Hey, Kindle 2 owners, remember when Amazon made the device official and you thought: “Well, it took them a year and a half to replace the old one, so I can buy this one without fears of immediate obsolescence.” And then remember how three months later they announced the Kindle DX and you thought: “Oh.” Well, if you’re now fearing a color Kindle will come sauntering along in a few months to make everyone jealous, fear not, as Jeff Bezos is saying the tech is still “multiple years” away, adding “I’ve seen the color displays in the laboratory and I can assure you they’re not ready for prime time.” From the few prototypes we’ve seen we’d tend to agree. So, anyone still on the fence about a Kindle, go ahead and buy now with confidence, as your devices won’t be made to look quaint any time soon — at least until that pizza box-sized reader Amazon’s been working on in secret is announced in July. Did we mention it actually cooks pizza?
The much-touted and extremely controversial story of the text-to-speech function of Amazon’s Kindle 2 could fill a very large e-book. The tale continues to get longer still, as at least one major publisher — Random House — has thrown the dreaded “kill switch” on about 40 of its titles, including authors such as Toni Morrison, and, ironically, Stephen King (who you will remember was part of the Kindle 2’s launch). Random House disabled the function without much fanfare, or an official announcement, but you can be sure this isn’t the final chapter.
If you don’t already follow the AmazonMP3 Twitter feed or belong to its related Facebook fan page, you might want to consider joining up. In addition to posting daily deals on select MP3 albums, Amazon recently used the two social networking feeds to announce that, through May, it’s offering 50 different MP3 albums for a mere $5 each.
Amazon has decided to allow all bloggers to publish their blogs to the Kindle and charge users for reading their content on the popular e-book reader.
Kindle delivers not just books and newspapers but also blogs. So far, Amazon has offered a limited selection of blogs on the device. But now it is democratizing the platform.
Any blogger can sign up for the company’s ‘Kindle Publishing for Blogs‘ beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.
Amazon hasn’t made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.
Unless Amazon can drop the price of blogs subscription to a few cents, it is not clear why users would pay to read individual blogs on the Kindle that they can otherwise access for free through their computers or smartphones. Would you pay to read a blog on the Kindle? Tell us in the comments.
E-readers aren’t for everyone, apparently. Clever hands fashioned this Kindle out of wood — cutely called the Amazon Kindling — using a laser cutter. You might only be able to read the same page of The Count of Monte Cristo so many times, but at least the battery will never punk out on you! One more shot of this wooden beauty after the break. Hit the read link for the whole set.
Real gadget heads know the pitfalls of being an early adopter: The products can be expensive, sometimes buggy and easily rendered obsolete as a result of an upgrade. Now some Amazon Kindle 2 buyers are finding this out for themselves as they try to return their newly acquired Kindle 2 in favor of the larger sized Kindle DX.
“If I was aware that there would be an upgraded product announced less than two months and after I received my Kindle–and that would be better for my needs — I would have postponed the purchase of the product,” says Rachel Swartz, who bought her Kindle 2 e-book reader two weeks after it was released in February. Swartz is now battling with Amazon to exchange her Kindle 2 for the Kindle DX.
Amazon introduced the broadsheet Kindle DX reader last week. The new product comes less than three months after the company launched Kindle 2, an improved version of the original Kindle reader. The Kindle DX has a screen that measures 9.7 inches diagonally — two-and-a-half times the size of the current-gen Kindle 2 — and is targeted at readers who want to use the device to access magazines, newspapers and textbooks.
But, as Swartz found out, Amazon does not offer an upgrade path for Kindle 2 users who now covet the latest release. “They have been basically stonewalling all my attempts for the last few days to find a way to exchange the Kindle 2,” she says. “This is not right. It’s not the way early adopters should be punished.”
There is one loophole in the system. Kindle 2 buyers can use the company’s standard electronics returns policy to send their devices back. Amazon allows for a 30-day return on electronics purchases, says a Amazon spokesman in an emailed statement.
Ryan Meeks, who bought his Kindle 2 within the last 30 days, is one of those lucky users who can get an exchange. Meeks has sent his Kindle 2 back — no questions asked — and has instead placed a pre-order for the Kindle DX.
“I have glasses and a bigger screen was a major factor for me,” says Meeks. “I also liked the fact that the Kindle DX changes from landscape to portrait mode when the device is rotated.”
Meeks doesn’t mind paying the additional dollars for the Kindle DX, which costs $480 compared to the $360 for the Kindle 2. And he’s understanding of Amazon’s reluctance to offer an upgrade path for Kindle 2 users. “Ultimately they are two different products though many people don’t really understand the difference,” he says. “Beyond the bigger screen, Amazon hasn’t done a good job of explaining how the two products are different.”
Still, says Meeks, the company should try to offer a way out for unhappy Kindle 2 users. “If I were Amazon, I would do well to make sure early adopters are happy,” he says. “The early buyers are the influential users.”
