WSJ: Kindle 2 launching today with Stephen King exclusive
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Feb 9th 2009 7:04AM
posted Feb 9th 2009 7:04AM
The Wall Street Journal just weighed in on today's Amazon press event with two nuggets of information. First, they state as fact that Amazon.com will announce a new version of its Kindle e-book reader. Additionally, Amazon is expected to announce an exclusive new work available only on the Kindle from best-selling author and be-spectacled weirdo, Stephen King. According to the WSJ, "a Kindle-like device" could play a role in the story. Oh Stephen, don't you know that they're all going to laugh at you? Find out all the details later today with our live Kindle launch coverage.
Great... Now I just need them to anounce when they will launch a european version...
she just found out how much it cost.
Wow, that picture makes my spine shiver and never want to own a Kindle. On the other hand, if it makes a woman's clothes magically disappear then consider it sold!
You DON'T WANT TO KNOW what that picture really is.
its so wrong.
and I'm still laughing.
No e-book reader will make clothes disappear. Tequila, on the other hand...
Want your palm red?
Where's the pic from, anyhow?
The movie adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.
...and the scene is when Carrie discovers her period (sorry for the spoiler!!!)
http://listverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/carrie-shot1l.jpg
lol period.
WAAAAAALL The Wall Street Journal
Its nice
well i don't need coffee anymore cause that picture sure woke me up
@_@
Steve lives about 4 minutes from here. I'll just pop in and ask him.
No way, I live like a half hour from him!
Wouldn't this depend on your mode of transportation? Im 4 minutes away from alot of people by Jet.
They really should take down the old kindle from the front page.
"be-spectacled?"
Carrie has always been the hottest babe in all of movie-dom!
The problems with Kindle (version 1) are multiple:
1) It's too expensive. If the device weren't tied to Amazon's service, the price might be acceptable but it is.
2) It's ugly. Designed by a committee ugly.
3) It's horribly proprietary. Support for open formats is deliberately poor, intrusive and a kludge requiring you send your books to Amazon for conversion. Support for other DRM formats or stores is non-existent. Your one and only source for purchasing books is Amazon.
4) Books are too expensive. In many cases the prices are so close to regular books as to be an insult. Laughably Amazon know this themselves since they compare the Kindle price to list and hardcover prices.
5) You can't loan or resell your books
I really wonder who the hell bought one of them. I don't think the Sony Reader is especially better but at least it looks nice and has proper support for other formats.
+1 best comment this topic will ever receive
If it's honestly too expensive there are library cards (I've never SEEN one personally, but heard they're out there). I find it weird that people complain about pricing, if it's too much $$$ don't get it!
The funny thing is the Kindle isn't even overpriced! I find it quite decent considering you can always "download" books and transfer them over, and you get a constant connection to the internet!
but it would be ok though if Apple made it with the same restrictions
DrXYM your points are valid but a little inaccurate. I was skeptical at first, but after a month with it over the summer, I now can't live without my Kindle. But then I felt the same way when I tested the Sony Reader. I'm an avid reader and I love the idea of having hundreds of books on my Kindle. To respond to your points -
1) You are correct it's way too expensive, but I do like the fact that it is so closely integrated with Amazon's service and it's really cool that when you get it, it's already personalized, activated and ready to go. There's NO set up required at all. Now this could be dangerous because if your device was intercepted then anyone would be able to just start charging stuff willy nilly on your account. But the ease of use was really amazing. The battery life on this thing is freaking amazing, it lasts over 3 days - with the wi-fi turned on. I took it with me to London for a week and only recharged it the day of my flight home, and that was just to be safe because it still had a 1/3 charge left.
2) It is butt ugly and at first I hated this thing because of those darn side buttons made it almost impossible to hold, but after a few weeks with it I eventually got used to it. The big keyboard chin originally bugged me but you get used to it, I like going into a borders or barnes and nobles being able to see what's out and immediately ordering on my kindle.
3) It is proprietary, no denying that, but you have all of Amazon so do you really need another store? And you can connect it to your PC or Mac (I have both) and it easily handles text files. So I just take a PDF or webpage (I like fanfiction) and dump it into word, save it as Text and transfer it over, no issues.
4) Books are expensive - yes and no. When I tested the Sony Reader, what disgusted me was all the books in the Sony store were a minimum of $19! $19 for a freaking ebook. Sony is out of their mind they deserve to go under. I don't know if the prices are still that high. But by comparison Amazon charges, generally, PAPER BACK prices for ebooks, the highest I paid for an ebook is $7 and that was for Twilight (awful book). I picked up Steven King's The Stand and The Shining for $5. They have a ton of classics for $1 or $2. I picked up the complete works of Shakes for $2, Complete Alexandre Dumas for $2, War and Peace for $1, Obama's book for $3, etc. These are books I would never buy or read others, but they were so cheap that it was a great impulse buy. Also every Kindle Book as a free sample available so you can load up on Samples if you want, and these are pretty hefty, like 2 or 4 chapters. The other cool thing about Amazon is they have a "digital locker" so anything you order can easily be re-downloaded if you purchase a new kindle or something happens. Unlike iTunes where several of my purchases recently was lost due to service interruptions during the download and I never got my downloads back. I hate iTunes because of this reason.
