Steve Jobs thinks the Kindle will be a flop:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Is this classic Jobsian downplay of an idea before Apple unleashes its own competitor?¹ Methinks yes, because even if people don’t read books any more, they at least do read the scads of content on the internet. Add to that persistent rumors of Apple working on some sort of tablet device, and I’m thinking we might be seeing some sort of Kindle-killer in the next 12 months.

My guess is that Apple will forego e-Ink in favor of a high DPI LCD, like the one in the iPhone but much bigger. It won’t be as legible as e-Ink and will eat batteries more quickly, but it will be in color and won’t have the dreadful refresh problems that e-Ink suffers from. It’ll have to have some sort of unlimited cellular data plan as well as Wi-Fi, allowing you to access internet content wherever you are. And it’ll support eBooks if you choose to read them.

Predicting Apple’s moves is a wretched Kremlinology, but I feel fairly confident that Steve Jobs will surprise us all with a game-changer in this general space.

This critique of the Kindle is so far the best and most thorough I’ve come across. I won’t recap the main points of the article because it’s best heard (read?) from the horse’s mouth. Here’s a sketch the author made correcting the most egregious flaws of the device:

The slide-out keyboard, for one, is spot on. Amazon, hire some consultants!

Before I’m finally done with this topic, I wanted to correct one other part of John’s argument. Gruber:

The only way to lend a friend a Kindle book is to lend them your Kindle reader. “Unshareable books” sounds downright oppressive to my ears.

Engadget:

You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.

It’s just like iTunes in that regard. It seems that Amazon went out of their way to ape Apple’s model in every way feasible.

I agree with John that it would be very smart if they opened the unit up to non-Amazon e-books, and if they’d drop the silly $0.10 fee per document that they charge to convert your PDFs, DOCs and JPGs into Kindle-compatible files.

Unlike John, I hope they correct these few small things and succeed in a big way. All the pieces are there, they just have to put them in place.

For those of you less enamored of the idea of Kindle, here’s some grist for your mill: the always thoughtful John Gruber.

John’s got some good points, though they largely hinge on one’s faith (or lack thereof) in Amazon’s commitment to the Kindle platform. The fact that Amazon will keep the purchased books online for you in a virtual library to some extent sets my mind at ease about their intentions. I think they’re in this for the long haul.

His paranoia over lockdown is a bit overblown too. I’ve bought songs and albums through iTunes that I’ve already owned, and I have very rarely if ever backed up my proprietary AACs to CD, even though that avenue is open to me. And though I can still buy CDs, I buy most of my music through iTunes.¹ I happily embrace Apple’s DRM because I find the convenience of their service to be worth the tradeoff in freedom of use. When I look at Kindle, I see a similar thing.

Nevertheless, the future of e-books might very well be the subscription model: you pay your monthly fee to have access to hundreds of thousands of books, all at your fingertips all the time. Perhaps these will be based around large public libraries, and you’ll access them from the device of your choosing. That sounds appealing as well.

Regardless, these are exciting times. I’m glad to be alive.

It’s finally out—the first viable e-book solution: Amazon’s Kindle. This article from Newsweek covers all the main points, and gets a bit (too?) philosophical about the implications of this potentially paradigm-shifting device. It’s worth a read, though, even if you think the analysis is over-dramatized.

I’m not a futurologist, nor do I intend to play one on the internet. I will say, though, that I’m excited by Kindle’s potential. The ability to carry an entire library with me wherever I go and to instantly augment it with new books wherever I am—these are the things I dream about.

I largely blame the iPod for conditioning my brain in just this way. It’s an insidious form of consumerism fueled by the promise of instant gratification—a false promise, as always, as the gratification is never complete.

Yet still I’m excited. I can see myself making extensive use of a device like this, to its full potential.