Amazon has officially thrown it’s hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.
Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?
Some are not so sure.
In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design “a thing of unsurpassed ugliness.” and its “failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom.”
David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the “F word” as Rothman calls it but he adds “even if the Kindle fails there is still hope for e-books.”
Duncan Riley at TechGadget says “the Kindle will have a lot of resources and content behind it so if anyone can make this work you’d think Amazon could. If it fails Ebook readers can go straight to the deadpool.” The deadpool being TechCrunch’s almost permanent graveyard for technology companies.
“With all this great e-book reader 2.0 functionality Amazon shoots itself in the foot by not supporting the open e-book standard that is used by most publishers. Using a proprietary format is inherently restrictive and limiting… It has been over 15 years since the first e-book readers hit the market with little to show. Yes, there has been lots of press and hype but the impact on reading habits has been minimal at best. Now we have the big boys entering the fray. With Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle the stakes have been raised” — was my take in a previous Book Patrol post back in early September when word of the Kindle first leaked.
Neither Sony or Amazon do anything lightly. There will be no white flags. These early versions are not the finished product. Someone is going get this right though I don’t see it causing any mass exodus from the physical book anytime soon.