These are indeed interesting times for book publishers. They’ve seen the mistakes of the music industry and how illegal downloading has had its effects. What’s about to happen with books? The next while will be telling.
The Sony Reader has been on the market a while but hasn’t seemed to capture the market like it should.
Last week Amazon offered us the international Kindle, so those of us outside the US could enjoy and today the Nook was launched by Barnes and Noble.
What’s the problem with the Kindle? Amazon shot themselves a little by selling an ebook and then entering each Kindle remotely and removing the offending ebook. This brings a lot of questions into play including that of privacy.
While listening to a recent podcast of ‘The week in Tech’ with Leo Laporte (www.twit.tv), Leo mentioned he had left his Kindle on a plane. While he could report the Kindle stolen with Amazon, they have the ability to completely block the Kindle from uploading new material but don’t. If whoever ended up with his Kindle, tries to put new books on the kindle, Amazon need the serial number to remotely upload the publication to that particular Kindle, so they who has it anyway…
I’m sure the next week will have lots of Nook reviews.
The main problems it seems, for the readers and why it hasn’t taken off yet is, price. People don’t have $/200/300 to spend on something to read books or newspapers on.
Yes, we have all come to love our Ipods but they do lack the all round bang of listening to a CD or even the feel of vinyl. But we can carry every piece of music we own at once. Before this it would all be packed in a large room and we would have bad backs trying to carry it all.
The other prong in all of this is whether people actually have the time to read books on devices like the kindle. It is another device to carry around, now we have phone, ipod, ereader.. To bring with us everytime we leave the house.
Audio books are making a comeback.. You may not have time to read a book but you can listen to a book in the car whilst driving or any means of commuting. Is audible.com onto a winner? This could be the way forward.
Kindle photo from here