Apr

6

2008

Over the next few days I’m going to be doing an in-depth review of Amazon’s Kindle, a device that has alternatively been described as hopeless, the future of reading, and even (I kid you not) “sexy.” The truth is, of course, somewhere between the extremes.

Unlike almost everyone else who has written about the Kindle, I bought one in the first five minutes after they went on sale.  Given the poor showing of previous e-book readers, and the $400 price tag, I was very surprised when it sold out in a matter of hours.  I thought I was going to me one of the few fools to spend that kind of money on it, especially given the poor showing of the superficially similar Sony Readers.  Despite many reviewers questioning the whole point of buying an e-book reader, the Kindle has remained on back-order for months.  This implies that there was considerable pent-up demand waiting for the proper product.

My Kindle arived the day before Thanksgiving and I’ve been using it daily since then, more than four months at this point.  After living with one for that period I’ve found that there is a stark difference between the things that the early reviews said were wrong with the device and the things that actually turned out to be problems in the long run.  Some of the things I hated at first I grew to understand, and other things that seemed unimportant at first turned out to be headaches.  Many reviewers spent little (and sometimes no) time with the device before writing about them, and the result is that they often missed the mark badly.

I’m going to go into depth about specifics of the Kindle, but before I do I thought it would be good to inject some perspective into the e-book market as a whole.  To that end I’m going to dedicate the entire first post to that topic so you can see the ways in which the Kindle solves many long-standing problems with e-books.  Afterward I will talk about life with the Kindle so you can get a feel for how it really works in practice.

Many people don’t realize it yet, but the publishing industry is in the midst of its first really massive upheaval in almost a century, since Penguin’s paperback books remade the industry.  This time around the ramifications are almost as broad as those resulting from the invention of the printing press itself.  That may seem overly dramatic, but bear with me: In my opinion the Kindle is probably the most pivotal piece of computing equipment we’ve seen since the personal computer, and it and devices like it will probably prove to have vastly greater long-term impact because they are going to completely transform publishing in a very, very short period of time.  I’ll try to explain that as I go on.

We already know that a lot of informational material that used to be printed is now available primarily, and often exclusively, on the web. Catalogs, brochures, and manuals have all made that migration over the last decade, mostly a result of reducing cost-of-product.  As one of the team of people who started the first public ISP back in 1989, I was in on the ground floor when the web took off a few years later.  By 1997 there were URLs appearing on the sides of buses and just ten years later it’s hard to imagine how we got along without the web.  (One of my co-workers at the time wrote this amusing ditty about that.) Ten years may seem like a long time in our lives but it’s a drop in the bucket relative to the centuries of development that printing has undergone.  It has been fast by any historical measure.

Likewise the rise of the web as a news service has been impossible to miss.  The average age of a newspaper reader is 55 now, and rising.  Most youngsters don’t read them at all, favoring online sources.  Eric Alterman’s excellent article Out Of Print” in the most recent issue of the New Yorker details this migration and investigates its impact on various aspects of the news industry, with a special focus of how it affects the democratic process.  It’s worth a read, if only because most people don’t realize just how fast the newspaper industry is imploding.  TV hurt it decades ago, but the web put a knife in the gut of the whole business model.

In the midst of this books have so far withstood the electronic onslaught.  There was a flurry of interest in the early years of this millenium, and a variety of electronic publishing attempts were made, but despite significant investments in publishing the demand remained very poor.  Most now believe that this is because consumers don’t want books as electronic documents, even though this flies in the face of the mass migration towards electronic publishing everywhere else.

