Hasta La Gadget!

The Kindle 2 may only be a few months old, but the New York Times reports that Amazon is set to unveil a big-screen E ink reader, designed for newspapers, magazines and textbooks. Like, soon.

The idea of a larger, newspaper-oriented reader (including a Kindle) has been floated before, most publicly by Hearst, who proposed a 8.5×11-inch reader in February. This report revisits that plan, pegging Plastic Logic as the manufacturer of the device. But that stuff is decidedly future tense (“by the end of the year”), and digital access to Hearst titles is only exciting if you live in one of their papers’ markets.

Amazon’s device would have access to the same wide range of publications as the current Kindle, and likely a few more, but a larger screen could mean content would be presented in a different way. Hilariously, the Times reports that they are “expected to be involved in the introduction of the device”, but couldn’t extract a comment (revealing!) from anyone allegedly involved in the project, despite the fact that they work in the same cubicle farm. But this naturally Times-centric report kind of dilutes the significant of such a device: Amazon will likely carry titles from a vast number of news providers, and if the E ink experience becomes enough like newspaper—in term of news choice as well as literal usability—then this product could represent the newspaper and magazine industries’ first financially viable step away from dead trees.

As sanguine as newspaper folks might be about this, magazine publishers are, predictably, a little less optimistic. Conde Nast’s editorial director said, “I don’t think we would be anywhere near as excited about anything in black and white as we would about high-definition color”, hinting that even a mondo-Kindle wouldn’t be a game-changer for their richly visual magazine stable.

The NYT report doesn’t mention the most obvious possible fault with these plans: despite the fact that a larger screen would be better suited to displaying newspaper content, it might make the device kind of impractical. The current Kindle is small enough to chuck in a bag or briefcase, and carrying one around isn’t much more of a burden than toting a weekday newspaper or single magazine. Using a larger reader, on the other hand, would be more akin to carrying a clipboard than an iPhone; fine when you’re reading, but a pain in the ass when you’ve got to leave the subway. [NYT]

After spending a week with Amazon’s $360 Kindle 2, I’d like to say we were wrong about it not being a big step forward, but for better or worse, it’s the same Kindle as before.

The annals of gadgetry are littered with revisions that just aren’t meaningful, like the 3rd Gen iPod with its solid-state buttons, or the slimmer, lighter but substantially unchanged PSP-2000. But after waiting a year and change for Amazon to get serious about its Kindle platform—serious enough to keep the thing in stock—I was surprised at how banal the modifications were. Why didn’t they just lower the price of the $400 original to something like $300 or $250, and build more?

Let’s recap the new stuff:
• Slimmer rounded aluminum-backed body
• Smaller inward-clicking buttons
• Text-to-speech book reading
• A USB-based charger
• More memory and longer battery life
• A leather cover that locks on—nowsold separately for $30

What’s not there:
• No SD card slot
• No rubber backing
• No sparkly sparklemotion cursor
• No free cover

Two Thanksgivings ago, I reviewed the first Kindle, calling it “lightweight, long-lasting, and easy-to-grip… in bed.” The same holds true for this Kindle. In fact, everything I liked about that Kindle is still the same: an E-Ink screen that’s easy on the eyes, fast EVDO downloads of books, super-long battery life (it really wasn’t a problem before), plenty of storage for books, and a nice service for buying new books, magazines and otherwise-free blog subscriptions.

Some people love the Kindle for all of the reasons above, and I still think it’s a marvelous product for a certain type of reader, a person who reads multiple books at once, and reads them in order, from page 1 to page 351, without skipping around.

Somewhere into my fourth or fifth book, I stopped reading Kindle 1, and the same basic issue hampered my enjoyment of literature in Kindle 2: You can’t jump around. There’s no way to read what actually counts as literature on a Kindle, because that takes the ability to leaf around, matching passages from different parts of the book, identifying key characters’ surreptitious first appearances, etc. This is something the codex lets people do very well, and it’s something no single-surface digital screen comes close to getting right, even when making it up partly with search, notes and bookmarks.

