The New Yorker Reviews the Kindle: “Buy an iPod Touch”
by Peter Kafka
Posted on July 27, 2009 at 10:14 AM PT
Novelist Nicholson Baker, whose first book was about a man riding an escalator, and who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the future of reading, tackles the Kindle in this week’s New Yorker. He devotes 6,219 words to the subject, and if you’ve got the time (it’s summer!), they’re worth reading.
If you’re in a rush, the takeaway is that he’s not very impressed with Amazon’s (AMZN) device, and that all things being equal, he thinks Apple’s e-reader is at least as good. He’s not talking about the yet-to-appear iTablet, of course. Like a lot of other people, he’s fond of Apple’s (AAPL) current iPhone/iPod touch line:
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it.
Oddly, Baker doesn’t make a reference to Kindlegate, even though the story broke a couple of weeks ago. If you’re looking for a summary of where things stand on that one and have five minutes to spare, you can listen in to the chat I had with NPR’s “On the Media,” which aired over the weekend. You can hear the full show here.
One last note: I’m stepping out for a couple weeks and going semi-off the grid, so if all goes well you won’t be hearing from me till the second week of August. If all goes really well, I may even read an ink-and-paper book. Meantime there will be plenty of fresh new stuff from Walt, Kara, John and Katie over at the mothership. See you soonish.
Comments
My wife is an avid ink-and-paper book reader. She absolutely loves the kindle app on her iPhone. The books are less expensive, take up no (physical) space, she always has it with her, and they are very readable (even in bright sun by the pool or in the dark in bed at night). So, kudos to Amazon for the kindle store. And kudos to Apple for the iPhone. The iPhone can be a book-reader one minute, and a turn-by-turn GPS the next, and a video game the next, and a web-surfer, the next, and an email machine the next, and a movie player the next ,etc. etc. etc. etc. And it does all of those things really well. Quite amazing. I can see why it is so popular. Enjoy your break, Peter!
Posted by glen engelmann at July 27th, 2009 at 10:31 amPersonally, I have been pretty happy with the Kindle reader on my iPod touch, but more to the point, after reading the chatter today about how Apple is reportedly working with the record labels to reinvent the album experience for the online world, why wouldn’t they do the same with e-books?
Think of this pitch this way:
Steve Jobs: “Book and Music industry. You are getting commoditized because you have no differentiated platform for extending/re-inventing your product for the online age. We just so happen to have a set of tools that have proven compelling to the tune of 1.5B downloads, field-tested across 65K apps and with a current footprint of 46M devices.”
Music/Book Industry: “There is no way we can re-create that value proposition, and we already see the writing on the wall with Amazon. If they are successful, they will be telling us how much money we can make or worse, go direct to writers and musicians, and design us out of the equation. How do we get started?”
This is the consummate 1+1=3 for a segment that is otherwise facing a 1+1=<2 future.
For more fodder on this one, check out:
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
http://bit.ly/zwTw8
Cheers,
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at July 27th, 2009 at 3:30 pmPeople keep bashing Kindle and while it’s not perfect I don’t think it deserves all the negative press.
Until Kindle e-books mostly floundered. Amazon and other Internet outlets had all but killed their e-book business. Kindle revitalized that and Amazon led the way.
The iPhone version is very well done but it does lack many of the Kindles features. I love the fact that I can read the Kindle and easily transition over to the iPhone.
The iPhone does well in low light situations but Kindle beats the iPhone hands-down in bright sunlight situations.
Much like the first iPods people are missing the point with the Kindle. It’s not the hardware, it’s the ease and availability of getting books.
Posted by Tony Clark at August 3rd, 2009 at 9:47 am