5 ms·

Bye-bye kindle

47 points by TweedHeads 17y ago

TweedHeads 17y ago
Exactly the kind of technology that can kill your business overnight. Now, imagine Apple finally delivering a 10" iPad with dual e-ink and full color, with their characteristic award winning industrial design we all love. Just imagine that.
- swombat 17y ago
  Argh. Stop saying that. Now I just want one. And I can't get one because it's not even close to being developed yet!
- ryanvm 17y ago
  "Imagine" is right - that is quite a fantasy. First, that Kindle killer isn't even close to existing. Second, if you think $400 is steep for a device that has a 1 second refresh rate and a gray-scale screen, just wait until you see the price tag on 10" of full-color, touchscreen, iInk. Third, and the real barrier to entry, Amazon has the bookstore to back it up. You can make the finest e-book reader in the world, but until you have "magic" wireless delivery and a limitless library to back it up, it's considerably more inconvenient to use than the Kindle. Apple will not crack this space. It will have to be Google or Microsoft.
  - hexley 17y ago
    Apple and Google are pretty fucking buddy-buddy atm, and isn't Google trying to scan/index every book in existence? Apple could execute it perfectly, with iTunes as a frontend to Google's vast library.
    - swombat 17y ago
      There's no reason why iTunes couldn't sell eBooks too.
    - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
      The barrier to having a huge ebook catalog isn't the lack of scanned books, it's the lack of publisher cooperation. You think that just because Google has scanned millions of books (to the great consternation of the publishers) that they're going to relent when Google/Apple proposes that they start selling them for cheap in an iTunes market? Please.
  - stevejohnson 17y ago
    The whole point of the Kindle, at least as I perceive it, is to sell more books on the Amazon store. Why wouldn't they let a company like Apple provide yet another interface for their store? If anything, an "iPhone of ebook readers" would increase sales on Amazon. The Kindle is not an end in itself. The store's the thing. Kind of opposite from the iPhone ecosystem, where the store exists to sell the phone.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      Such a device from Apple would have multiple uses. Imagine the 10.1" pad in a magazine-thin form factor on a coffee table, interfaced to your iMac. You could also have an advanced remote control for Front Row, a special multi-touch iPhoto viewer/editor, the same for iMovie, multi-touch oriented apps for Facebook, and a Twitter widget that could float in from the background. Done right, a device like this could rule the living room!
    - Retric 17y ago
      As the price of eInk drops Amazon can start to make a lot of money by continuing to discount their eInk reader and making it up in book sales. An Apple iReader would add a middle man that would be able to quickly switch to another book store and cut Amazon out of the loop. There is no magic that let's Apple build at lower costs than Amazon so as long as Amazon is willing to take a minor hit they can keep the eReader market. As other company's start to sell laptop's with eInk they can transfort the Kindel into a solid tablet PC. PS: Amazon does not think of it's self as a book store as much as a large tech company. It's trying to create large margine markets like the kindel not just sell more books. And they have great brand recognision to build off of.
    - blurry 17y ago
      Why do you think they don't? I've been reading books through Kindle For iPhone for a month now. Takes me 30 seconds to buy a book, or download a sample to decide later. Love it.
  - zouhair 17y ago
    There is a huge amount of free books already available. I don't care much about the magic wireless as long as I can read my own files.
    - blhack 17y ago