Meeks suggests Amazon take a leaf out of Apple MobileMe’s playbook. “I was an early user of MobileMe and it had a lot of problems,” he says. “But ultimately Apple gave us a lot of extras and I am glad I use MobileMe now. That may be something there for Amazon to learn from.”
Amazon isn’t shipping the Kindle DX yet. The product is expected to be available this summer.
People are always eager to point out cool technologies that America ignores, but what about the ones that we—and only we—use? Enough with the grousing: Here’s what we’ve got that they don’t.
TiVo For a long while, TiVo was the undisputed king of TV recording. Other DVRs have come a long way in the last ten years, but they’re all late to the party, and still playing catchup: The TiVo name is now permanently tattooed into the public’s consciousness, synonymous with recording shows and backed up by still-impressive hardware.
But the fact that TiVo has attained a near-Kleenex level of brand recognition in the US doesn’t mean a thing overseas. As of writing, the service is only available in a few other places—Canada, the UK, Mexico, Taiwan and Australia—where it has been met with limited enthusiasm. While the US, with its huge, old, fragmented cable industry, offers a fantastic opportunity for a meta-service like TiVo, smaller countries with one or two dominant pay-TV providers—which have their own increasingly formidable DVR alternatives—are tougher nuts to crack.
The Kindle This choice might seem odd—or at least inconsequential—on account of the steady stream of new e-reader hardware available all over the world, but Kindle exclusivity is actually a technological feather in America’s cap. Why? Because the source of the Kindle’s importance isn’t its hardware, but its connectivity and the service it’s tied to.
Anyone can slap a case around a panel of E-Ink and add an off-the-shelf Linux OS—and plenty of companies have. But being linked wirelessly to a massive library of legal downloads, bestselling books, magazines and newspapers, is what will make a reader great. For now, the only mainstream reader that can claim such a feature is the Kindle, and the only country that can claim the Kindle is the US. Not that it can’t go global—similar services for music and TV, like the iTunes store, have found ways to deal with tricky licensing and gone global—it’s just that it probably won’t for a while.
Push-to-Talk Without a doubt, this is the technology that feels the most American on this list. Intended primarily for the workplace, push-to-talk technology has tragically seeped into the mainstream, subjecting millions of innocent mall shoppers to that incessant, inane chirping, and the shouting at the handset that accompanies it. Who hasn’t been inadvertently pulled into the middle of a heated, long-distance argument about novelty Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches flavors while waiting in line at Walmart? Well, pretty much anyone who doesn’t live in America—and not just because they don’t have Jimmy Dean, or Walmart.
As it turns out, PTT’s Amerophilia can be explained by little more than poor marketing. According to ABI Research:
In other world regions MNOs have failed to market PTT successfully to business users or have opted to market to consumers, and it just hasn’t taken off.
Nextel, which was inherently crippled by a proprietary network technology that wasn’t built out in any other country but the US, found success with PTT by pitching handsets to businesses as turbocharged Walkie-Talkies, not by marketing them directly to consumers, most of whom would have trouble imagining a more efficient way to make themselves look like brash assholes.
Video On Demand iTunes has gone worldwide and services like BBC’s iPlayer have brought the Hulu model overseas, but America still has the best VOD situation in the world, bar none. The problem is simple: Even countries with a healthy entertainment industry import a tremendous amount of American TV, often well after it was originally broadcast. This regional disparity seems kinda stupid in the age of the internet and VOD, but it’s just as severe as it ever was.
European or Asian viewers have to wait for painful weeks or months for a domestic channel to license, schedule and dub international American hits like Lost or Mad Men, and hope, assuming their stations have a VOD service, that the show eventually finds its way online. As an ad-supported service and a product owned by the networks who profit from the above arrangement, Hulu’s reluctance to stream content to countries is understandable, but the despair is deeper than that: You can’t even pay for TV if you want to. People without American billing addresses are barred from VOD services like Amazon’s Unbox, and will find their iTunes video selections sorely lacking.
Satellite Radio Since is smells distinctly like a waning technology, satellite radio might not do much to stir your techno-patriotism, but goddernit, it’s ours. The US has far more satellite radio subscribers than the rest of the world combined, all through the remains of Sirius and XM, now merged under the lazy moniker of “Sirius XM”. Why? We have lots (and lots) of cars.
Satellite radio actually has roots as a proudly international service—after all, it is broadcast from frickin’ space—having been developed in part by a humanitarian-initiative company called 1Worldspace, which was established to broadcast news and safety information to parts of the globe without reliable terrestrial radio infrastructure. They still exist today, but they broadcast to fewer than 200,000 subscribers, mostly in India and parts of Africa. Satrad’s American success can be solely credited to our auto manufacturers, who eagerly installed satellite units in new cars for years, healthily boosting subscription numbers (but not necessarily car sales). With no comparably pervasive car culture to take advantage of anywhere else in the world, satellite radio is a tough sell.
