About Kindle MatchBook, Gruber writes...
This is the e-book/print combination I've wanted since 2007.
But it’s too late. I do still get print copies of books shipped to me on occasion, but almost never when buying from Amazon.
Yet, there are sadly books I still can buy in digital form.
Let’s assume for the moment that the Kindle Fire HD lives up to the expectations Amazon has given us. Perhaps the most interesting part is how Amazon differentiated themselves from Apple and other Android tablet makers. Amazon said they want to make money off the content they sell you for your devices rather than on selling the devices themselves.
Now, I’m not going to say that you can’t create on a Kindle Fire HD. Creative people will find creative ways to use any tool. But while Apple sells Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and GarageBand for the iPad; Amazon tells us that their tablets are about selling books, music, movies, and games.
(However much you think creating text content on an iPad doesn’t make sense, consider presentations, music, and graphics. Oh, and thanks to Posts, I’m creating this blog post entirely on my iPad.)
So, for instance, it seems (note “seems”) doubtful that the Fire will ever have the range of music production apps and accessories that the iPad has.
So, if you’re wondering why you should buy an iPad instead of a Fire HD, the big question is how much you want to use it to create and consume. If, for you, a tablet is mostly about consumption, a Kindle Fire might be the best choice for you.
And if you buy an iPad instead, Amazon still wins, because you can still buy your content from them and use it on your iPad. In fact, if you’re thinking about buying content to consume on your iPad from Amazon or Apple, you’re probably better off buying it from Amazon because, e.g., you can read Kindle books on nigh everything, but you can only read iBooks on an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod touch.
The number of times I want to read an e-book in direct sunlight: Almost never. The number of times I want to read an e-book in the dark: Nearly every night.
More often than not, Kindle has a book I’m looking for and the iBook Store does not.
Unfortunately, buying Kindle books isn’t nearly as easy. It’s annoying that I can’t buy books from within the Kindle iOS app as I can from the iBooks app. It’s annoying that I can’t buy Kindle books through the Amazon iOS app. I can’t imagine why this is the case.
The other annoying thing is trying to remember whether I need to go to the iBooks or Kindle app to read a particular book. I wish I had a “bookshelf app” that would show all my iBook and Kindle books and then launch the appropriate reader. It should also have documentation to allow other e-book apps to integrate with it as well.
Pipe dream? Perhaps. It would, however, be “insanely great”.
(I’m less sure about having Good Reader integrate with such a “bookshelf app”.)
Grubers asks, about Alice for the iPad, “How does the Kindle compete with this?”
This is an app, not a iBook. So this is a question about competing on the platform level.
If I’m Amazon, I don’t want to be in the hardware business. Amazon is a software company that builds a retail platform. If I’m Amazon, I want to write the Kindle app for the iPhone, iPad, Slate, Courier, etc. I want to sell books to people that use other people’s hardware. Amazon created the Kindle hardware because there wasn’t a suitable platform...at least for a certain segment of the market. The iPad has the potential to serve that same market, and Amazon stands to win by supporting the iPad.
It’s with the iBooks app and store that Apple is competing with Amazon.
Jeff Bezos wrote:
A strange thing happened on the way to the paperless society. We humans created more paper than ever before. Computer printers (and their evil companion, the ink-toner cartridge) have proliferated, and most of us routinely print out and lug around loads of personal and professional documents. Why? It’s not that buying printers or changing ink-toner cartridges is fun. It’s because reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays. Printing has been worth the hassle.
(It’s currently on the Amazon home page, but I didn’t see a permanent link.)
Reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays? There was a time when that was certainly true, but it hasn’t been true in a long time.
Why do I print things out? There are a lot of factors, of course, but here are currently the primary ones.
Area: I can spread four sheets of paper out on my desk. Buying a display or multiple displays that can show as much at one time is expensive.
Flipping through papers is often easier than managing windows.
I do have a portable screen, but it has less area and flipping between documents on it can be more overhead than managing windows.
These are all trade-offs. The point is not that paper has a clear advantage for any of them. The point is that paper still has enough of an advantage enough of the time to make printing worth the hassle.
The Kindle DX does add another variable to the mix: A portable display with a larger area and different characteristics. It doesn’t, however, fundamentally change the equation.
Having said that, I’ve been wanting something the size of the Kindle DX for a long time. There’s a reason you can buy—e.g.—paper notebooks in pocket, digest, and letter sizes. I think there are roles for devices in similar sizes.