      You represent a very tiny minority of prospective kindle users. The people using the kindle just want it to work (this is why Bezos worked out the deal with Sprint). Have you ever tried walking grandma (Who is a memeber of one of the major groups the kindle is aimed at: The elderly) through setting up her ipod? Then transferring songs to it? Can you imagine walking the same person through the steps required to convert whatever file it is she wants to view on her reader, how to plug the USB cable in, what hole it goes in, what buttons to press, when to press them, what it all means, where the books are, how to find them on her harddisk etc. etc. etc. The kindle is good because it is simple. If you don't want that, get an old palm pilot or a nokia 770 (which is what I used before I got my kindle...palm back in early 2000 and nokia up until about a year ago).
  - bitwize 17y ago
    The technology already exists in the form of the OLPC screen, which, I can assure you, is quite beautiful and amazingly high-resolution with the backlight off. It's not the same as Kindle's eInk, just an LCD with amazingly low dot pitch and an anisotropic color filter which only works in transmissive mode (backlight on). That kind of thing in consumer-level devices will lead to cheap, very high-res, nearly page-quality devices you can fit in a pocket.
  - pixelcloud 17y ago
    There is always shortcovers as well. They will probably add support for this.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Apple should crack this space while it still has a lock on cover-flow. That alone could give them a key advantage. Also, if you don't limit yourself to the primary use-case of the Kindle, you don't need the resources of the Amazon bookstore to back it up. A better form-factor for people to take information that they collate will have a lot of users. I can think of a variety of such uses for myself. I would be able to carry my entire library of sheet music with me for reference. I would be able to have an entire library of programming language manuals with me, whether or not I was online. There are lots of kinds of books other than paperbacks. Kindle is oriented towards one specific use case.
  - patrickg-zill 17y ago
    Actually you are wrong about the price tag issue: --the whole point of these screens, is that they can be made using existing LCD screen manufacturing technology, with some number of tweaks. There have been billions upon billions already spent on LCD screen manufacturing facilities. The e-ink process on the other hand, does not have that kind of scale and ability to spread costs over a very high number of units.
kevTheDev 17y ago
I haven't looked into this for a while - but isn't one of the advantages of the Kindle the ecosystme that surrounds it - in the same way that the iPod is not just an mp3 player - i.e. the iTunes ecosystem?
- swombat 17y ago
  I'm not entirely sure about that. There are many books "available" on the internet, and this one appears to double up as a netbook. That's a pretty serious advantage over a plain "eReader".
thristian 17y ago
Sounds like this is the impressive high-res-black-and-white-or-low-res-colour display technology of the OLPC laptops, available for other companies to use. I'm looking forward to it.
- bitdiddle 17y ago
  yea, I used my OLPC mostly as a PDF reader. It was great for reading books outdoors
- moe 17y ago
  Indeed, I'm very curious to see that, too. Didn't know they could make e-ink displays suitable for video playback already? This sounds almost too good to be true.
deleted 17y ago
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deleted 17y ago
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jm4 17y ago
