Books Good News/Bad News (Amazon Edition)
posted by on July 24 at 15:00 PM
Good news for Amazon.com:
Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 41% to $4.06 Billion; Sales Growth Accelerates to 31% in Media and to 58% in Electronics and Other General Merchandise
Bad news for Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader:
While Sony’s Reader has never received the enormous press or enjoyed the supposed whirlwind sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book, and is certainly lacking in, erm, EV-DOness, the Reader is about to get one trick the Kindle doesn’t have yet: openness. Sony will be shooting out an update on Thursday to allow the Reader to use purchased books in the protected EPUB format from whoever is peddling them, instead of being tied to the Sony’s e-book store, or just DRM-free text and PDF documents.
It’s smart to open the Reader up from just the one bookstore. If Sony can figure out some way to partner with brick-and-mortar bookstores and position itself as the literate person’s ebook reader, Kindle could potentially be in trouble.
Noooooo! Curse the one time I become an early adapter!
My most desperate wish is that this simply forces Amazon to open up its format(which it should have done from the beginning), but either way I'm crossing my fingers. I could care less about losing in the HD/Blu-Ray battle, but I fucking love my Kindle.
Reeeeally love it. Unhealthily so, in fact.
If Sony had opened up its reader from the start (in other words, if Sony could have not been Sony), they could have been a serious competitor to the Kindle with a real first-to-market advantage.
And if Amazon had not made the Kindle a hideous 70's Battlestar Galactica prop (and had been prepared for demand at launch), they might have achieved overwhelming market dominance by now.
Kindle-ugly, Sony-pretty. Me like.
@ 2 I agree. I'm not a person who gets hung up on aesthetics but the Kindle is one seriously fugly device. I could easily get over this if it compensated for its bad design by being useful. 'Useful' means instant internet access via wifi and compatibility with any and all e-publications I want to read, not just the ones Amazon chooses to supply. And color. Jesus, it's not 1942. No visual device should be limited to black & white, especially if it is dedicated to displaying printed media.
I sit squarely in Amazon's demographic for this thing but when the Kindle launched, I took one look at the specs and said 'no way'. I figured there was no way the Kindle would go unchallenged in the marketplace for very long with these glaring limitations. I'm still waiting for my dream e-book reader though. I hope it won't be much longer. It's kind of puzzling to me why decent e-book reader development has taken as long as it already has.
Every time I go to Seattle Public Library branches, especially downtown, I have to fight my way past the Kindle readers to get to the real books.
Oh, wait, I was being ironic.
Never mind.
EPIC FAIL!
Nobody cares about Kindle. Seriously, the Zune is more useful, and nobody cares about those either.
[holds Kindle tenderly, whispers to it] "Don't listen to them baby, you're all I'll ever need, and you're beautiful."
Out of curiousity, has anyone here done a real-life comparison with the two? I'm not being snarky, I actually want to know. When I researched both, the Kindle was the winner hands down for what I wanted out of the thing (a shit ton of books) and had the better reviews.
Um, no. But then, I haven't done a real life comparison between pit bulls and sharks, either.
The first truly open source, DRM-free reader that isn't a complete design monstrosity will quickly destroy both of these early fails.
I have not done a real-life comparison, because I found both products wanting. (Though I disagree with city kitty's grousing @4 about the non-color displays; it ignores the fundamental difference of so-called e-ink from a traditional LCD.)
I think melior @8 nails it.
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