I think the problem is not so much that consumers wouldn’t buy e-books as the devices that have heretofore been used to read electronic documents are very poorly suited to reading anything at length.  So, if I am going to convince you that the Kindle is a pivotal product amidst a wasteland of former attempts, it makes some sense to investigate why everything before it was an utter failure.
My whole career has been working with computers.  I’ve been using them upwards of 10 hours per day, every day, since the mid-1980s.  Even so I have never, not once, read an entire novel on a desktop or laptop computer screen.  I have instead bought thousands of paper books.  I have piles of them in my bedroom, bookshelves full of them through the house, boxes of them stacked up in the basement, but not even one e-book on any of my PCs.  The aforementioned New Yorker article is about as long as I care to ever read while sitting in front of my computer and many other people I know aren’t even that tolerant.  I read novels to relax, and I just can’t relax while sitting in front of that screen, tapping the keyboard or mouse to scroll or flip pages.

A laptop would seem to be a more interesting reader, as you can at least lounge in a comfortable chair, but it’s much too large to do anything other than hold it in my lap and attempting to use it on the bus is an exercise in futility (if not an invitation to a mugging).  As if those weren’t enough problems, my laptops rarely run more than three hours on a charge.  I like laptops but they are lousy e-book readers.

There have been a whole series of dedicated e-book devices through the last ten years, one of the most famous being the RCA Rocketbook.  Some of them were pretty good functionally, but were seriously hampered by a near-total lack of content on top of being extremely expensive and utterly single-purpose.  The technology might have been good enough but the publishing industry was not ready.  Any chance of success was demolished as soon as would-be buyers found out about the paucity of available titles, and no publisher was going to put much effort into e-books until there was an actual audience.  Your classic chicken-and-egg.

So far the only even moderately successful e-book readers have all been PDAs or smartphones.  If you have read my previous postings on the iPod Touch you might remember that I bought my first PDA, a Palm 5000, that year.  In 1998 I discovered that the Palm 5000 was actually a pretty decent e-book reader in two really important ways: It was very portable and you could use it continuously for upwards of twenty hours on a single set of batteries.  I could load three or four full-length books into one and always have something to read on the bus, in the grocery store, or on the plane.

Back in 1998 e-books were the rare commodity indeed.  There were efforts like Project Gutenberg, and really small commercial vendors like Peanut Press (later purchased by Palm), and that was about it.  The flurry of publishing feelers into e-books around 2000 led to a huge expansion of book availability and the advent of Mobipocket, the most broadly recognized e-book format today.

While the e-book industry has grown many-fold since 1997, nobody would call it a real success.  Few current mainstream titles were available and the e-book inventory of many vendors was a mere 20,000 titles midway through 2007—more than a typical brick-and-mortar bookstore, but nowhere near the number of books in print.  E-book sales broke $30M last year, not even peanuts to the publishing industry.

Even as e-books started to become available the devices on which to read them got worse.  The migration from monochrome LCD displays of the early PDAs and e-book readers to color made them almost impossible to read in sunlight.  Even if you’re not in direct sunlight backlit displays can cause eyestrain when used for long periods of time, especially with the small print used on the devices.  Backlit color LCDs are great for reading in bed, but pretty much suck everywhere else.

Even worse, color LCD displays eat a lot more power than monochrome.  PDA operating times dropped from around 20 hours to perhaps six.  That’s plenty for an evening of reading, but is marginal for a flight across the U.S. and is completely inadequate for a week of reading on the beach.  If you’re a heavy reader you have no choice but to recharge very frequently, and I found myself staring at a dark screen instead of my book all too often if I forgot my nightly recharge or if my connecting flight was delayed.  The portability was still very nice, but the overall experience was rather poor.

Things got even worse as the PDA market turned away from standalone devices towards integration with cellphones.  PDA screens, already very small for text to begin with, become downright microscopic.  And battery life got even worse.

With all of that I don’t think there is any mystery as to why e-books have, to date, not been very successful.  The devices varied from bad to terrible in many dimensions, on top of being quite expensive, and even if you could cope with those issues the catalog of available books was tiny.  As if those problems were not enough to kill sales, new book titles in electronic format were often priced as if they were undiscounted hardcovers.  Who wants to spend more than $20 for an e-book?

It is into this environment that Amazon made their entrance, and tomorrow I’ll explain the confluence of technologies that make their device an industry-changing product in A Confluence of Technologies.


Categories: Entertainment

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