Analysts Sound Death Knell For Dedicated E-Readers, So Multi-Purpose Tablets Win

Selburn said that 2011 appears to have been the peak of the e-reader market, when IHS said that 23.2 million e-readers shipped, compared to 14.9 million shipped for all of 2012. By 2016, Selburn said that just 7.1million e-readers will ship, equal to a loss of more than 66% since 2011.

via Last chapter for e-readers? – Computerworld.

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Single use tech devices have a more limited audience especially when they must compete against more feature rich multi-purpose devices. Why have just a reader when for just a few dollars more you can get all the features of the reader plus all the features of a tablet. You can read the latest best seller AND check your email, update Facebook, chat with friends and so on. Of course e-readers aren’t going away, but they won’t be dominating the market for hand held devices either.

Kindle Fire: Amazon’s Latest Consumer Point of Sale Terminal

The Kindle Fire seems to have been designed and built not as a tablet, but as a device to read and watch that happens to be a tablet. It has been designed to help Amazons customers buy more in the best way possible it’s that sort of user centric approach that will make it so popular.

Kindle Fire: Developers be Warned – John Nye

Good succinct article that gets to the heart of the matter: Amazon doesn’t sell tablets, Amazon sells stuff and the Kindle Fire and its siblings are designed to help you buy more stuff quickly and efficiently. Sure, the Fire will have access to Android apps from the Amazon App store, however consumers (and developers) will need to keep in mind that it is running a forked version Android 2.1, so some stuff is not going to work as expected. Even though there will always be more powerful, more capable Android tablets on the market, the Fire will find market share as the Android device for the home consumer. Just the thing for using around the house to read books and magazines, watch video, listen to music, perhaps chat with friends, or check your email. I suspect that if your looking for a powerful device for serious business and education use the Kindle Fire may well disappoint. Of course we won’t know until mid-November when it actually appears.

Kindle Gets Audio/Video… On the iPad and iPhone

Amazon just introduced a audio and video to the Kindle, but the only way to experience the new Kindle multimedia books is on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. A baker’s dozen of titles already come in multimedia editions, including Rick Steves’ travel guides, Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar, and Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds In Song.

via TechCrunch – Amazon Introduces A Video/Audio Kindle . . . But Only On The iPad And iPhone.

Interesting development., but a couple of things are worth noting here. First the entire collection of multimedia editions numbers just 13 indicating this may be a test as much as anything else. Second, while it seems odd that they would sell ebooks that have features that aren’t usable on the Kindle, think of it as simply expanding their market by offering more ebooks to a wider market by including other features.

Think of it this way, a Kindle now costs $189. For your money you get what is considered the industry standard in readers. A great device for reading fiction and non-fiction works that are primarily text. It is a device that is aimed at casual reading and it works very well for that.

Of course text is hardly the only content type that can be used effectively in ebooks. By their very nature ebooks can be multimedia works incorporating color graphics, images, audio, and video. Amazon knows this and they also now that selling those works requires a platform that is different than the Kindle. No problem, the Kindle software turns your iPad or iPhone into a Kindle and it will handle multimedia quite well. So, Amazon offers audio and video enhanced ebooks for the Kindle on the iPad/iPhone. If you want ebooks with those features get your self the more expensive iPad[1], starting at $499, and buy those books Amazon.

I think this move is really designed to enhance the Kindle app and make it more appealing than Apple’s own iBooks. No need to have 2 separate accounts for your ebooks, just use the Kindle for all your ebook needs. Of course I would expect that we will see the multimedia features of the Kindle app turn up on the Windows and Mac versions of the software. And at some point Amazon will introduce a color Kindle of some kind.

[1] Yes, you can get the features on the Kindle iPhone, I suspect that you will find it more satisfying on the iPad.

Free PC app for the Kindle will soon be downloadable | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

“Kindle for PC features Amazon’s Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Whether you read Kindle books on a Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the free Kindle applications, you can always have your reading with you and never lose your place. With Kindle for PC, you can read some on your PC, read some on your Kindle, and always pick up right where you left off. Whispersync helped make the Kindle for iPhone application the most popular books app in the Apple App Store.”

via Free PC app for the Kindle will soon be downloadable | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.

It was inevitable and seems timed right to get Kindle content onto PCs just as the nook hits and competition heats up in the p-book market. Now if they would only deal with other formats and that pesky DRM.

Princeton Kindle Trial Gets Mixed Reviews

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.” …

Katz also added that the absence of page numbers in the Kindle makes it more difficult for students to cite sources consistently.

“The Kindle doesn’t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,” Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are “convenient for reading,” they are “meaningless for anyone working from analog books.”

via Kindles yet to woo University users – The Daily Princetonian.

Not much of a surprise here. I find the Kindle great for leisure reading, but not so useful for work related stuff. I’ve read a number of novels and even law review articles and court opinions on it and it is fine for straight forward reading (probably why they call them e-READERS). It is not very useful for my tech oriented work material though because I either need to flip around a lot, easy in the physical artifact or copy and paste, straight forward in anything on my desktop.

As mentioned in the quotes above, the lack of annotation and highlighting features (yes it does have basic annotation features, but they are not all that great.) coupled with the inability to make meaningful citations are real show stoppers in legal academia. And, FWIW, it isn’t just the Kindle that is a problem here, it is the entire class of dedicated e-readers. As a class they are designed for reading, books mostly, but increasingly news sources as well.

Learning is a different activity than reading, though reading can be a component of learning. In a learning environment, reading becomes more than the passive recognition of words. It should be an active experience that makes use of the reading material as a raw material that is transformed into knowledge. What we need is a class of device that doesn’t really exist yet, the e-learner.

The e-Learner device would be an excellent e-reader with full unfettered net access that provides the student with the ability to use the reading material to build knowledge. It would have annotation, highlighting, and note taking capabilities, and provide some sort of universal citation format for citing the materials. A touch interface would allow for flipping through materials and real, deep hyperlinking would allow for meaningful search and discovery. Net access would provide a gateway to wider bodies of information and knowledge.

Of course no such device really exists today. You could sort of fake it with a laptop or netbook, but the underlying tools and resources are not really there. Merely converting a casebook or course materials into PDF or HTML only starts the process, but it is a start. Once materials are in an electronic format then the other tools will come along. And perhaps one day not long from now we will see the e-learner.

Sony Reader Goes EPUB Only

On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

via Major news: Sony goes EPUB only; scraps its own format!! | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.

This is a big deal and puts some pressure on Amazon to open up the Kindle to more formats natively and let its ebooks onto other devices.

The Rocketbelt Caper: Free eBook, Print Too

“When three men set out on a quest to build a real-life Buck Rogers-style flying machine, their obsession with the Rocketbelt 2000 shattered their friendship and set in motion an astonishing chain of events involving theft, deception, assault, a bizarre kidnapping, a ten million dollar lawsuit and a horrifically brutal murder. From sci-fi to reality, this is the incredible true story of the amazing rocketbelt.” – Description at Feedbooks, where this gripping history from the annals of aviation tech is free.

via ‘The Rocketbelt Caper: A True Tale of Invention, Obsession and Murder’: Free in E and even P | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.