Amazon boasts 20% faster page turning on this new baby, but you can see in the video that page turning is still painfully slow, and would need to be 100 or 1000 times faster to mean anything. Going from Kindle 1 to Kindle 2, the experience stays the same—there are no new convenience features that actually help you read books more easily. The last one held several hundred books, this one holds well over 1000. The last one’s battery lasted nearly a week, this one lasts over a week. Big deal.

In the video below, you can see the most annoying features of the Kindle 2:

• It’s slow to wake from sleeping
• Page turning is slow and flashes inverted text every time
• The ridiculous computer voice with an Eastern European accent that is impossible to listen to for more than three paragraphs (at least you can stop and start it by pressing spacebar)

There’s no video for the best features of the Kindle 2 because they’re so apparent:
• The clear text on a non-flickering panel
• The compact size that can hold all the books you need
• The great battery life and internal storage for text-and-picture files
• The updated look meets even Jesus Diaz’s strenuous requirements for aesthetic awesomeness

You may be reading this as a slam on Amazon and Kindle, but the fact is, I am a proponent of pushing forward with the ebook concept. I think it’s still easier to read books on E-Ink screens than it is to read them on an iPhone’s LCD, and while there’s no perfect ebook reader, E-Ink and other electronic paper technologies do have an advantage in energy consumption.

Kindle remains by far the best dedicated ebook reader out there, and based on how often they sold out of original Kindles, Amazon will sell as many of these as they can make. I even think the soon-to-come ability to read Kindle content on phones will help Kindle sales rather than hurt them, because more affluent readers, finding more freedom to use their ebook purchases as they like, will want a Kindle as an option.

A mostly cosmetic upgrade, the Kindle 2 is just another step towards some revolution in reading that none of us, not even Amazon chief visionary Jeff Bezos, can yet see or understand. [Kindle 2 Product Page]

In Summary
Still easy on the eyes

Still nice and compact

Even more internal storage and longer battery life

No meaningful change from the first Kindle

Still hard to read longer, more complex books

Cost still too high for most people

While affirming its stance on the legality of Kindle 2‘s text-to-speech feature — and in fact stating it’ll actually get more customers interested in buying audiobooks — Amazon‘s announced that it’ll now let the books’ rights holders decide on a title-by-title basis whether or not they’ll let TTS be enabled. No word on when the update’ll be fed to the devices, but we bet somewhere right now, Paul Aiken‘s cracking a tiny smile. Full release after the break.

Continue reading Amazon sorta capitulates, will let publishers decide text-to-speech availability

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Amazon sorta capitulates, will let publishers decide text-to-speech availability originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yeah, the new Kindle is neat and all, but you know what it doesn’t have (besides, you know, a color screen)? Officially licensed James Bond awesomeness, naturally. But the new Ian Fleming Special Edition Sony Reader has that in spades.

Available now from Sony, the specially Ian Fleming edition comes with two free Bond books–Casino Royale, the first in the series, and For Your Eyes Only, a collection of short stories featuring Quantum of Solace. The reader also has the familiar 007 logo on its cover. The official Sony-endorsed license to kill costs extra.

Amazon’s Kindle 2, announced on Monday, is the probably the best ebook reader you can buy. But neither it, nor any other reader out there, will be converting the masses anytime soon. Here’s why:

The Current State of Suck
Amazon will sell a lot of Kindle 2s. If they can keep up with demand this time, they’ll sell more than the original Kindle, supposedly now in the hands of 500,000 people. But it’s still not the breakthrough reader, the one that will dramatically overturn and recreate the literary market.

People call it the “iPod of books,” and in some senses that’s true. The first iPods didn’t overturn any market. They were just marginally better than their competitors, but they were limited to Mac users only, had mechanical scroll wheels and were easily damaged.

Desire for the original iPod is like desire for the Kindles—it reveals that there is a very real mass of people who do want this kind of device. But getting from the original iPod to the hottest new models may prove to be an easier journey than going from these original Kindles (and Sony Readers) to the perfect reading device, primarily because of display technology—readers are, after all, designed for the singular purpose of displaying content that’s easy on the eyes. As of now, there are two display camps—electronic paper and LCD—and both have far too many compromises at the moment to be adequate for a reading revolution.

