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Amazon e-book opens new chapter in publishing war
Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Editor23 Aug 2010
Amazon's £100 electronic book goes on sale this week amid claims it could change the way we read books and cause a major price war in the British publishing industry.
The size of a paperback, the Kindle e-reader stores 3,500 books and can wirelessly download new titles online from a catalogue of more than 400,000. It costs £109 for a wi-fi version or £149 for a 3G version that can download books over the mobile phone network.
Amazon pledged it will undercut prices of paper books and e-book rivals such as Apple and Sony.
The move has sparked a price war, with WH Smith slashing the cost of its ebooks, and other retailers expected to follow when the device goes on sale on Friday.
For example, Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer, has a recommended retail price of £7.99 — but is available on amazon ebook for £2.70, iBooks for £4.99 and on Amazon as a normal book for £3.86.
Amazon Kindle's senior vice-president Steve Kessel said: “In the US we now sell more electronic books than hardback ones and we are very happy to be bringing this to the UK. But it takes time to get a book selection together of more than 400,000 titles.”
Review: They've cracked it — this is the future
By Sam Leith
To any sensible person, the idea that e-books wouldn't catch on was always risible. Here is a technology that will make books unimaginably cheap and portable, searchable, easy to lend and impossible to lose.
The problem has always been getting the device right: to the level where the experience competes with a paperback.
The lamentable Sony Reader — clunky architecture, slow and blinky page-turns — showed how to get it wrong. But with Amazon's new Kindle, I think they've more or less cracked it.
The size and weight of a paperback, and as thin as a magazine, Kindle feels pleasant in the hand. They've half-heartedly bunged in an MP3 player and a steam-powered web browser, but it's really just for reading books. Good.
Pages are turned forward and back by clicking a slender bar on the right or left-hand side of the reader, and the vestigial keyboard is just about okay for marginal notes and searches. Kindle passed the no-faff test. It took no more than a minute or so to download a copy of the book I am reading and find my place.
The display doesn't threaten eyestrain, and you can change the font size, though I regretted you can't shift it from ugly italics into the elegant roman font of the print version.
We're accustomed to seeing two pages at once, rather than one — and to sweep a finger from right to left, rather than click a button, still feels the natural way to turn a page. The iPad does these things better.
But my hunch is that the period of disorientation proves no greater than switching to a left-hand-drive car on your holidays — and Kindle's price and portability have iPad licked.
Plus, if you turn on “text-to-speech” a robot voice with zero feeling for cadence will make you weep with laughter.
Reader views (1)
Lemme see now - huge selection of books cheaper than the dead tree version; carry most of my library with me as and when I choose; mags and rags available by subscription, downloaded over the Whispernet; able to load multiple formats of eBooks; able to load Word documents and the like.
Never had a proplem with any of mine since they first came out. Easy to read. Not trying to be everything to everyone.
Last comment - no regrets.
- Rogan, Irving, 25/08/2010 06:44
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