Personally I remain sceptical about whether something like this can be a "killer app".
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The End of Books..... again?
Apparently Amazon will tomorrow unveil what they believe is the iPod for book reading. The Kindle. It's yet another attempt to, if you pardon the pun, rekindle the idea of the eBook reader which has been around for some time really.
Personally I remain sceptical about whether something like this can be a "killer app".
Personally I remain sceptical about whether something like this can be a "killer app".
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11 comments:
Agree Dizzy. It's a crap idea and a crap name, and like mobile phones and other new-fangled technology, will never catch on. A book is sensual it speaks to you more than its words can. An electronic tablet is just a gimmick to make newsreaders look 21st century, man.
It won't be. The point they all keep missing is that ipods are cool, e-readers are not and probably never will be with people of the right age to drive volume.
For reading I've always found that a cellulose based device with paged memory has always been the right option and it never needs batteries.
I don't think I'll ever be leafing through shelves of Kindles at the local second hand electronic device e-book shop looking for an interesting title. I'd probably have to stick batteries into each one just to read the title on the spine as it were.
No-one wants e-books! Why can't they get it through their thick heads? They finally worked out we don't want internet on our tv, we want tv on our internet though so there is hope.
maybe books will change to fit the new medium.
I'm a book addict, always have been, but, but, but -
1. my very aged Mum adores reading but is losing her sight; the only books available in large print are crap. These new devices can enlarge the typeface, and lo! she could read something decent again.
2. I am getting to the age where arthritis is afflicting my hands, and big books, thick books, serious tomes etc are literally a paint to hold, so if this new equipment is light, people like me could carry on reading without discomfort.
Nothing will replace the sensation of reading from a book made of paper, or scanning the shelves of one's personal library however large or small, but whatever will help me to carry on reading is great by me.
iPods are just an addition to an already well established market, Sony pretty much single-handledly invented that market and until Apple got into it were the brand of choice (probably the iPods biggest win was changing the word associated with personal stereos - walkman, into a new one related to their brand... even Dyson hasn't managed to do this, we still hoover).
This is a device that just doesn't have a market, and there is no thirst for the market that is easily demonstrable... two screens side by side and open and close it to change pages though and it might just catch on...
Errrmm if you mean portable music market then fair enough. But on the matter of mp3, Sony came to the party very later, as did Apple. Sony were busy playing with the mindisc when the first mp3 players from Diamond came out.
What a stupid idea. Reading a book is a tactile experience that a computer will never replace.
The new Sony Reader got a nice review from Ars last week.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/sony-reader-review.ars
Frankly, I would welcome this as a way of reading long boring reports at work without resorting to printing off a rainforest's worth of hard-copy: I just can't read it off the screen for any length of time.
So, if they can make it light, handheld and easy to read then it may well begin to replace the pokey little screens of common PDAs and suchlike.
Not having tried it, I am forced to say "if" and hope.
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