I don't know that this necessarily kills the Kindle and other ebook readers, but it will definitely require some serious adjustments. Up to now, ebook readers held an a huge advantage with the e-ink screen and ergonomics. Ebook readers still have an advantage when it comes to ergonomics, but I think they'll have a hard time appealing to the average consumer based on ergonomics alone. The ergonomics advantage isn't even one that ebook reader manufacturers can expect to keep. It will be reduced to just about nothing as soon as someone makes a netbook with a screen that can rotate around and fold down so it can be used like a tablet. There must be price cuts. I can't imagine enough people will prefer the simplicity and ergonomics of a dedicated ebook reader over an equally priced- and now equally functioning- netbook to sustain a business. They also need to focus on what they're good at and figure out what inherent advantages there are in having a dedicated device. Ebook readers need to be as simple as books, they shouldn't have to boot up, they should be extremely light, you shouldn't have to worry that some email worm is going to keep you from reading your books, etc. In any case, this is only a good thing for consumers. We're likely going to see cheaper and better ebook readers as well as better netbooks.
jakewolf 17y ago
I have a kindle 2 and a netbook and love that they are separate. I treat the kindle as a book/magazine and use it on the subway, in a cafe, in bed etc just like a book. I would never do the same with my netbook especially considering how much larger it is. The kindle 2 is the perfect size for reading and a 10" netbook is the perfect size for a netbook.
ahoyhere 17y ago
How can a standalone screen technology kill an integrated consumer device with the world's best infrastructure behind it? The article clearly states that the product is the screen, not a complete netbook. Stuff and nonsense. If anything, Amazon might license the screens.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Have you ever tried to use something like a reference book on an e-ink device? There's a reason why Sony Readers didn't have any kind of search. The refresh is sloooowwwww. A 1 second overhead on each click on top of normal processing will kill most web apps. For a device that's accessing data locally, it's murder. Better interactivity will also give a better online shopping experience on the device. It will open up lots of other uses. Damn straight Amazon will license the screens. How about an Amazon branded netbook that had the Kindle functionality, but also could boot as a netbook?
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    I own the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2. So yes, I have used e-ink devices quite a bit :) The screen refresh on the K2 is waay, waaaaay better. Much less painful to type and use UI elements. But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth, to rescan, and remind myself, "hmm it was about in the last quarter of the book..." or "Where did I read about that study? I'm thinking... yellow book about yea big... aha, that one", etc. With a digital reader that always looks the same, and feels the same, you lose something. That is where the Kindles (et al) fall down - nothing to do with the screens, just that the natural UI of books is very good for these things.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth That's exactly what I'm talking about! If the Kindle 2 had better interactivity, there could be a highly responsive interface that could give you the same "wayfinding" feel. (Think of the flick-scroll contacts on the iPhone.) Such is impossible on the Kindle.
chanux 17y ago
There was more geeky link to the same story on HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630237 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630237
erlanger 17y ago
Between WinAmp and iTunes, bye-bye iPod!
ianbishop 17y ago
The part that surprised me was that Amazon hadn't acquired a patent for the screen technology.
- jemmons 17y ago
  They didn't invent it. They're just licensing it for use in the Kindle.
_pius 17y ago
Once I found out that my laptop could play mp3s, it was bye-bye iPod!
jonknee 17y ago
It's the content stupid.
jmatt 17y ago
Wouldn't Amazon just come out with a reader that worked on these new netbooks? They already have an iPhone app... So I don't think it's too big of a leap to think they may extend to other markets as demand rises.