E-Ink vs LCD
Most readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, use a type of electronic paper called E-Ink. These displays are known scientifically as electrophoretic, and involve the arrangement of pixels on a screen like you would draw on an Etch-a-Sketch. That is, energy is used to sketch, but once the pixels are in place, they stay in place without demanding power.

E-Ink differs from the LCD screen you’re likely reading this on (unless you subscribe to Giz’s new Kindle feed) in that it’s not backlit. Like legitimate paper, it must be held under a light source, but proponents say that’s easier on the eyes. You’re not staring at any rapidly flickering light bulb, just calm black pixels on a grayish background.

And because E-Ink only uses power to change pages or images, but not to display a given page, E-Ink-based electronics can run for days without recharging. The problem with that E-Ink is expensive, slow (you can’t have moving cursors or any kind of video) and boring. No color, crummy contrast, crappy resolution. Though reading actual text in good light is pleasant, the limitations of E-Ink are painfully obvious to even the least-techie of users.

Standard LCDs on your computer or an ebook-friendly smartphone aren’t any better. They could be too small, and if they’re not too small, they require too much power to run for any prolonged length of time. (E-Ink can go for days—getting a single day out of any LCD device would be a coup.) Above all, it’s just not a comfortable display to read on—sure you might stare at a monitor eight hours a day, but no one wants to read a novel on a glowing, constantly refreshing screen when they’re lying in bed, trying to relax. It’s doable, sure, but make no mistake, it’s a harsher experience.

The Dimly Lit Future
So what’s next? Plastic Logic presents the rosiest picture of the future of electronic paper displays, a perfectly-sized flexible plastic touchscreen that’s basically all E-Ink display, plus Wi-Fi.

I talked to Time Magazine’s Josh Quittner, who’s been intently researching readers, and he loves the device. The problem, he says, is that it’s both too innovative and too slow—it’s made entirely of plastic, even the transistors, requiring brand new fabs to produce it. So not only will the initial version will be expensive as hell, with a 10.7″ screen, but it’ll be standard black on gray. Color, which E-Ink has developed in the lab, won’t be coming out until 2011—possibly too late. Not even God knows what the market will be like in 2011—try to imagine what you thought cellphones would be like in 2008 from back in 2006.

Mary Lou Jepsen—who designed the XO Laptop’s breakthrough reflective LCD screen and her new company, Pixel Qi, are reinventing the LCD again, and their display, if it lives up to its promises, could be the other way forward. In fact, she told me that she predicts that “in 2010, LCDs designed for reading will overtake the electrophoretic display technology in the ereader market.”

She says that Pixel Qi‘s displays are actually more readable than e-paper, with “excellent reflectance, high resolution for text, sunlight readability”—just as easy on the eyes when the backlighting is turned off, but with the key advantages of full color and fast refresh, for pages that update as fast as video. Jepsen says it’s even possible to get a week of battery life from LCD tech, of course depending on the device the screens are embedded in. Infrastructurally and perhaps historically speaking, the odds are in LCD’s favor. Even new versions will be incredibly cheap and quick to manufacture because they can be made entirely in existing factories without requiring new, specialized equipment.

What’s Really Gonna Happen?
Which display tech will win out is may prove to be more economic than aesthetic, but ebook readers are here to stay. The presumption that everyone will eventually read books on an electronic display of some sort in the future is so fundamental I haven’t bothered to question it, mostly because nobody else does either. (Even if you love books, ebook reading makes sense.)

If you believe there’s a future for a dedicated device that exists solely to display books and newspapers and whatever other forms of the printed word you want to read, then E-Ink and similar tech makes sense, as long as it eventually can cost less and refresh faster. The battery-life advantage is huge. But if you think that a reader will be just one function of, say, a multitouch tablet that’s also your netbook, PDA and video display—and it’s a device you charge every night—it’s pretty clear that a multi-talented LCD display is the future.

As Quittner told us, someone’s going to figure this out. It’s just a question of who and when.

Old book image: ēst smiltis no ausīm/Flickr