Hasta La Gadget!

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.

“Two devices = fail,” Berty said.

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.

See Also:

• Amazon’s Kindle 2 Pits Authors Versus the Blind
• iPhone Beats Kindle in E-Reader Popularity Contest
• Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives …
• Hands-On: Kindle DX Is a Pricey Pleasure — Despite Many Flaws …
• Dead Media Beat: No Amazon? No Kindle Library
• Kindle … Or Is It Just Kindling?

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Book reviews aren’t something we do a lot of here on Gadget Lab, but we have to call out the quite excellent “Hot Shoe Diaries” by Joe McNally, a bible for anyone thinking about using small strobes in their photography.

If books on photography technique usually leave you disappointed, you’re in for a treat. McNally’s book offers big fat doses of both anecdote (this guy has lived about five lives already) and solid instruction. There’s no wooly theoretical musing — you get hard advice and plenty of explanation mixed in with lots of example shots (and not just the good shots, either — you’ll find the ones that went wrong as useful teaching aids).

The book comes in four sections. The first covers the gear and what Joe does on his way to a shoot. Then we get a whole section on what is possible with just one light, then two, then lots of lights. You can’t get much more straightforward.

The only possible criticism is that McNally goes pretty heavy on the Nikon side of things, especially Nikon’s CLS (Creative Lighting System), its proprietary wireless control system. If you want to know the things about this kit that reven the engineers don’t know, you’ll find it here. That said, a strobe is a strobe, and all the principles apply, even if you can’t have the camera take care of everything for you.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. The publisher, Peachpit Press, has made a generous chunk of the book available in pdf form for your sampling pleasure. If you are even slightly interested in flash photography, buy this book. It really is that good. $40 or less.

Product page [Peachpit]

Amazon has done the right thing at last, and made an honest application of iPhone e-book reader Stanza (our favorite iPhone reader here at the Lab). Amazon has bought Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. It now joins the Kindle (in the US at least) as one of two Amazon-owned readers for the iPhone. So what will change? From the Lexcycle blog:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. 

That’s good news for Stanza fans — the app is our favorite for a reason: While it has powerful options, when you just want to read it gets out of your way, just like a real book (only with poorer battery life). We’d fully expect to see some integration with the Kindle Store coming soon though, which is great — who doesn’t want more ways to buy books? No mention, of course, is made of  the sums passing between the two companies, but it’s interesting to see Amazon slowly moving to dominate e-readers across the whole market. Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon.com! [Lexcycle blog] See Also:

• Hands-On With Stanza Update: iPhone E-Books
• Interview: Stanza Brings Online Bookstore to the iPhone
• Stanza Updated With Cover Flow, Online Libraries

Our favorite e-book reader for the iPhone, Stanza, has been updated.
Already the best reader for the iPhone, the new version has had a major
overhaul and gets a whole new look and feel. That the version number
has only jumped to 1.8 is a surprise: The new Stanza feels like a v2.0
application.

There’s not really one standout change in Lexcycle’s update.
Instead, a lot of small tweaks add together to make Stanza even better.
We’ll take a quick tour of the screenshots and I’ll point out what is
new.

First, and probably the most requested new feature is a book-wide search. Previously you could only search within a chapter. That had its uses, we guess, but full book search means that you can store copies of heavy textbooks in your pocket and fully explore and annotate them.

Annotate? Yes. Stanza already had a robust bookmarking system, allowing you to not just bookmark multiple positions but also to name those bookmarks. You can still do that, but now you can also just touch the corner of the page to set a mark. That’s it, and it will appear in the bookmark list. It’s as easy as turning the corner down on a real book, only it doesn’t leave a crease when you straighten it out again.

Stanza now has a dictionary, although you’ll need a network connection to use it. And while the implementation is good, the dictionary pages themselves are a little clunky. You can either go straight in from the main Stanza page, or press and hold a word in a book. You’ll then see this screen:

Tap “Define” and you’ll see this:

Actually, you won’t. The word “agrees” came back as non-existent, so I truncated it to the singular, which worked.

If you take a look at these pictures again, you’ll see another subtle new tweak. The bar the bottom shows how far you are through the book. This makes a big difference. With paper books this is easy, as you can feel and see how many pages you have left. This new bar brings that to the e-book.

There is also more info on progress when you tap the screen once:

Next, screen controls. You can, as ever, set the font size from within the app, but now you can also control brightness — another oft-requested feature. Stanza can’t actually set the system screen brightness, which is a shame, but it offers a neat workaround — it changes the font color to make things appear darker. The shot below shows the difference.

The best part is the way you control this: put one finger on the screen and drag up or down to brighten or darken the screen. Top marks.

There are seemingly hundreds more tweaks, from the all-new home screen with redesigned icons to cover art icons which cartoonishly pop into view with a squeezy animation, to the online cover art lookup, allowing you to browse for covers.

Even the cover flow view has been redesigned. It now looks and works much like the one in iTunes, and although it’s still not quite as smooth, its actually useful now. That’s it at the top of the post.

If you have never used Stanza, go download it now. If you are a user already, I imagine you rushed to the App Store as soon as you read the headline of this post. Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now.

Product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Stanza Updated With Cover Flow, Online Libraries
• iPhone Beats Kindle in E-Reader Popularity Contest
• Interview: Stanza Brings Online Bookstore to the iPhone
• Free Software Turns the iPhone Into an E-Book Reader

Yes, I know that the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are changing the way many people read. And I chuckled a bit this morning when I heard the news that Google is spending $7 million on a print ad campaign to inform the world of its plan to digitize every book ever written. But when you get right down to it, I still prefer my page-turners to have actual, you know, pages.

Which is why I love the idea behind Icoeye’s clever Save Bookmark, which adds a little online humor to your offline reading. The best part? It’s free. Simply download and print the graphic, cut it out, and [physically] save your page.