47 points by TweedHeads 17y ago

Exactly the kind of technology that can kill your business overnight. Now, imagine Apple finally delivering a 10" iPad with dual e-ink and full color, with their characteristic award winning industrial design we all love. Just imagine that.

swombat 17y ago
Argh. Stop saying that. Now I just want one. And I can't get one because it's not even close to being developed yet!
ryanvm 17y ago
"Imagine" is right - that is quite a fantasy. First, that Kindle killer isn't even close to existing. Second, if you think $400 is steep for a device that has a 1 second refresh rate and a gray-scale screen, just wait until you see the price tag on 10" of full-color, touchscreen, iInk. Third, and the real barrier to entry, Amazon has the bookstore to back it up. You can make the finest e-book reader in the world, but until you have "magic" wireless delivery and a limitless library to back it up, it's considerably more inconvenient to use than the Kindle. Apple will not crack this space. It will have to be Google or Microsoft.
- hexley 17y ago
  Apple and Google are pretty fucking buddy-buddy atm, and isn't Google trying to scan/index every book in existence? Apple could execute it perfectly, with iTunes as a frontend to Google's vast library.
  - swombat 17y ago
    There's no reason why iTunes couldn't sell eBooks too.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    The barrier to having a huge ebook catalog isn't the lack of scanned books, it's the lack of publisher cooperation. You think that just because Google has scanned millions of books (to the great consternation of the publishers) that they're going to relent when Google/Apple proposes that they start selling them for cheap in an iTunes market? Please.
- stevejohnson 17y ago
  The whole point of the Kindle, at least as I perceive it, is to sell more books on the Amazon store. Why wouldn't they let a company like Apple provide yet another interface for their store? If anything, an "iPhone of ebook readers" would increase sales on Amazon. The Kindle is not an end in itself. The store's the thing. Kind of opposite from the iPhone ecosystem, where the store exists to sell the phone.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Such a device from Apple would have multiple uses. Imagine the 10.1" pad in a magazine-thin form factor on a coffee table, interfaced to your iMac. You could also have an advanced remote control for Front Row, a special multi-touch iPhoto viewer/editor, the same for iMovie, multi-touch oriented apps for Facebook, and a Twitter widget that could float in from the background. Done right, a device like this could rule the living room!
  - Retric 17y ago
    As the price of eInk drops Amazon can start to make a lot of money by continuing to discount their eInk reader and making it up in book sales. An Apple iReader would add a middle man that would be able to quickly switch to another book store and cut Amazon out of the loop. There is no magic that let's Apple build at lower costs than Amazon so as long as Amazon is willing to take a minor hit they can keep the eReader market. As other company's start to sell laptop's with eInk they can transfort the Kindel into a solid tablet PC. PS: Amazon does not think of it's self as a book store as much as a large tech company. It's trying to create large margine markets like the kindel not just sell more books. And they have great brand recognision to build off of.
  - blurry 17y ago
    Why do you think they don't? I've been reading books through Kindle For iPhone for a month now. Takes me 30 seconds to buy a book, or download a sample to decide later. Love it.
- zouhair 17y ago
  There is a huge amount of free books already available. I don't care much about the magic wireless as long as I can read my own files.
  - blhack 17y ago
    You represent a very tiny minority of prospective kindle users. The people using the kindle just want it to work (this is why Bezos worked out the deal with Sprint). Have you ever tried walking grandma (Who is a memeber of one of the major groups the kindle is aimed at: The elderly) through setting up her ipod? Then transferring songs to it? Can you imagine walking the same person through the steps required to convert whatever file it is she wants to view on her reader, how to plug the USB cable in, what hole it goes in, what buttons to press, when to press them, what it all means, where the books are, how to find them on her harddisk etc. etc. etc. The kindle is good because it is simple. If you don't want that, get an old palm pilot or a nokia 770 (which is what I used before I got my kindle...palm back in early 2000 and nokia up until about a year ago).
- bitwize 17y ago
  The technology already exists in the form of the OLPC screen, which, I can assure you, is quite beautiful and amazingly high-resolution with the backlight off. It's not the same as Kindle's eInk, just an LCD with amazingly low dot pitch and an anisotropic color filter which only works in transmissive mode (backlight on). That kind of thing in consumer-level devices will lead to cheap, very high-res, nearly page-quality devices you can fit in a pocket.
- pixelcloud 17y ago
  There is always shortcovers as well. They will probably add support for this.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Apple should crack this space while it still has a lock on cover-flow. That alone could give them a key advantage. Also, if you don't limit yourself to the primary use-case of the Kindle, you don't need the resources of the Amazon bookstore to back it up. A better form-factor for people to take information that they collate will have a lot of users. I can think of a variety of such uses for myself. I would be able to carry my entire library of sheet music with me for reference. I would be able to have an entire library of programming language manuals with me, whether or not I was online. There are lots of kinds of books other than paperbacks. Kindle is oriented towards one specific use case.
- patrickg-zill 17y ago
  Actually you are wrong about the price tag issue: --the whole point of these screens, is that they can be made using existing LCD screen manufacturing technology, with some number of tweaks. There have been billions upon billions already spent on LCD screen manufacturing facilities. The e-ink process on the other hand, does not have that kind of scale and ability to spread costs over a very high number of units.

kevTheDev 17y ago

I haven't looked into this for a while - but isn't one of the advantages of the Kindle the ecosystme that surrounds it - in the same way that the iPod is not just an mp3 player - i.e. the iTunes ecosystem?

swombat 17y ago
I'm not entirely sure about that. There are many books "available" on the internet, and this one appears to double up as a netbook. That's a pretty serious advantage over a plain "eReader".

thristian 17y ago

Sounds like this is the impressive high-res-black-and-white-or-low-res-colour display technology of the OLPC laptops, available for other companies to use. I'm looking forward to it.

