Kindle: not your parents’ eBook.
November 29, 2007
Posted by jesse in : digital innovation, participation gap, digital learning, digital information overload, digital identity , trackback
On November 19, Amazon.com announced its first foray into hardware: a portable eBook reader called the Kindle. Amazon hopes the Kindle will become the iPod of books - a portable personal library you can take anywhere.
That same day, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the results of a new study: young Americans are reading less.
So it makes sense that despite obvious similarities, the Kindle and the iPod target very different markets. Whereas Apple turned the iPod into an icon of digital native culture, Amazon is aiming the Kindle squarely at digital immigrants.
Look at the features Amazon is touting. A display that mimics the look of ink on paper. A built in wireless book store so you never have to touch a computer. The ability to change text size. In short, it’s designed for people who hate using computers and have bad eyesight.
Meanwhile, with a screen saver featuring the likes of Jane Austen and the Gutenberg printing press, along with what the popular technology blog Engadget calls “a big ol’ dose of the ugly,” the Kindle is almost aggressively unhip. As one analyst told the Wall Street Journal, “No one is going to buy Kindle for its sex appeal.”
Moreover, digital natives tend to be more comfortable reading from traditional LCD screens than their parents are. Indeed, some of us, myself included, actually prefer reading from a screen. I’d much rather read a book on, say, an iPhone, than have to carry a separate device.
But as the NEA study (3.3 MB PDF) makes clear, most readers aren’t digital natives. If older consumers take to the Kindle in droves, perhaps they could become the digital natives of literature, defining the new paradigm for how we read digital books.
In a sense then, whether knowingly or not, Amazon is performing a large scale social experiment. We can’t wait to see the results.
-Jesse Baer
Comments»
The fat lady has yet to clear her throat: http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/16/seiko-epson-shows-off-uxga-e-paper-display/
Traditional book, as an artefact, is a great technology. It should be difficult to challenges it! Do you know if audio books are being used by the digital natives?
Honestly, I’d kill for Kindle 5.0 right now, a la Minority Report newspapers. e-ink technologies definitely have a place in the hands my ilk… just like programmable OLED walls do. Where’s my jetpack and flying car indeed. My current long-term futurist patience will be utterly exhausted if the Ghost in the Shell future of Masamune Shirow is not fully realized by 2028 (the same year that thermoptic camouflage is described as being developed in its given from from the manga).
ebooks is easy for seeking, but hard for downloading
e.g. rapidshare.com is a big store for ebooks, but hard for downloading
sites like http://filezfile.com offer online reading version, but not too many books
world is not perfect
Dazee…Project Gutenberg (probably mispelled)…hint, hint. Actually, does anybody know if the Kindle will allow downloads from sites other than Amazon? I’d expect not. There will have to be a way around that (possibly hack so it will accept attachments directly form e-mail).