How many times have you been on the road with all your electronic devices, laptop, pda, mobile phone, mp3 player, and thought; “Man, I wish I had thought to pack a novel.” Or how many times have you looked around your house and said, “That book case just makes me look too intellectual.” Regardless of what it promises, these are the kinds of problems that the Amazon Kindle solves. Kindle is an amazing product that has been forced entirely into the wrong market. Which is precisely why it will fail.

Anyone with even a passing interest in tech news has heard of the Kindle by now. An electronic book that refreshes its content over a wireless modem. An amazing idea, but Amazon has relegated it to selling books for them. The Kindle has the power to do so much more. True, you can get some live content, but only after a subscription fee, for each item. Even loading your own stuff on it results in a fee, which leads me into my list of failings for the Kindle:

1. Too Expensive
   A paperback novel costs roughly ten dollars. The Kindle costs forty times that amount. That means in order to justify the cost of the unit you must have a need to carry around four hundred dollars worth of books. While that may be true for the average college student, the average college student can sell their books afterward.
2. Too Closed
   I can put music on my iPod that I didn’t buy from Apple. I should be able to put pdfs and even images on a Kindle. Alright, technically I can do that. But only after paying Amazon a ten cent fee to transfer my file over. That fee, and the fact that I must go through Amazon makes the feature void in my book.
3. VERY Limited Online Content
   Again with the fees. For something I get for free on my computer. That very argument is why newspapers are in serious trouble right now. Amazon has positioned half of Kindle’s functionality in a failing market.
4. Inflexible Medium
   Believe it or not, digital paper can be inflexible. Going back to college students, you can’t use a highlighter on a kindle nor can you make notes in the margin. Reference books tend to have corners folded and notes added in pen. Not to mention the need of having several open at the same time. What little of these features can be implemented on the Kindle are far overshadowed by the costs.

All that said, I do love the Kindle. It just needs better software. I would pay four hundred dollars for what is essentially a Star Trek PADD. What Kindle needs to be, is an RSS reader. An open one that will interface with our existing web based readers and work complimentary to them. In addition to the hardware I would expect a monthly fee to operate the wireless modem. A fee that guarantees customers no less than 2 updates a day. Once to download new content and again to update your web based reader, marking off the things you’ve read. I think ten dollars a month is a fair price to replace every newspaper and magazine subscription you’ll ever have.

ePaper isn’t the future of books, audio books are the future of books. Books are static, they don’t have to be electronic because they never change. ePaper is the future of newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals. The RSS reader is the current evolution of the periodical and products like the Kindle are the perfect platform. Once these companies realize this, products like the kindle will be immensely successful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 12:10 am and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.