bitdiddle 17y ago
yea, I used my OLPC mostly as a PDF reader. It was great for reading books outdoors
moe 17y ago
Indeed, I'm very curious to see that, too. Didn't know they could make e-ink displays suitable for video playback already? This sounds almost too good to be true.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jm4 17y ago

I don't know that this necessarily kills the Kindle and other ebook readers, but it will definitely require some serious adjustments. Up to now, ebook readers held an a huge advantage with the e-ink screen and ergonomics. Ebook readers still have an advantage when it comes to ergonomics, but I think they'll have a hard time appealing to the average consumer based on ergonomics alone. The ergonomics advantage isn't even one that ebook reader manufacturers can expect to keep. It will be reduced to just about nothing as soon as someone makes a netbook with a screen that can rotate around and fold down so it can be used like a tablet. There must be price cuts. I can't imagine enough people will prefer the simplicity and ergonomics of a dedicated ebook reader over an equally priced- and now equally functioning- netbook to sustain a business. They also need to focus on what they're good at and figure out what inherent advantages there are in having a dedicated device. Ebook readers need to be as simple as books, they shouldn't have to boot up, they should be extremely light, you shouldn't have to worry that some email worm is going to keep you from reading your books, etc. In any case, this is only a good thing for consumers. We're likely going to see cheaper and better ebook readers as well as better netbooks.

jakewolf 17y ago

I have a kindle 2 and a netbook and love that they are separate. I treat the kindle as a book/magazine and use it on the subway, in a cafe, in bed etc just like a book. I would never do the same with my netbook especially considering how much larger it is. The kindle 2 is the perfect size for reading and a 10" netbook is the perfect size for a netbook.

ahoyhere 17y ago

How can a standalone screen technology kill an integrated consumer device with the world's best infrastructure behind it? The article clearly states that the product is the screen, not a complete netbook. Stuff and nonsense. If anything, Amazon might license the screens.

stcredzero 17y ago
Have you ever tried to use something like a reference book on an e-ink device? There's a reason why Sony Readers didn't have any kind of search. The refresh is sloooowwwww. A 1 second overhead on each click on top of normal processing will kill most web apps. For a device that's accessing data locally, it's murder. Better interactivity will also give a better online shopping experience on the device. It will open up lots of other uses. Damn straight Amazon will license the screens. How about an Amazon branded netbook that had the Kindle functionality, but also could boot as a netbook?
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  I own the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2. So yes, I have used e-ink devices quite a bit :) The screen refresh on the K2 is waay, waaaaay better. Much less painful to type and use UI elements. But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth, to rescan, and remind myself, "hmm it was about in the last quarter of the book..." or "Where did I read about that study? I'm thinking... yellow book about yea big... aha, that one", etc. With a digital reader that always looks the same, and feels the same, you lose something. That is where the Kindles (et al) fall down - nothing to do with the screens, just that the natural UI of books is very good for these things.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth That's exactly what I'm talking about! If the Kindle 2 had better interactivity, there could be a highly responsive interface that could give you the same "wayfinding" feel. (Think of the flick-scroll contacts on the iPhone.) Such is impossible on the Kindle.

chanux 17y ago

There was more geeky link to the same story on HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630237 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630237

erlanger 17y ago

Between WinAmp and iTunes, bye-bye iPod!

ianbishop 17y ago

The part that surprised me was that Amazon hadn't acquired a patent for the screen technology.

jemmons 17y ago
They didn't invent it. They're just licensing it for use in the Kindle.

_pius 17y ago

Once I found out that my laptop could play mp3s, it was bye-bye iPod!

jonknee 17y ago

It's the content stupid.

jmatt 17y ago

Wouldn't Amazon just come out with a reader that worked on these new netbooks? They already have an iPhone app... So I don't think it's too big of a leap to think they may extend to other markets as demand rises.