“CAN SOMETHING AS EVOLVED as the book be improved?” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asks himself rhetorically on the online superstore’s homepage, clearly hoping to position his newest product squarely before the public as it shops for holiday gifts.
If the answer turns out to be “No,” Bezos may regret having posed the question. And the response to Amazon’s intriguing offer of a new e-reader is decidedly mixed.
But pose the question Bezos did last Monday as Amazon unveiled the Kindle, a $400 e-reader that enables consumers to purchase and wirelessly download best-sellers and nearly 100,000 other books for $10 or less, newspaper subscriptions for $10-$14 per month and blogs for $1 to $2. Perhaps as quixotic is Amazon’s offer to authors who wish to self-publish their work.
Unlike Apple Inc.’s iPhone launch, it was possible to miss this news.
The skinny
In brief, purchasers can download a book in less than a minute to the 10-ounce, rectangular device that’s slightly smaller than a typical hardcover book. The downloads are courtesy of an undisclosed deal between Amazon and Sprint Nextel Corp., using the latter’s CDMA2000 1x EV-DO network. The “screen” is based on “electronic ink” technology from E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., which apparently supplied the technology to Sony Corp.’s earlier “portable reading system,” now selling at $280.
The Kindle screen is high-resolution, black-and-white and not backlit. It has a limited browser that allows users to find and download content. The device itself is made by “a Chinese OEM,” Amazon said, without elaborating. The device is primarily aimed at travelers who tend to tote multiple books with them.
How to slice and dice this product and service in a meaningful way, this early?
Mixed reviews
As a device, the Kindle has received modest plaudits, though comments on Amazon’s Web site were voluminous and initial remarks tended to be ecstatic. Among those not flocking to add their comments on Amazon’s site, observers were inclined to be charitable, though many had mixed reactions.
“This ugly duckling has potential,” wrote ZDNet blogger Josh Taylor, in a headline that seemed to capture the device’s twin attributes that fueled much of the muted discussion that followed its launch.
Whereas teardown houses rushed to dissect the iPhone, anticipating that component-maker design wins would be scrutinized and, presumably, send stocks gyrating, Portelligent Inc., acknowledged it would have a leisurely look and iSuppli Corp. declined to pursue the effort.
“The most unique aspect is the device’s wireless connectivity,” said Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars Communications Ltd. “Otherwise, the device is the result of several unsuccessful compromises.”
The screen only allows the reader to see a paragraph or two at a time, which could demand changes in users’ long-held visual habits, according to the analyst.
“This device doesn’t really follow the rules for how we learned to read,” said Howe. “And, it’s expensive. If you read about a dozen books each year, like most adults, it’ll take one to two years for the price to make sense.”
Reading the market
In fact, the e-book category has not proven itself, Howe said. Other efforts by Sony, with a handheld reader (which ports content from your PC) and Mobipocket, which offers books for online, PC-based consumption, or for porting to PDA-like devices, have not caught fire with a mainstream audience, he said.
“Mass-produced books have been with us for hundreds of years,” the analyst said. “They’re cheap, they’re durable.”
“This is technology push, not user demand,” Howe said of the Kindle. “It’s an oddity and it won’t be here two years from now.”
It’s not clear from the real estate given over to the device’s keyboard whether Amazon intends to seed the market with mobile devices that might directly access the full array of Amazon’s online offerings, Howe said. And that confusion muddies the Kindle’s impact-what is the device’s primary purpose? he asked rhetorically.
Pricing challenge
Howe predicted that wireless content such as books and magazines are more likely to be available as a secondary application on a more diverse device.
“A successful e-reader won’t be a dedicated device until it becomes much cheaper,” the analyst said. “At $50, this would have generated a lot of attention. But books are cheap.”
Some observers suggested that perhaps the Kindle represented the future vision of Sprint Nextel’s WiMAX plans, where innumerable consumer-electronics devices would spend brief periods tapping the soon-to-launch, high-speed network for uploading or downloading, between uses. But Kindle could easily represent the case of WiMAX’s skeptics, who suggest that such WiMAX offerings will have to compete with Sprint Nextel’s EV-DO network-and that’s the network Kindle runs on now.
