Following the launch of Amazon's
third-generation Kindle, company CEO Jeff Bezos sat down to discuss the e-reader business with
USA Today. We'd recommend giving the whole piece a look-see if you just can't get enough
Kindle in your life, but a few choice quotes caught our attention. For starters, Bezos predicted that Kindle e-book sales will "surpass paperback sales sometime in the next 9 to 12 months," and that "sometime after that, we'll surpass the combination of paperback and
hardcover." Considering that the Kindle platform is but 33 months old, and that books are just
a wee bit older, that's pretty impressive. In a separate sit-down with
Pocket-lint, Steve Kessel -- Amazon's senior vice president of Worldwide Digital Media -- teased us all with regard to a color version of the company's famed e-reader. 'Course, we've known that Bezos and Company
aren't too hopeful about such a thing in the near-term, but we've yet to actually hear the company confess to having specific color alternatives in the lab. If you'll recall, we found Qualcomm's
Mirasol demonstration
worthy of laud back at CES, and according to Kessel, "that's in the lab." We're also told that a slew of other color options are always in testing, though, so we're doing our darnedest to not get those hopes too high. It ain't working, but still...
posted July 29th 2010 9:50AM
I like this. killing trees needs to stop.
@FrankDTank
What will you use to wipe your ass then?
Tree hugging hippies, too bad we cant use you lot to print books with...
And the "three seashells"... they don't work.
@A25i
Someones been watching Judge Dredd lol
@Cg006 Demolition Man
@angelusp: Books are useless?
I mean, sure, we should stop cutting down trees for Twilight, but not all books.
I like the idea of kindle and I will buy when more books that I read will be available for it.
but please - no color. Kindle is so good because it doesn't generate light.
eyes hurt on everything else.
@arybaczyk
Since when does color automatically mean backlit LCD? That's so 2008, man. Get with the times. Do you even know about the Mirasol tech mentioned in the article? Did you even read the article?
@angelusp
It's not useless. It creates books which power our industry, educate our children, inform ourselves, and provide space to doodle on when we're bored. It also helps clean your posterior.
Most paper trees, at least in the US, are generally raised on "farms" and replanted. We're not "losing" anything here.
I always get a little tired of the "tree saints" who come on here and try to demonize the rest of us for using paper.
Still cant imagine school bags being replaced by a kindle pouch. give me some time.
They would sell even more ebooks if they didn't try to tie their sales to their own devices. Time they did what they did with DRM free music. I for one would like to be able to read book downloads on any device and as such Amazon have missed out on a fair few sales as my Sony reader is catered for by other retailers.
E-readers will be the new thing once the world gets a grip of how much were screwing up the carbon cycle.
@angelusp
"Print is dead."
-Dr. Egon Spengler
@paul34 I agree paper has its uses, but NOT cutting trees for books is better than cutting trees for books.
If anything, I'm hoping for a transfer of using timber to using hemp (the weed that doesn't make you high). Its cheaper, it grows anywhere and you don't have to bleach it.
Ooooh what if Kindles grew on trees?
Hmm, I need to cut down on my coffee.
I love books and book shelfs and collections of COLORFUL things lined up in an obsessive order from large to small. I also read a lot of magazines that would make no sense in black and white....
I'm not touching these things till they are in full color, this black and white garbage is going to look quite silly in a few years.
None the less, these Kindles are wonderful...
If my wife's Kindle could somehow vibrate I am pretty sure she would leave me for it. She loves it that much.
Everytime I buy a overpriced text book from my college I think to myself I could have one little device to store all of these books if the publishers just got with the times and made a ebook version I could use at a reasonable price, instead of having to carry around 4, 5 heavy books, I'll just carry one little device and use that instead, plus having 3G I can look up stuff on the included dictionary, and store documents on the thing to use.
@AiRSK
While publishers will certainly embrace e-books, don't expect to see prices come down. Most of the cost of a textbook is not paper, but the talent to write the book, which will not get any cheaper with e-books. The only way you can save money unfortunately, is through buying used.
