All Posts Tagged With: "kindle"

My wife, Suzanne, has long had to put up with a husband who’s a new-gadget hound. I’m an early adopter but not a super-early adopter. We’ve had a TiVo DVR for years, but I wasn’t among the very first to purchase one. I waited for the iPhone 3G to come out before catching iPhone fever. (Suzanne has one, too.) She tends to tag along, patient with me when I enthuse about some new gizmo. (Like the Roku box I bought as a family Christmas present. No one else in the family had a clue what it was supposed to do.) Eventually Suzanne sees the wisdom of (most) of my new-gadget purchases.

Since she’s a school librarian and avid reader, I thought that an e-book reader would be a special holiday gift. So I ordered Suzanne a nook from Barnes & Noble, preferring the virtual screen interface to the Amazon Kindle’s many physical buttons.

In observing her use of the nook in the first couple weeks, I’ve come to predict that the nook (and the Kindle) will not win over huge chunks of the population. While the devices and their E Ink screens make for a wonderful reading experience (my opinion) and are easy on the eyes in a way that reading lengthy prose on a backlit screen is not, they’re still not quite ready for truly mass-market success.

Perhaps Apple will debut the Kindle- and nook-killer later this month. I’m looking forward to seeing what Steve Jobs is hiding from public view.

Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of Suzanne’s first couple weeks with the nook (as observed by me):

• Initial enthusiasm and “that’s so cool” reaction
• Love for some features like tap on a word to get a definition; add notes to sections as you’re reading; highlighting key passages; etc.
• Some disillusionment: “You mean you can’t read it in bed in the dark? You have to have a light on to see the screen?”
• After she played around with it a bit, the nook went in a bedside drawer, not seeing much use

The final point needs some explanation, because it’s not a rejection of the product. Rather, Suzanne has a pile of books on her reading and book-club list, waiting to be picked up. What’s the point of spending an extra $10 for a nook e-version? Books on nook will have to come later, when the paid-for or from-the-library printed versions have been read.

One book on her to-read list is already in hand in digital form, purchased from Amazon for reading on her iPhone. She was disappointed that that purchase couldn’t simply be ported to her nook.

More alarming (to me) was an e-mail receipt showing up in my inbox from Amazon.com, showing that Suzanne had ordered a printed book after receiving the nook. It turns out that it was a cookbook, with color photos, and that didn’t seem like the right kind of book to order in digital form for an e-reader than only displays black, grays, and white.

Magazines and newspapers? Nope, she told me; won’t use the nook for that, especially since the monthly subscription prices per publication are ridiculously high, and she can read most of them on the web for free.

I’ll continue to spy on my wife’s nook usage (or lack thereof), and I suspect that I’ll see her make the transition to digital books read on the nook, in time.

Suzanne was, I guessed, the ideal nook/Kindle convert: librarian, book lover, and not a techno-phobe. Alas, it was not love at first sight.

This makes me think that we’re not quite there yet. What will become a mass-market hit, I believe, will be a thin tablet computer that does everything an iPhone with a big color screen could do (i.e., a full-fledged wirelessly connected computer), and is an outstanding form factor for reading books.

The trick will be getting the price down to a few hundred dollars, and that may take a while.

The ultimate tablet, I think, would be that large, thin iPhone/iTouch device with a stunning color, backlit touch-screen. And it would have a switch to turn the screen into a paper-like E Ink experience with no backlight, for comfortable book and other long-form reading.

Alas, unless Mr. Jobs has some magic up his sleeve, that may be a pipe dream.

Strike those last two paragraphs in my original of this blog item. It seems that a single screen that can be both back-lit color and E-Ink quality reflective display for reading in light is possible; indeed, it exists. Pixel Qi showed off such technology at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Here’s a Gizmodo report on this amazing development.

And then there’s Mirasol displays, which could be the technology that moves media tablets where they need to go. Exciting stuff!

A new, and very large, Barnes & Noble bookstore opened here in Boulder, Colorado, recently, replacing a smaller store half a block away. I’ve wondered since construction started how the giant bookstore chain could justify a larger store when more and more we’ll be seeing people buying and reading books on digital tablets like Amazon’s Kindle. Wouldn’t smaller bookstores be in our future, not bigger ones?

With the announcement of B&N’s Nook e-reader device to compete with the Kindle, now I understand. The Nook digital strategy supports the brick-and-mortar business — the physical stores — of B&N.

I think the Nook business model is freaking brilliant! Here’s what it looks like:

• The Nook is priced about the same as a Kindle, but advances e-reader technology a bit. It features an E-Ink screen (no color) for reading, but also has a color navigation screen below the reading area.
• It adds a lend-a-book feature; it’s limited, but a great idea — and Amazon is sure to follow with something similar.
• You can preview and buy books anywhere you have a AT&T 3G signal or a wi-fi connection.
• And the best part: B&N says it “soon” will allow Nook owners to take their devices into any B&N physical store and read any e-book for free while in the store using the free wi-fi there!

I’m in awe of whoever thought up that last item. It’s a brilliant strategy to get more people into B&N bookstores. Nook owners will come in to read more than just the samples available to them outside the stores’ wi-fi range. They’ll buy coffee and perhaps other physical merchandise. They’ll read maybe a few chapters into a new book while lounging in a comfy chair in the store, then probably decide to buy the full e-book to finish at home later.

Sure, there might be a few freeloaders who spend time inside the stores reading entire books for free on their Nooks without actually buying the e-books. But so what?! I suspect that the increased coffee shop sales and the number of people who do buy the full e-books will far outweigh the freeloading. And the physical stores will be more crowded, sending the social signal the B&N stores are the place to be.

I had expected bookstores to eventually die off in larger numbers, and for chains like B&N to have fewer stores in the future. But this Nook strategy, as I see it, ensures a bright future for its brick-and-mortar stores. It gives the Nook a big advantage over the Kindle, since Amazon doesn’t have physical stores.

As for independent bookstores, if e-readers like the Nook, Kindle, et al truly take off, I’m not sure how they’ll stay healthy over the long run. But at least they probably have a longer lifespan than printed newspapers; I sense more people willing to say goodbye to the printed newspaper than the comfy printed book.