Kindle: First Impressions

The first thing that struck me with the Kindle was its display. The welcome text was, as many other people have also mentioned, not on the transparent sheet covering the display, it was the display! Outstanding, and very paper-like (which means that you need some light to read the Kindle in).

Buying books from Amazon is easy and over the air as expected. What's a tad difficult is finding free, contemporary ebooks ;-) Project Gutenberg and its various off-shoots are nice, but they don't quite cut it if you're looking for Freakonomics or Blink! or ... catch my point?

Kindle plays nice with many popular formats, but sadly, that doesn't include PDFs. I'm told that PDF handling has improved significantly since the first generation of Kindles, but there's certainly a long way to go before it gets as easy and natural to read PDFs on the Kindle as it is to read MOBI or HTML files. Fortunately, thanks to a heads-up from a friend, I now use the free ebook library management program Calibre which helps me overcome difficulties with Kindle-unfriendly formats. Calibre converts ebooks into a great variety of formats specific to your favourite ebook reader. I'm happy now!

Transferring books to your Kindle is as easy as copying stuff over the supplied USB cable. If you prefer Wifi, then all you'll need to do is send the ebooks over to your Kindle's email address and the Kindle will download them when you're connected to a Wifi network. Alternatively, if you're flush with money and don't know how to spend it, you could give it away, £0.10 at a time per MB, to Amazon's Whispernet service which will deliver it over their excellent 3G network.

A feature that I find very handy is the built in dictionary. Using it is quite intuitive: you move the cursor over to the desired word, and a small hint / tool-tip pops up at the top or bottom with the meaning of the word. If you'd like to read the full entry, just press the 'Return' key on the keypad.

No review of the Kindle can be complete without the superb feature called synchronisation. In one stroke, Amazon ensures that you can read your ebooks - from wherever you last left them - on any supported device, and even on your PC. How? Use the Kindle application for your favourite device. There's a catch however: it seems as if books that you transfer through USB don't get synchronised (well, they didn't get synchronised on my Android). I'll update this post later if I'm proved wrong.

New iPad idea

Note to book and magazine publishers: this is an idea that's worth listening to, and if you go ahead and implement it, all I ask you is for a few free ebooks a year. Deal?

I've been thinking about app ideas for the newly launched, but somewhat embarrassingly named, Apple iPad. One of this device's personal let-downs for me was the rather underwhelming iBooks app. Nothing wrong with the app itself: it's stylish, and has the classic Apple touch. However, I was expecting something ground-breaking; something revolutionary for ebooks, something akin to what iTunes did for music. Alas, that was not to be! But the beauty of the iPhones and their bigger-sized cousins is not in the device itself; rather, it's in the fantastic applications (more than 140,000, Apple tells us) that have made them the stars of the smartphone market. And so it is that my idea is not about any tweaks to the device itself. Intrigued? Read on.

The trouble with ebook readers in their present form is, again, not their form factor, or their display, or any of their hardware characteristic. Rather, it's the ebook delivery model that's flawed. No one in their right mind seriously thinks that ebooks should be priced at $10 (or their global currency equivalent). So, while it's admirable that Amazon steps up to the publishers and challenges them, it's not going to resolve anything until the publishers choose to not commit the same folly as their counterparts in the movie and music business: miss the forest for the trees. You see, while the global market for books may not be as big as that for music and movies, it's still huge. Empirically, however, one of the barriers to an even higher readership is the price and availability of books, and that is something book publishers cannot afford to lose sight of. In India, for example, in many major cities, unauthorised copies of books are sold on pavements for a fraction of the price of the original, and people - even the ones who can afford the originals - buy them. The reason in the case of most such books is that the perceived value of those books is far less than what the publishers had in mind. Enter book rentals.

Book rentals are not, strictly speaking, a new idea. The concept of lending libraries is at least a hundred years old, and in western countries, public libraries lend books free of charge. However, this is where the delivery mechanism comes in. Imagine a device like the iPad - or even the Kindle or Nook for that matter - being able to offer book rentals, for an amount as small as a few cents a book. After all, the cost of creating copies of ebooks is infinitesimal, especially as compared to the cost of printing a physical book. Thus, while the publisher doesn't really incur any cost in making an e-copy, he would incur a small profit for each subscriber that 'borrows' the book. And, unlike with physical copies of books, the customer could be allowed to keep the book for as long as he / she wants. This only makes sense when you remember that while there may only be limited copies of a book in a library, the number of e-copies of a book can be virtually infinite. Thus, more people than ever before can read the latest bestseller, and (electronic) book stands need never put up 'Out of stock' notices on their store fronts.

To me, the notion that this is a win-win situation for everyone concerned is a no-brainer. The subscriber gets to read all the books he wants, when he wants, where he wants (on his iPad, iPhone, computer, Kindle),and publishers get a good profit for each electronic copy that cost them nothing to produce. As an added benefit, there are no vendors, middle-men, retail channels, distribution headaches, etc. to worry about.

Is anything not to like? Is anyone listening?