@AiRSK
Like you, I hope to one day not carry 50 pounds of books. Even more importantly, I hope that my daughter doesn't have to develop muscles like a linebacker by the time she's in 2nd grade, just to carry her backpack.
@Seraphim Lokk at the model that the publishers selling ebooks on the Entourage Edge follow.
The ebook textbook costs 50% of the retail price of a new textbook. Sounds like a good deal? So the $150 textbook costs you $75.
The kicker is that they are only leasing you the textbook; with the lease expiring in one year. So if you want to keep the textbook forever (good plan if you are an engineer), you probably will have to pay full cover price (and that isn't part of their model).
I
It will be really cool when you can skin an eBook reader itself using full body eInk with a virtual cover of the book you are currently reading, so others around you know. So many sharing possibilities - just as with real books.
@angelusp You do realize the huge environmental impact of these ebook devices right? The toxic chemicals required to make them, the fab plants that manufacture them, etc.
Things way more toxic than a printing company.
I like my Kindle, but as ebook prices have increased, and some publishers demand sales tax in the ebook price, I've been buying more used "real" books instead.
Seriously? Killing trees? Cmon guys I thought more of you all. There are more trees today, than there were at Columbus's arrival. Thats fact! Ever heard of the "CCC"? Google it. Holding a kindle or iPad is nice, but it's no book. If we don "kill trees" for books, what will happen to them? Good grief. Go eat a hamburger and live a little.
Smh @ killing trees. Un. Real.
@BlondeBuddhist No, there are not more trees in the US today than at Columbus's arrival, that's a myth. In the early colonial eras, the eastern US was all one HUGE forest. It was said a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from the coast to the Mississippi River. Most of that is gone now, as are many of the huge forest swaths on the west coast.
@BlondeBuddhist
Oh wow. Maybe you should actually read a book instead of whining about them. Paper, E-Ink, it doesn't matter how the content is delivered, you just need to learn a bit more.
@Dreamwriter just make eSquirrels who can jump farther. Problem solved.
The Kindle as a Plattform is still in a very bad state.
There is hardly anyone developing for the device. Is there even something like an app store for kindle?
The image browser is still "experimental".
The internet browser is still "experimental".
pathetic.
You know in the end the kindle will have to compete against IPad and all those android Tablets on the horizon. Both have thousands of apps.
If amazon wants a device that can only be used to read their own books, then for craps sake it should be for free.
Precisely. I'm just waiting for Apple to come out with iPad version 2 and then I'm dumping my Kindle.
@Schattenherz
I don't want apps on my Kindle. It's designed for reading, and that's what I use it for. Amazon is right not to try to make the Kindle all things for all people. Get an iPad for the other stuff. For reading books (and newspapers and magazines), nothing beats a Kindle.
@Schattenherz
Yeah, you completely miss the point of the device. It's for reading books. That is it's purpose. It does it incredibly well. Do you throw this kind of fit when you see paperback books sitting around? Do you complain to the MP3 player manufacturers that you can only use them for music?
I have an Android phone. I have an iPod Touch. I have several computers. However, when I want to read, I rarely use any of those. I use my Kindle. Worth every penny I spent on it. Oh, by the way, you can get books from other sources besides Amazon. Its very easy.
@Schattenherz You're missing the point; Amazon doesn't care about the Kindle hardware, they just want to sell e-books. As a platform Kindle is actually a rousing success; available on tons of different devices and types of devices (typically for free except for the Kindle hardware itself), able to sync between all the different devices and give you the "available anywhere" cloud system that will soon be prevalent in all of our technology.
@ZombiePete
Yeah, Whispersync is amazingly useful. When I need to write papers on a book for a class, I make highlights and annotations as I read on my Kindle, and then, I use the computer application to view the same annotations and quotes, saving me worlds of time when trying to cite page numbers and remember various happenings in the book.
The Kindle is an amazing platform.
