Here. The Kindle, if you’re not familiar, is Amazon’s eink book reader. Bits of information about the device have leaked out since it was first spotted on the FCC’s website last September, but now Steven Levy has the whole story. In brief:
- $399, shipping this week. Very expensive, the price of an iPhone, which seems like an amount only nerds would pay.
- Hardware: 10.3 ounces, six-inch black and white eink
touchscreen, 30 hour battery, “200 books onboard” “more with a memory card” which I’m going to guess will be SD, EVDO for buying books from the device. - Software: Some form of DRM - sounds like one purchase = use on one device, web browser, an email address for the device, annotations on texts, search, Amazon’s store. It can apparently read Word documents and PDFs, but no news on txt or rtf.
- Pricing: Classic (read: public domain) books are $1.99, bestsellers and new releases in hardback $9.99 with backlist books presumably somewhere in between. There are also periodicals: The NYT, The Atlantic, others. Weirdly you can subscribe to blogs but have to pay $0.99-$1.99/mo.
Two years ago I would have been really excited about this. Clearly the biggest deal is the wireless store and Amazon’s pricing, which, aside from the DRM and ripping you off on public domain stuff and RSS feeds seems reasonable, even thrifty. However, with the advent of high-DPI displays in mobile phones, I’m not sure that a single-purpose device like this will be successful at any price. The idea of DailyLit emailing you 1000 word segments of a novel to be read on a phone might terrify the old guard, but fuck the old guard.
Update: me and Tim O’Reilly are on the same track here.
Update 2: Here’s the product page on Amazon. It costs 10ยข to email things to the device - I think that’s to cover a payment to Sprint for data transfer on their network.
Update 3: More from Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Notably PDF is totally unsupported and it’s possible that Amazon’s .azw DRM format and .txt are the only natively readable file formats.
Update 4: Mark Pilgrim rips the Kindle a new port.
