Charles Stross' Diary (RSS Feed)
12-04-2007, 08:32 PM
(If you've somehow failed to notice Amazon launching their ebook reader, the Kindle, look here (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA).)
I don't like the Kindle. Here are my reasons:
1. Aesthetics. The Kindle looks like something you'd shove under a door with a dodgy hinge to keep it from opening by mistake. It looks cheap, plasticky, and badly designed (at least, in image; I haven't seen a real one yet, for reasons that will become obvious in point #2, below). I mean, what were they thinking when they let it out of the lab? Compared to Sony's reader design, let alone the iPhone, this looks like cheap rubbish. Except it's not; it cost £200 US $399.
2. Network architecture. Unlike previous ebook readers, the Kindle can go online all on its lonesome to let you buy ebooks direct from Amazon.com. Which is a truly excellent idea, except that instead of doing the sensible thing and building in wifi support, Amazon went with something called Whispernet that runs over a third generation telephony protocol called EV-DO, which doesn't work outside the US. Congratulations; you've just stopped me from buying one, because — surprise! — I live in a country where the wavelengths available for EV-DO have all been assigned to other services.
This is particularly inexplicable because Amazon's core market (folks who travel and read a lot) are far more likely than other folks to travel to places where their ebook reader won't work.
(I will concede that Amazon may be working on a UMTS or even a GPRS design for use in the rest of the world when they've ironed out their contractual requirements for licensing ebooks for sale in non-North American territories, but if so, guess what? Non-NorthAm Kindle's probably won't work in the USA! It looks like they've decided to enforce the arbitrary trans-Atlantic rights split in English language book sales in hardware.)
3. DRM. Digital Rights Management software means that you won't be able to read Kindle ebooks on other devices. Books you buy for your Kindle will vanish, in effect, if you change machine. Cory Doctorow nailed it in one when he pointed out that the Achilles' heel of the whole DRM argument is that DRM penalizes honest users, not dishonest ones. (Honest? You've got to jump through all these hoops to use the thing you paid for. Dishonest? You'll grab an illegal cracked copy, or crack the DRM, and thumb your nose at the inconvenience.)
We have a technical term for any business plan that relies on making life difficult for customers and easy for non-customers: we call it "circling the drain".
4. Intrusion into the reader's privacy. If you buy a Kindle you've got to accept that Amazon's ebook reader is monitoring your usage (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530&) and transmitting data about you back to the mothership — yes, that's in the terms and conditions. (Look for "Information Received" in the small print.) It's outrageous: what would you say to a librarian who said that your lending rights were contingent on their monitoring precisely what you were reading and how long you were spending on each page? Reading is one of the few activities that we're used to doing in private, alone in the privacy of our own heads. Kindle is making a bare-faced attempt to strip away your privacy.
5. Marketing stupidity. Kindle is, bluntly, aimed at the wrong people — and it's the wrong size. It really needs an XGA or higher resolution colour screen — the display technology of the OLPC XO-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1) would be perfect (for reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph). The XO-1 display is dirt-cheap, sufficiently high resolution, low power consumption, colour, and degrades to usable black-and-white in bright sunlight. (The obsession with epaper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epaper) has drawn the ebook industry down a blind alley; sure epaper has a stupendously low power draw, but ubiquitous gadgets (ipods, phones, and the like) have trained us to plug stuff in overnight, and there are very few situations where you will find yourself reading for more than 12 hours straight without access to a mains socket.)
The ideal launch market for an ebook reader exists; it's college students and academics. They're used to paying over $1000 a year for textbooks and often up to $100 for a single book. The books are big and heavy and they need to carry them around. The books go out of date — an ebook reader with an online subscription service for correcting errata and adding supplementary material would be perfect. If Amazon had designed their hardware a little bit differently, then stitched up a deal with Elsevier and the other big publishers of peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, they could have rented pre-loaded Kindles out to students for $1000 a year and shifted container ships full of the things on day 1.
But instead of designing a device that will allow college students to carry all their (expensive) textbooks around in a single notebook-sized package, Amazon seem to be going after the consumers of (cheap) popular literature and fiction. Readers who are unwilling to spend much more than US $7 on a mass-market novel in the first place, and very unlikely to read more than 100 titles per year. And then they're expected to put up with intrusive DRM that devalues their purchases, intrusive privacy-invading monitoring, and (to add insult to injury) a $400 entry price before they can join the party.
Yes: for no obvious reason, Amazon have ignored the obvious, lucrative market and aimed Kindle instead at a tiny population of mad bibliophiles. They've invented the perfect Christmas present for Harriet Klausner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Klausner).
Do I think Kindle is destined to succeed? Well ... this reader's a turkey, but the Kindle service might succeed, if they can iron the bugs out. But they're going to have to make a whole lot of changes, and some of those aren't up to Amazon — the publishers need to change their minds about DRM, and (perhaps more controversially) to accept that it's necessary to renegotiate their rights splits to permit a true worldwide English language ebook market to evolve.