Schattenherz fail.
@metafor
You do realize that in the past few years it has been possible to make electronic devices such as these without toxic chemicals for either the screens or the semiconductor fabs. Lithium polymer batteries are also recyclable. If anything, the paper industry uses far more toxic chemicals to print paperbooks than the electronic industry these days. Yes there are alternatives, like soy based inks, and paper is 100% recyclable, but the fact that you need much more paper, and that the paper companies are losing money, thus have less incentive to actually switch to more environmentally friendly inks.
@angelusp
And actually, paper is about the most resilient "back-up device" available. When properly stored, paper books can last a millennium and still be readable. USB drives and CDs can barely last a year, and harddrives are barely any better.
Also, cutting down and regrowing trees ensures a steadily high rate of carbon removal from the atmosphere. Once a tree reaches old age, it's rate of carbon extraction decreases.
Amazon Kindle is a great product!!!
http://whywrite.tumblr.com/
Dedicated devices do things better. After seeing the "Kindle on the Beach" ad , it was so obvious.
Better battery life , better readability in sun and evrywhere else , thinner lighter , cheaper. Free DL of books on 3G.
But the best part is like Bezos said "pay once , read anywhere" (any platform)
iBooks doesn`t stand a chance against this.
@bufbarnaby
I agree completely. I can share our purchases across all of our devices, except for the newspapers or magazines, but I'm sure they'll come. It's very convenient.
@James Sonne
What are you talking about?
CDs have a life expectancy of ~10 years.
USB flash drives are good for 10,000 - 100,000+ writes (Depending on the drive). I still have a working 64MB flash drive that I bought back in the day. Unfortunately, I just don't have a use for it.
SCSI drives are rated for 171 years.
@ManWithHat You give a best-case-ever scenario for paper - lasting a millennium when "properly stored" - and then say CD's and USB keys only last a year?? You do realize that CD's never degrade, right? Wherever you are storing your paper to last so long, a CD will last even longer. Especially the cheap paper used in modern books - modern commercial paper is not designed to last a millennium.
@Dreamwriter That was meant for @James Sonne
@metafor You do realize the huge environmental impact of the paper production process, right? The process to make a Kindle may take toxic chemicals but it is only made once. The toxic chemicals required to make paper must be used again and again as you make new paper books.
@Tagbert That'd be a valid argument if most people bought Kindles only once. This is what, the 3rd upgrade cycle already?
@ashwinkn No, it has not been. Even RoHS complaint devices still involve tons of toxicity in manufacturing (albeit not necessarily the end product).
See:
http://cnx.org/content/m14503/latest/
http://www.pwbrc.org/members/pdf/works99/Muller.pdf
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ISEE.2004.1299707
@paul34 The practice of growing trees on a farm is dangerous for the environment because plantation forest is generally a monoculture. Also paper industry still uses a lot of old trees and most of imported paper is made from old trees and not from farm trees. Paper industry consumes 35% of all harvested trees and is major contributor to deforestation. In addition to deforestation there is air and soil pollution with dangerous chemicals used in ink.
@angelusp
Just FYI, most tree production practices is pretty sustainable and trees are renewable. So we aren't just cutting down trees uselessly.
I don't condone strip clearing of the land (ie what many countries in S. America do), but most forestry practices in the USA is very environmentally friendly. Besides, I don't think people realize that most paper is not 100% wood--many other materials such as clays are used in paper production.
Lastly, there are many environmental groups/activists that believe in harvesting from virgin forests--this is because older trees actually do not fix carbon dioxide as efficiently as younger trees do.
@angelusp I think you meant, "unnecessarily" since in this day and age digitizing media, whether it's written material, audio, pictures or whatnot, looks like the way to go.
Pretty soon the government is going to start freaking out about the loss of paper books because the portable e-reader devices are unavailable to low income families. I wouldn't be surprised to see an e-book tax created to help subsidize publishers to keep printing books at a loss, or to provide e-readers to those under a certain wage bracket.