(2007-11-16) Amazon Kindle Ebook Reader

Amazon will announce its Kindle EBook reader on Monday.

Steven Levy gives the blurbage: Levy On Kindle.

Nov19: announcement http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1079387&highlight= |made

• no EV-DO charge, they eat that. (Probably the basis for charging for blog reading.)

• it's not clear to me whether you can browse the whole web, or just Wikipedia

• it's just the Ny Times Best Seller-s and New Release-s that are guaranteed $9.99.

  • but I also found that price (or lower) for Getting Things Done, Crossing The Chasm, Crypto Nomicon, Halting State (Charlie Stross), Black Swan, Ghost Map, Spook Country, Jennifer Government, Zenith Angle.

  • titles I found no match for: Eastern Standard Tribe, Brave New War, Rainbows End, any Jane Jacobs

  • I found an EBook priced over $1000! That's kinda cool.

  • Seth Godin wanted to have his books available for free on the device. They said no.

  • (strangely, if I try to query categories like "Fiction" and then sort by price, I get lots of non-fiction titles)

Still DRM-locked stuff.

• Mark Pilgrim attacks this situation. Lots of comments.

Peter Kafka thinks this isn't an IPod-level win because you can't pull in all the books you already own, equivalent to ripping.

• I'm not sure that's comparable, because not many people re-read (fiction) books they've already read (I do it sometimes for some favorites).

• I wonder whether Amazon would try something like "pull the book off your shelf, tell us the 3rd word on the 4th line of page5, and we'll give you the Kindle book for free". (Of course, that wouldn't work if they've provided the scanned copy of the pages online already!)

Anil Dash makes some interesting points, and notes that his IPod Touch is a pretty good EBook reader. (He also comments about need for Kindle Fat Client app for other platforms. I Commented on positioning vs OLPC for Educating Kids.)

Self Publishing opportunity is there, though it seems like you can't put your own WebLog into the store!

I just have a hard time seeing very many people spend $400 for a single-purpose device. I think the Mobile/MID/IPhone is the EBook reader (and everything else) of the future.