Tag Archives: Kindle

The Kindle, the Nook, and now an iPad (maybe).

Over at the LA Times Jacket Copy blog there’s a post about Apple Tablet rumors heating up. This comes hot on the heels of PC World’s review of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader which it calls, a formidable Kindle competitor.

With a slew of iTablet rumors swirling for the better part of 2009, this one caught my attention because it’s on a book blog and not the usual nerd-blogs you’d expect to find it.

Frankly, I had no idea the Apple tablet/pad thing was being dubbed an e-reader. Interesting, very interesting. Do you think an Apple iPad/iTablet/e-reader could do to downloadable books what the iPod did to downloadable music?

And more importantly, as developers and designers are we ready for this?

Apple Tablet coming in September?

You can check the Periodic Table of Nerdery yourself to find all the nerds with the Mac Fanboy badge. There’s a few.

So you can imagine that the news coming out of the Financial Times this morning has a few of us buzzing. They’re reporting that Apple is in talks with record companies to add sleeves, liner notes, and other interactive goodies to digital music downloads.

Why? Because, again, according to the Financial Times:

“The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to Apple’s online stores.”

Even more interesting is that Apple is talks with book publishers too which is probably making Kindle owners a little scared.

Gizmodo has a nice mockup of what an Apple Tablet might look like.

Big Brother is indeed watching

As a full-fledged booknerd, I follow news and views about Amazon’s Kindle pretty closely. The Kindle fascinates me, as do the people who use them. If your nerdly predilections are of a different bent, you might have missed the story about Amazon removing 1984 from user’s Kindles due to some sort of copyright infringement. Of all the books in all of the land to delete, the only one that could me more ironic than George Orwell’s 1984 (which has a lot to do with the government editing the news) would have been Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (about government outlawing books).

But this isn’t about irony. No, this is about the slippery, slide-y ownership issues of electronic files and who gets to control the devices that hold those files.

My mind can’t quite get around the fact that even after someone has purchased a Kindle and purchased a book from Amazon (sure under hinky circumstances but that’s besides the point) that the company can still go into their device and erase that book.

Sure on a rational level it makes sense that Amazon would recall 1984 to avoid a copyright lawsuit, but the fact that they can even do that gives me the creeps. Do consumers really want a company to have that kind of control over their stuff? But more importantly did Kindle users even realize that Amazon had that power?

Yuck.

Can you imagine if Apple exercised the same power over an iPod? I would wager you’d be hard-pressed to find an iPod that didn’t contain an ill-gotten, illegally downloaded song. The outcry if such a thing happened would be deafening.

Kindle 2 for booknerds or gadgetheads?

You can’t swing a dead cat around the Internet today without reading all about Amazon’s Kindle 2. I find the buzz puzzling.

Essentially the Kindle is an e-book reader. Sure you can get some blogs and newspapers and such, but what they’re really trying to pimp is the ability to download and read any book you want, instantly! Here’s why I find this so puzzling, in 2007 only one in four US adults claimed to have not read a single book that year. Not one.

Sure, sure the NEA has reported that for the first time in a decade or so the percentage of adults reading “literature” (ironic air quotes intentional from the booknerd) is on the rise, but still, are these the people who are going to shell out $300+ for an e-book reader?

As I’ve mentioned before. I’m a booknerd. I know a lot of booknerds. None of them are clamoring for a way to carry their entire library with them all the time. Unlike music, it’s not like you can shuffle on to a new book every four or five minutes. Heck, most of the people I know can’t even start reading a new book until they have finished the last one.

I’m convinced the Kindle is purely a device for the gadgethead and not the booknerd. It makes me wonder if makes the gadgetheads actually use their Kindle to read books or is it something they get and play with for two weeks and then resign it to the scrap heap with all the other toys?

Besides, no booknerd in their right mind would spend $359 on a device to read books when they could spend that money on 25 actual books.