niks blog

A Broken Kindle

I’m not a big fan of illegitimate cartels such as the MPAA and the RIAA. In fact, I despise anyone or anything that supports their actions usurping users’ rights. Lest I forget, I don’t want to leave out the next wave of idiots that are coming out of their shells: Publishers.

E-books are coming

Earlier, I posted about E-book readers being screwed. I have my own opinions on e-book readers and I strongly believe that they will co-exist with paper-based media. However, I think the adoption of e-book readers will not skyrocket like the personal digital media player (i.e., iPod). E-books will gain a strong foothold with voracious readers and commuters. I, myself, would enjoy the prospect of having my daily newspaper delivered to my e-book reader daily.

Like it or not, most people will begin carrying around another gadget to supplement their already growing array of electronic gadgets.

Amazon had a vision, now they killed it

Amazon came out with a great pricing scheme for e-books, $9.99. Most of the e-books that Amazon sold for its Kindle were flat-rate and easy to remember. Publishers such as Macmillan, have basically thwarted Amazon’s noble effort to maintain a strict one-tier price model.

Why? Macmillan wants to make more money and reduce ‘harmful’ effects on sales of overpriced hardcover editions.

Let’s sell for…

Apple and Macmillan have literally teamed up to deliver e-books at a tiered pricing model. In other words, most of the newer e-books will cost $14.99 and may see reduction in price as time goes on. The $14.99 price point allows publishers to sell these new versions at the same time as the hardcovers, but at a price point closer to the MSRP of the hardcover editions.

Let’s screw the customer AND the author

Paul Carr, a noted TechCrunch writer, is an established author and he writes a fairly constructive view of what this new pricing model by Macmillan really means for the author.

For the first time in the UK since 1997, and ever in the US, publishers are able to set – and enforce- their own prices on ebooks. And they will; not to make a fair return on ebooks but rather to cripple their sales in order to protect early hardback book sales. They’ve admitted as much themselves, saying that prices will start high on hardback release, before dropping steadily over time.

What is happening is that publishers like Macmillan are screwing e-books by making the price point artificially high and inadvertently promoting piracy. E-book piracy is not as big as music piracy, but I can assure you that if e-books do not have consumer-friendly pricing, more and more customers will engage in questionable tactics to get their e-books.

Imagine a “Napster” for e-books

Soon we’ll start seeing e-books without any DRM (digital rights management) popping up on popular torrent search engines. As e-book readers continue to increase in sales, we’ll start seeing hackers ‘jailbreak’ their e-book readers and improve functionality.

Ladies and gentlemen. What we are seeing is the birth of e-book piracy because publishers are on a crusade to crush consumers’ rights, all in the name of protecting their pathetic business models.

Long live e-book piracy.

A little over a year ago, the Amazon Kindle was stealing the tech headlines all over the world. Some experts proclaimed that the Kindle would revolutionize and resuscitate the industry. Who can argue with them? The Kindle was, in my view, a remarkable device that combined an e-book store and hardware seamlessly. One could argue that the Amazon Kindle is to e-books as the Apple iPod/iPhone is to music.

Fundamentally speaking, there are three flaws with the entire e-book landscape:

• available content does not replace print media
• e-ink technology is pretty crappy
• all e-book readers are primitive (currently)

Print vs. electronic format

The best use of the Kindle and its primary competitors is the fact that it can easily handle subscriptions to a multitude of respectable media powerhouses such as Time, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, etc. The best part is that electronic format of these popular magazines and newspapers is that they are extremely competitively priced.

For instance, a one-year subscription to the Chicago Tribune in print form will cost $4.75 per week, coming to a total of $247 per year. A one-year subscription to the electronic format of the Chicago Tribune for the Kindle will cost $9.99 per month, coming to a total of $119.88 per year. That’s a total savings of over $125 per year.

This is where print versions win

For that extra $125, you receive crossword puzzles, sudokus, advertisements/coupons, and dirty fingers. Let’s face it, none of those things merit the extra $125. But here’s where print media wins. The print version of the Chicago Tribune is far more well organized with complete stories and details.

The Kindle version seems like a dump of all the articles from the Chicago Tribune. Reading one review from a customer on Amazon, here’s what he had to say:

The Kindle version of the Tribune is simply a ‘dump’ of the Tribune articles…Occasionally items are clearly missing (e.g. ‘Here are 5 items …’ and then the 5 items are missing)

E-ink sucks

We’re in the modern age of portable computing and yet, the majority of all e-book readers use crappy e-ink technology. The biggest downfall of e-ink technology is its dreadfully slow refresh rate. Imagine ‘turing’ a page on your Kindle and having to wait a couple of seconds until the page appears. Sure, it’s only two seconds, but those two seconds will feel like eternity.

The best advantage that e-ink has is its ability to render text that virtually mimics text on a page. So how come not a single e-book reader has a built-in backlight so that I can continue reading even in low-level light conditions? And don’t give me the argument of decreased battery life. All of these products use mundane battery technology that is obsolete, in order to save manufacturing costs.

E-books are babies

So now I argue that E-books are like ‘babies’ and extremely primitive. Not a single e-book reader is market innovative in my mind. An innovate e-book reader would have:

• WiFi & 3G connectivity for downloading content
• Backlighting so that I can read my e-books in low-level lighting
• Ability to write my notes on the actual screen
• Ability to view high-resolution images
• Color screen (so I can view actual magazine-like images
• Battery life that lasts over two weeks without a charge with constant use of backlight and WiFi

Sure, I know that what I want is not really technically feasible or cost-friendly. However, any successful e-book reader would do more impact if it were priced at $100 – $200 with most of the features I mentioned. I don’t mind paying for content, but I do mind that if I spend upward of $200, I can’t do what I want.

In case you haven’t figured it out, tablet PC’s will make e-book readers obsolete. My guess is that tablet computers will replace e-book readers as the preferred way to consume books, magazines, and other electronic media.