Well it is certainly ugly. The new Sony reader looks much nicer and is $100 cheaper (without evdo though):

I am very surprised by the price also. Ebooks have had a real hard time gaining traction in the market. I would have thought it would have been smarter to really make this as cheap as possible to get more people converted to ebooks. As it is, this is really only targeted at the high end power reader / early adopter.

Oh and $1 per RSS feed per month is, a non-starter I thin - at least for this feature.

More comments coming...

Even if this thing wasn't fatally ugly, it's still another device that I'd have to carry around. Sorry, this should be software for the iPhone or whatever, not a separate device.

The DRM is just another non-starter for me. Even the music industry realizes that DRM doesn't work.

Kindle Thoughts

I think Amazon is in a tough position here. We all know that the future of reading is ebooks in some fashion. The question of how to get there is a harder one however. I'm a big ebook fan, although I'm a much bigger audio book fan. I carry piles of e-books with me everywhere I go on my PocketPC. In fact I have purchased electronic versions of paper books I received as presents - just for the convenience. I'm even resigned to the DRM somewhat - although the restrictions could be lighted up a bit.

In Amazon's case I think they are targeting to solve the PC sync, easy access to buying content etc issues over cheap price at the moment. This unfortunately restricts the device to only the fringe high end power reader. At $400, you could buy a lot of cheap paperback books. Most of 'middle' America is hard pressed to read more than a few books a year anyway (if that many). High end power users that are also geeks, might not be the target market either since we already have e-reading (ereader.com) and mobile RSS solutions. Plus I don't see myself paying 1 dollar per RSS feed, or 1 dollar for a normally free project Gutenberg book, not to mention paying money to read my OWN MS word file.

That's not to say it won't be successful, it is just going to be a long battle. Maybe they are hoping that the early adopters will drive things and make it trendy? Hard to say given how ugly the device is - seriously how many odd sharp angles does it need? And why? It does look pretty good from a general usability view though (excluding the multiplicity of next / prev buttons). The keyboard gives it search capabilities the Sony reader doesn't have. The EVDO is a very gutsy move. Being able to buy books from anywhere (withing EVDO coverage at least) is a powerful feature. But I fear it was the wrong tradeoff. I don't see books being a 'spontaneous' purchase. At least not something I couldn't at least plan ahead for. Will I really need to buy a book at the airport? Seems I could have thought about that before I left my house. I think WIFI would have been a good tradeoff for the first gen product. They could have partnered with Starbucks like Apple did, and lower the cost of the device. $200, seems about the max I could imagine for this device. And you'd have to pre-load it with a pile of books.

It would seem that e-books would be the killer platform for the long tail of books, but as Seth points out, the long tail only works when 'everyone' has access to your product. At $400 that just isn't true.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/11/you-wont-find-m.html

Then there is the whole issue of a fixed purpose device. It is hard to guess how that is going to work out. One more thing to carry, one more thing around the house to 'lose'. But the lower power e-paper display is hard to beat for battery life and readability. Seriously if you've ever seen one in real life they are very impressive. The down side of course is that they are super slow to refresh (almost 1 second), so you couldn't use the device for say, surfing the web, it would drive you mad. No line by line scrolling that is for sure, and the screen inverts / glitches for a moment while it does refresh. That kills my favorite ebook feature - auto scroll.

My opinion is that if Amazon really wanted to further e-book adoption I think it should take a different approach. There are several reasonsebooks have not taken off, and I think Amazon could really use its leverage to solve these issues:

1. Too many incompatible formats. No momentum on any given format. No guarantee the format will be around tomorrow.
2. DRM is overly restrictive, and rights very from platform to platform.
3. Ebook cost is too high. The consumer expects things that aren't physical to cost less.
4. Limited availability. Not enough publishers are offering ebooks.

I think Amazon could really be a champion here. It could help pioneer an open e-book standard that allows interoperability between publishers, software readers, devices (iPhone) etc. Sure there would be DRM, but somethings can help, like allowing multiple simultaneous devices, re-download, 'rights' transferability etc. I would like the choice of reading on my laptop, PDA, cell phone OR dedicated ebook reader. (Actually I'd like to switch between these easily like I do today with a browser - with my bookmarks synced across devices!) Amazon could also push the publishers to keep the prices down and provide incentives for releasing ebooks. I think that by opening up a common standard to multiple vendors (hardware, software, publisher and storefronts) they would increase the overall ebook market (which would benefit Amazon as well). I think that would be much more beneficial than creating yet another closed standard. -I'd like some confidence that the book I buy today, will still be readable tomorrow. That is a problem that paper just doesn't have.

Amazon, I really think you missed a golden opportunity here.

I think browsing the web on a device with a slow refresh / monochrome screen and no touch input / pointing device would be very painful. That said, however, Having Wikipedia and some online dictionaries everywhere would be pretty cool.

Making your own content for free is uber yawn. We have tried that before with various 'pocket' document formats for viewing on the go etc. In this day an age you need to 1. Support popular native formats directly, and 2. Support .pdf - that's what it's for!

One thought crossed my mind on how to make this popular. Offer college text books for purchase or rent. If a student could get through a semester carrying nothing but the Kindle, then you might be on to something.

A small clarification, the screen is 1200x900 in monochrome mode (daylight) in color it is 800x600. The display is actually pretty clever. When they are not doing color they can use some of the color RGB pixels to generate more resolution grayscale. The display also has the ability to continue to show an image while the processor, ram etc are powered down. This is one way to get really good battery life. Especially in sunlight mode (no backlight on). The processor is only 433Mhz though.

To get this down to 200 was a pretty big feat. It has a built in web cam, a display that folds flat, wifi mesh routing, a capacitive touch pad and two stylus touch pads. Why two I have no idea. Too bad the handcrank idea was abandoned.

This might make a good web thin client. The Asus EEE-PC has better specs though, but at a higher price.

My iMac is a very thin web client.

Well this and the EEE-PC have prompted a response from Dell:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=04&kc=12924&oc=BQPRIBF

A real 15.4" laptop, with a real processor, hard drive and RAM for $399. Not really targeted at the same market. But if I wanted to pickup an extra laptop...

Fake Steve hammers Mr. OLPC.

My OLPC arrived last week. I'm waiting to do a a review until I can get xubuntu installed on an SD card. The built in linux runs a special interface called "Sugar" that is interesting, but hard to gauge hardware speed. Initially, the form factor and features seem really cool, but the keyboard size is pretty brutal.