5) I don't care about loaning my books, I'm tired of loaning stuff to people. Although I don't know how you can give the kindle to someone else. Because if I ever decide to upgrade, I'd like to give mine to my nephew but it's tied to my Amazon account, so I don't know how that process would work.
My wish list would be for it be in color, bigger screen (wider), the lack of a back light is irritating as heck so would definitely like one of those, the navigation is a little slow and clunky so that could be sped up, I wish it had page numbers so you know where you are in the book and how much farther to go. The way it does it now is pretty awful. But otherwise, I love the Kindle.
1) The problem with the price is that you can buy a PDA for less which holds more books, with reader software for every format and does a lot more besides read books. Even the Sony Reader which has fairly decent standard support is cheaper in some models. Why is the Kindle, a device tightly coupled to a single service so expensive? The price might be easier to swallow if (like the iPod), the store functionality was in addition to top notch open standards support but it isn't. The thing should be a lot cheaper to reflect what it is or the standards support should be better.
2) I think looks are one thing they could fix in a new version.
3) Assuming the current price of the device, yes it would be great to have a choice of stores. Just like everything else there will be times where shopping around will yield a better price, or better service. It's called competition. That or the price of the device should reflect its proprietary nature.
As for file formats, I have books and documents in a variety of formats. For example, I download O'Reilly books from their Safari site and they come in PDF. Blogs might be in HTML. Internal company documents might be in MS Word. Yet I'm meant to submit them to Amazon in guaranteeing their formatting is completely trashed. Why can't Kindle just read PDF format files? Additionally I might have books (such as documents) which I really don't want Amazon to be knowing about. It's none of the godamned business what books I have.
4) I'm not saying Sony is any better, in fact from what I've seen their store is even worse. The underlying issue is pure greed by all ebook publishers and stores who are trying to pull a fast one. Amazon is just the latest tying themselves to a proprietary device and format. If they had any sense publishers would force store's hands to adopt a single delivery model and file format. Let stores compete out of their own margins.
A book is a couple of hundred kilobytes, maybe a megabyte at most. The cost for storage and delivery is neglible, pennies at most. And there are no returns, no stock to manage, no warehouse space to rent, no printing / pulping or transportation costs. It must be quite possible to preserve the margins for authors, publisher and the store at a lower price than now. Especially considering that the fundamental rights you lose when you buy ebooks.
5) The point is that with most physical books, music and video, you have the right to loan your copy, or sell it. This right is removed from you with DRM'd books. I can sell old physical books and claw back perhaps 20% of their price if I wish. More on ebay. I can loan the book to a friend or swap books. That option isn't even open to me with ebooks. Equally bad, I can't buy second hand ebooks for a fraction of a new book's price. Why not? Just because the book isn't physical should't mean I can't sell my *rights* to that book. After all, rights are bestowed by digital signing and crypto. Amazon or whoever could implement a service to revoke my right to a book and transfer it to someone else. It's just that they don't. Again, this wouldn't be so offensive if the price of the books and hardware were considerably cheaper, but they aren't.
I think colour would be a great addition to any book reader, but I wonder if e-ink even allows for that. Current performance is sluggish too making it only suitable for paged content, not web pages or interactive content. Perhaps the future for book reading devices will be some kind of OLED screen with LED backlighting.
Dude, I don't have time to read all that. How'd you guys find time to WRITE it?
It's too expensive, which is why it keeps selling out and there's a new model a year later.
http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/kindle3.jpg
hehe!
product placement reaches books.
like Jack says, "synergy!"
Sidebar fellas, but good work on applying the appropriate film grain to the Kindle on this photochop. Not often enough is this done. ;)
Oh, that is the line, Mr. Ricker. That is the line and you have crossed it!
More appropriately, if the Kindle 2 launches with "Needful Things"....
I checked the Kindle store and some of the prices have gone up in the last month. They are now asking $12 for the Twilight book 4 and Obama's Audacity of Hope is now $10 which is way too high for an Ebook. But you can pick up the first 2 installments of Twilight for $6. But the new price increases are a bad way to go Amazon.
I CAN SEE YOUR DIRTY PILLOWS!
They're called BREASTS, mama.
Best Engadget Picture EVER!
Amazon: Stephen, can you write a novel specifically for the Kindle audience?
Stephen: Sure! Hold on... [type type type type type]
[12 minutes later]
Stephen: Here you go!
Amazon: !!!!
Yeah, that's how it's going to get popular, by making physical books unavailable. I can imagine King enthusiasts printing and binding their own copies just as the scenes would rip a film that isn't available digitally.
If _ever_ there were a case for having an onscreen keyboard... this device would warrant it. PS, I've seen someone use one of these things in public. They're huge!
Her face scared me to hell, i can't step into the washroom.