That means it hs cell phone tech inside allowing the user to buy a book through a free service by hitting a few buttons on the device. So, no more waiting, you want it, you get it immediately. Amazon has already done about as good a job as any website in getting over the “bin shopping” hump, so now you can browse Amazon then click buy and the book is automatically downloaded in a few minutes right to the Kendle I really believe this could change everything. I will give the device a try because you can make the text huge and it also plays Audible audio books.
This is version one of the device though, so there are some problems. The first problem is the device design isn’t perfect. I’ve heard there are issues with the location of the next and previous page buttons too. Finally, I have to say, the device is just kind of ugly. It looks like some early Apple design from ten years ago. Here’s the worst part though, it costs $400.00! This is a ridiculous price for a device that’s so toed to future retail purchasing. I know the cell tech built into the device probably makes it pricey plus I’m sure Amazon has to pay some sort of percentage to Sprint but the price is just too high to allow the device to grow beyond tech heads and early adopters at least during generation one. I predict some massive discounts for rev two where you sign a contract guaranteeing to buy a certain number of books over a given amount of time, similar to a cell phone package. Ultimately I’d like to just see the price come down and to see the device opened more to the user being able to store more of their own stuff on it. Yes it’s pretty locked down and in fact if you want to email docs to the Kendle for future reading it costs 10 cents but you can do it for free via USB.
Along with books you can subscribe to newspapers and magazines which are automatically pushed to your Kendle which is great, but Amazon is also charging for blog subscriptions. The b logs they are offer are freely available on the internet so it’s a little odd that we’d have to pay for them on this device. Here’s something broken about that though; in the experimental menu item of the device there’s a web browse which can access the blogs for free that you would normally be asked to pay for. It seems to me that Amazon is trying to work out usage of the EVDO service and how much it’s going to cost them. I feel like they should just go ahead and make the internet openly available and create some data packages, again similar to cell phone packages. Maybe they should just add a speaker and make this a cell phone too!
What we have here is an interesting start that I hope the early adopters will support enough to keep new and improved versions coming.