We know that the only reason you’re holding out on buying a Kindle 2 is your aversion to that sterile plastic shell. Well, you’re in luck, aesthete… ‘cos the folks at Colorware will happily sell you a model that lives out loud for a song (and $599, baseline). Or you can send in your own e-reader, in which case a cool $199 will get you the paint job you deserve. It will be 2-3 weeks before you get your device back in your hot hands, but when you do you’ll be ready to read The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in pop art style. Hit that read link to get started.
E Ink, the company whose displays power almost all the major e-book readers, has released a new line of its broadsheet prototype kits aimed at developers. The AM-300 kit offers a 9.7-inch display and comes on the heels of the launch of Amazon’s larger sized Kindle e-book reader Kindle DX Wednesday .
The latest kit allows companies to experiment around E Ink’s display and build their own prototype readers.”With the success of e-books, there is lot of interest in e-newspapers,” says Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing for E Ink. “We have had every major publisher talk to us about our displays and many large equipment manufacturers are getting into the space.”
E Ink’s experiments with similar kits has paid off in the past. Last year it launched the AM300 series kit targeted at product designers and hobbyists who want hands-on access to its e-books reader sized display technology. The kits offered buyers a production sample of a glass-based display, a display controller and all the hardware and software necessary to produce a fully functional e-reader. Though most of the kits priced at $3000 each were bought by companies looking to create Kindle competitors, a few enthusiasts hacked it to run a browser and some Linux applications.
E Ink’s new Broadsheet AM 300 kit has a resolution of 150 pixels per inch and can display multiple shades of gray giving readers the clarity of newsprint, says the company. The kit includes a display module, a Linux x86 operating environment, E Ink API software for Broadsheet, various sample images, open source software drivers and applications including support for MMC cards, Bluetooth and USB. The kits will start shipping by the end of the month.
Amazon will have to do much more than enlarge its Kindle to increase the e-reader’s appeal to college students.
Announced Wednesday, the Kindle DX features a 9.7-inch screen geared toward displaying textbooks for college students. However, many students polled by Wired.com on Twitter listed various reasons for why the DX would fail to replace their mountains of textbooks. Their complaints ranged from the reader’s $500 price tag to the DX being inconvenient for study habits.
“I’d need five Kindles just to hold a single thought while writing essays,” said Marius Johannessen, who is studying for his master’s in information systems at University of Agder. “Books work just fine.”
Amazon is investing high hopes in its Kindle e-book reader, with dreams of spearheading a paperless revolution. It’s unclear just how close Amazon is to actualizing this dream, as the company has declined to release official sales numbers of the reader, which debuted late 2007. However, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said in February that the Kindle makes up 10 percent of the e-book market, and Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated 500,000 Kindles were sold over 2008. So that would suggest 5 million e-readers were sold over 2008 — still a small market relative to the tech industry.
With the DX, Amazon is aiming to expand its e-book presence by targeting two major print industries — newspapers and textbooks. The textbook industry, worth $9.8 billion, is going to be tough to crack, because there are so many ways thrifty students obtain their books: University stores often offer used books, book-trading programs and sometimes even textbook rentals. Other than specification details and the product’s price, Amazon did not disclose sales strategies for e-textbooks.
Tech strategist Michael Gartenberg said a viable e-textbook business model would be the DX’s main challenge in appealing to students.
“You can’t introduce technology like this, which has got a lot of breakthrough things associated with it, and expect it to be business as usual,” Gartenberg said. “The reason the iPod worked was not only did it introduce new technology, but it introduced a new business model for the technology as well.”
Indiana University business student Chandler Berty told Wired.com he would consider a Kindle DX if e-books cost less than used physical textbooks. He added, however, that college students already carry laptops, which are superior to the Kindle, rendering the reader unnecessary.
Students pointed out plenty of other issues about the DX to Wired.com. For instance, students often loan textbooks to one another, and currently that’s not practical with a Kindle, as you’d have to loan your entire reader and library. Also, the beauty of paper textbooks is the ability to highlight sentences, underline keywords and keep all of them open at once. While the Kindle does have highlight and notes tools, the reader is sluggish with performance, and the keyboard is unnatural and clunky to type on.
However, it’s too soon to say how Amazon’s DX will fare on campuses, as the students polled by Wired.com had mixed opinions. Overall, 19 students replied to our query via Twitter, five of whom said they would definitely purchase a DX, seven who said no and seven who said maybe.
“Law students are waiting for Kindle books!” said Twitter user “SoCaliana.” “We have so many books to carry around. I couldn’t find my texts on CD or anything!”
We can expect Amazon to cook up some interesting sales models after it completes DX pilot programs with Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia and Pace university. Meanwhile, let’s get the brainstorming started. What would you suggest for e-textbook sales strategies, readers? Here’s an idea: Selling e-textbooks by individual chapters as opposed to complete books, since most classes don’t read textbooks in entirety anyway. That would certainly cut costs.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Amazon has decided to allow all bloggers to publish their blogs to the Kindle and charge users for reading their content on the popular e-book reader.
People are always eager to 
TiVo
The Kindle
Push-to-Talk
