Kindle Fails to Spark

There's certainly plenty of fuss being made about the Kindle. And in the tried and true tradition of product criticism, my review is made without ever having actually held the gizmo....

Before getting into my disappointments, let me start by saying that I'm thrilled that the 800-lb gorilla of book retailing is putting its heft behind electronic books. There is unquestionably a place - and I'll talk more about venue shortly - for electronic books. Unfortunately I don't think the Kindle is it.

Think about where and how reading takes place, the challenges to reading, and the types of reading that make sense for these different venues. For example, there's a section of the bookshop called "Coffee Table Books." This is the nothing-but-venue section to the extent that the actual content of the book, the author of the book, etc. are completely irrelevant. All that's germaine is that the format of the book (size, photos, short chunk writing style) is amenable to being displayed and browsed on a coffee table.

Think about "beach reading" or "airplane reading." Whole genres of books that would certainly show up in a normal bookshop get culled from the shelves of an airport bookshop. Rightly so. A Tom Clancy page turner can stand up to the ambient din, the constant interruptions, and the wandering attention of the airplane experience. Can you really read Walden on a plane? Is a book that requires focus, attention, contemplation, much less notetaking, possible to enjoy on a subway?

These are just simple examples. Start to really get mechanical about reading and you start to wonder about the Kindle's success.

• I like to read in bed at night. My wife goes to sleep before me. My Treo (small screen and all) is backlit, meaning I can read without a kludgy booklight or waking her. The Kindle doesn't give me that option.
• I like to read in quick snatches when I'm early for an appointment or if I'm eating lunch alone. I can do this on my Treo because I carry my cellphone with me for work. Am I really going to lug a Kindle around with me all the time? Is interstitial reading really going to justify carrying around a single-purpose device?
• The iPhone created a buzz that literally causes strangers to ask to see your phone. The Kindle's appearance is far more likely to brand the lucky(?) kid carrying one as a major geek.
• Sure you can read on a Kindle at the park, by the pool, in the bath. But will you? I'd be scared to death that my $400 book would get wet, dirty, dropped, etc. Is this really the paperback killer?

Then go to the next step and think about the Kindle's features. Are the additions the Kindle introduces really the stiles that will get people over the hurdles that have prevented them from buying books?

• Carrying 200+ books around with me at a time is kind of cool I suppose. That said, I usually just read one at a time, and unless I'm traveling for an extended period, I really just need the one. How often is the weight factor of carrying 2-3 paperbacks really an issue?
  
• Electronic ink looks better than a computer screen, no question. But better than paper? And how about those colors! Oh, sorry.
• Wireless Internet access is certainly a nice feature. Apple went first, then Microsoft, and now Google. Amazon is definitely late to the game here, and I can't think of any reason that selling books through iTunes, with the elegant search, seamless delivery, and browsing and discovery process that a billion plus song sales have perfected, wouldn't be much more likely.
• Annotation, cross references, and Wikipedia access strike me as features in search of a mass-market. If you're reading a Grisham novel, what would you highlight? Or need to look up? These are academic or technical features, not mass-market ones.
  

Now get back to the buyer. My $400 ante really doesn't get me anything on its own. It gets me the right to buy books and read them. At $10/per, I suppose I'm saving a decent bit, but I'd really have to buy quite a few books to see this as a straight ROI play. I suppose if I lived in a small space, having all my books on the Kindle would be like getting rid of my CDs after ripping them to my iPod. But will I pay $400 for that space-savings? And if I'm really a serious reader, don't I like having my home filled with books, just as much as I dislike having it filled with jewel cases? And how do I share my books? People walk into my home and know what interests me by seeing my books. We talk about these things. With iTunes I can share playlists or music at the office. Can I ask friends to scroll through my Kindle library?

So now that I've carped, what would I suggest positively?

The Kindle has enormous potential as an academic tool. I could certainly see an SD card loaded with the entire reading list and all the text books for an 8th grader. Annotations, cross-references, Wikipedia access, a dictionary, etc. all make a great deal of sense for a school kid. College reading packets could be handled the same way.

I could also see the Kindle (moreso if it offered color) working very nicely as a way for a field technician to carry around an encyclopedic set of product manuals or repair guides. The access speed of the Kindle makes it a substantially better option than a laptop, which trades speed for flexibility.

What gives me hope about the Kindle is that Amazon has been able to get publishers to start thinking about their books as intellectual content instead of a physical artifact. More on this later.