Amazon’s Kindle
Last week Amazon launched its long anticipated e-reader: the Kindle and unless you live in a cave it was kind of hard to miss.
Here at iRex, we would like to congratulate the Amazon Kindle team with the launch of their reader. Seeing such a big name as Amazon making a move into the electronic reading business is very re-assuring for a company like iRex Technologies, who stood at the cradle of this display technology. It is certainly a sign that the electronic paper technology is here to stay.
With the launch, Amazon created a significant hype and wave of interest in the media, and at this stage the first priority and concern for e-reader manufacturers is to develop the market rather than to compete for market share and in that perspective the entry of another big name like Amazon is certainly stimulating the market growth and will benefit all the current active players on the market.
More important, maybe, is that the launch of the Kindle is also a good thing for the consumers, who see their options grow with the introduction of another e-reader. And the Kindle certainly offers some nice new features like the EVDO connectivity that gives you a convenient way to connect directly to the Amazon store. Which provides a wide variety and large volume of content ranging from e-books and newspapers to magazines.
All this content is available in a special Kindle format, based on the Mobipocket format, but unfortunately is not compatible with other devices that support Mobipocket. In addition Amazon also offers access to over 300 blogs and the possibility to send your own documents to the Kindle, but both at a fee. To subscribe to the blog you’ll pay $1.99 and to have your documents converted and send to the Kindle will cost 10 cents.
Personally, I am bit puzzled by this and the choice of format and I wonder if the world really needs another. The Amazon owned Mobipocket format is already widely available and supported across many platforms including other e-readers like the Cybook and the iLiad. By supporting only a single format unique to Kindle, they have created another closed system.
They certainly didn’t needed to ask for a fee for subscribing to a blog feed or converting your own documents with the Mobipocket format. Over 300k RSS feeds from major blogs and other news sources are available from Mobipocket for free and with the Mobipocket Creator, you can easily convert your own documents into a Mobipocket document.
Correction: It does not need to cost money to convert documents for the Kindle. This can be done by yourself and you can place them on the Kindle using the USB cable. However if want to have documents converted and send to a Kindle, it will still costs 10 cents.
All things considered, the Kindle is a very attractive e-reader, although it is open for discussion if this includes the appearances of the device, but the features and the amount of available content and the ease of acquiring this content makes this reader certainly an attractive option.
Please do note that although I try to provide objective and accurate information, I am still a human being who is entitled to his own opinion and, as such, the above is my own opinion that I am sharing with you: please feel free to share yours as well because that’s what i-to-i is all about :-).
8 Comments so far
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptHere at iRex, we would like to congratulate the Amazon Kindle team with the launch of their reader. Seeing such a big name as Amazon making a move into the electronic reading business is very re-assuring for a company like iRex … […]
Well, someone can always provide a small patch utility so the iLiad software can read Kindle ebooks, huh?
It does not cost $0.10 to place your own documents on the kindle. That fee is only to use Amazon’s conversion tools and to send the document over the wireless network. If you download the mobipocket conversion tools and convert the files yourself on your desktop, you can send them over using the USB cable for free. Also, text documents can be sent with no conversion required via the USB cable.
[…] a move into the electronic reading business is very re-assuring for a company like iRex … i-to-i.irexnet.com/2007/11/30/amazons-kindle/ i to i blog […]
As Ted appears to confirm, I figured Amazon only charges for access to the Kindle over the wireless network. The device comes with a CDMA modem built in and the owner doesn’t pay any monthly fee to use it. Personally, I’d rather have the wireless ethernet that I have on my iLiad.
Thanks for the info Ted. I updated the article accordingly.
What I have found that converting normal or easy text, word doc or pdf file to kindle is quite easy but if the pdf file consists of lot of images and tables the conversion process does not work properly and the whole layout of the ebook gets change.
Kindle is still in experimental stage in converting the complicated pdf file to kindle format, but very recently I came across one website which provide ebook conversion service along with kindle ebook conversion at very affordable rates, mostly for the PDF ebook which consists of tables and images which are quite tough to convert them to ebook format such as mobipocket, kindle or MS reader, but I have found that the above ebook conversion company converts these type of ebooks in more profession and efficient way at very reasonable rate.
Today, the Dutch television program ‘In de ban van het ding’ paid attention to the Kindle as well as the iLiad. I will soon post the video on YouTube (channel ‘ebookreaders’). Or just visit www.ebookreaders.nl, where the video will be available as well.