Finally: some of my books are available on Kindle. I think I've made my opinion of the platform clear. However, if you must drink the Kool Aid, if you've already lost your saving throw vs. shiny!, then please allow me to encourage you to buy my ebooks.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/12/why_i_dont_like_amazons_kindle.html)
I don't like the Kindle. Here are my reasons:
1. Aesthetics. The Kindle looks like something you'd shove under a door with a dodgy hinge to keep it from opening by mistake. It looks cheap, plasticky, and badly designed (at least, in image; I haven't seen a real one yet, for reasons that will become obvious in point #2, below). I mean, what were they thinking when they let it out of the lab? Compared to Sony's reader design, let alone the iPhone, this looks like cheap rubbish. Except it's not; it cost £200 US $399.
2. Network architecture. Unlike previous ebook readers, the Kindle can go online all on its lonesome to let you buy ebooks direct from Amazon.com. Which is a truly excellent idea, except that instead of doing the sensible thing and building in wifi support, Amazon went with something called Whispernet that runs over a third generation telephony protocol called EV-DO, which doesn't work outside the US. Congratulations; you've just stopped me from buying one, because — surprise! — I live in a country where the wavelengths available for EV-DO have all been assigned to other services.
This is particularly inexplicable because Amazon's core market (folks who travel and read a lot) are far more likely than other folks to travel to places where their ebook reader won't work.
(I will concede that Amazon may be working on a UMTS or even a GPRS design for use in the rest of the world when they've ironed out their contractual requirements for licensing ebooks for sale in non-North American territories, but if so, guess what? Non-NorthAm Kindle's probably won't work in the USA! It looks like they've decided to enforce the arbitrary trans-Atlantic rights split in English language book sales in hardware.)
3. DRM. Digital Rights Management software means that you won't be able to read Kindle ebooks on other devices. Books you buy for your Kindle will vanish, in effect, if you change machine. Cory Doctorow nailed it in one when he pointed out that the Achilles' heel of the whole DRM argument is that DRM penalizes honest users, not dishonest ones. (Honest? You've got to jump through all these hoops to use the thing you paid for. Dishonest? You'll grab an illegal cracked copy, or crack the DRM, and thumb your nose at the inconvenience.)
We have a technical term for any business plan that relies on making life difficult for customers and easy for non-customers: we call it "circling the drain".
4. Intrusion into the reader's privacy. If you buy a Kindle you've got to accept that Amazon's ebook reader is monitoring your usage (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530&) and transmitting data about you back to the mothership — yes, that's in the terms and conditions. (Look for "Information Received" in the small print.) It's outrageous: what would you say to a librarian who said that your lending rights were contingent on their monitoring precisely what you were reading and how long you were spending on each page? Reading is one of the few activities that we're used to doing in private, alone in the privacy of our own heads. Kindle is making a bare-faced attempt to strip away your privacy.
5. Marketing stupidity. Kindle is, bluntly, aimed at the wrong people — and it's the wrong size. It really needs an XGA or higher resolution colour screen — the display technology of the OLPC XO-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1) would be perfect (for reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph). The XO-1 display is dirt-cheap, sufficiently high resolution, low power consumption, colour, and degrades to usable black-and-white in bright sunlight. (The obsession with epaper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epaper) has drawn the ebook industry down a blind alley; sure epaper has a stupendously low power draw, but ubiquitous gadgets (ipods, phones, and the like) have trained us to plug stuff in overnight, and there are very few situations where you will find yourself reading for more than 12 hours straight without access to a mains socket.)
The ideal launch market for an ebook reader exists; it's college students and academics. They're used to paying over $1000 a year for textbooks and often up to $100 for a single book. The books are big and heavy and they need to carry them around. The books go out of date — an ebook reader with an online subscription service for correcting errata and adding supplementary material would be perfect. If Amazon had designed their hardware a little bit differently, then stitched up a deal with Elsevier and the other big publishers of peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, they could have rented pre-loaded Kindles out to students for $1000 a year and shifted container ships full of the things on day 1.
But instead of designing a device that will allow college students to carry all their (expensive) textbooks around in a single notebook-sized package, Amazon seem to be going after the consumers of (cheap) popular literature and fiction. Readers who are unwilling to spend much more than US $7 on a mass-market novel in the first place, and very unlikely to read more than 100 titles per year. And then they're expected to put up with intrusive DRM that devalues their purchases, intrusive privacy-invading monitoring, and (to add insult to injury) a $400 entry price before they can join the party.
Yes: for no obvious reason, Amazon have ignored the obvious, lucrative market and aimed Kindle instead at a tiny population of mad bibliophiles. They've invented the perfect Christmas present for Harriet Klausner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Klausner).
Do I think Kindle is destined to succeed? Well ... this reader's a turkey, but the Kindle service might succeed, if they can iron the bugs out. But they're going to have to make a whole lot of changes, and some of those aren't up to Amazon — the publishers need to change their minds about DRM, and (perhaps more controversially) to accept that it's necessary to renegotiate their rights splits to permit a true worldwide English language ebook market to evolve.
Finally: some of my books are available on Kindle. I think I've made my opinion of the platform clear. However, if you must drink the Kool Aid, if you've already lost your saving throw vs. shiny!, then please allow me to encourage you to buy my ebooks.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/12/why_i_dont_like_amazons_kindle.html)