Amazon gears up for Superkindle.
(Sternless) Sirius XM on BlackBerry.
Twitter adds Hovercard user profiles.
Engadget turns comments back on.
Palm’s Mobile Hotspot Speed: Disappointing.
Tragically, prematurely, CSPAN abandons RealVideo.
Teenagers lose interest in blogging.
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Amazon.com has released a Software Development Kit for its Kindle e-reader, allowing third-party developers to create apps for it. Amazon will distribute programs and give their creators 70 percent of the profits. The Kindle’s slow monochrome screen limits what developers will be able to do: Other than the e-reader functionality, the best-known Kindle app to date is Amazon’s own Web browser, which remains a crude “experiment” after two years on the market. But one app that’s already been announced–Zagat’s user reviews–sounds like a good example of something that can make sense.
You think it’s an utter coincidence this interesting news came out one week before Apple will apparently tell the world about its tablet?
Amazon, which started selling the Kindle internationally back in October without fully localizing it, is now distributing the Kindle iPhone app in sixty countries. Good news for folks around the world who are interested in reading bestsellers and other recent, still-in-copyright tomes on their iPhones. (I have a Kindle but do most of my Kindling on my iPhone these days–reading a few pages at a time when I’m in line at the grocery store or otherwise confronted with a sliver of free time I can devote to a book.)
Watching movies over the Internet offers instant gratification. DVDs and Blu-Ray feel more permanent, and look consistently good even if you have the world’s most sluggish network. So Amazon is offering a pretty clever combo deal: Disc+ on Demand, which gives you a free video-on-demand version of a movie when you buy the DVD or Blu-Ray edition. You can watch the on-demand version on a PC, a Mac, or an Amazon-compatible device (such as a TiVo, a Roku, or certain Panasonic and Sony TVs).
It’s only available for certain titles, and there’s no new technological magic involved–Amazon’s just throwing in access to the streaming version. But it’s an attractive package, and Amazon, as a purveyor of both shiny discs and on-demand video, is one of the few companies in a position to offer it.
Amazon is pitching the offer as a bonus for disc buyers that gives them immediate access to the movie they just purchased. But in some cases the DVD or Blu-Ray costs the same as purchasing the stand-alone streaming version–the Terminator is $9.99 on Blu-Ray or as an on-demand purchase. So you can also think of Disc+ on Demand as providing a nice, permanent copy of the movie you bought in on-demand form.
Of course, it would be even cooler if you could go for the trifecta and buy a movie as a disc, a stream and a download you could put on a phone or other mobile device. There are DVDs that come with iPod/iPhone versions, but I don’t know of any that are part of Disc+ on Demand.
[UPDATE: I tried again, and Kindle for PC is now downloading all my books swiftly and reliably. Not sure why it wasn’t before…]
I’ve been playing with Amazon.com’s new Kindle for PC application over the past 24 hours, and while the idea of having access to my Kindle books on my PC remains mighty appealing, the software as it stands in beta form is a bare-bones disappointment.
[UPDATE: I tried again, and Kindle for PC is now downloading all my books swiftly and reliably. Not sure why it wasn’t before…]
Last month, one of the few new pieces of news at the Windows 7 rollout was the fact that Amazon was releasing a piece of Windows software for reading Kindle e-books. The software is now available for download–and the site says that a Mac version is coming soon.
I’d like to tell you what I think of Kindle for PC, but I can’t just yet–any time the software tries to download a book (including one I just plunked down $9.99 for), it gives me a cryptic error and tells me to try again later. Which I’ll do. But I like the concept, at least–I don’t see myself curling up with a laptop to read a novel, but I own several hundred dollars’ worth of books in Kindle form, and getting access to them on another device is a boon.
(Although I just realized: What I’d really like is a Kindle for the Web that would let me read everything I’d paid for on any Web-connected device, no downloads required. Wonder if Amazon’s contemplated such an app?)
Over at Wired’s Gadget Lab, Charlie Sorrel is intrigued by the fact that Amazon’s artwork for the Kindle for PC download page shows a book with color art, and he wonders whether the company’s hinting that a color Kindle is in the works. Actually, a color Kindle has been available since March–it’s known as the Apple iPhone, and it became a Kindle when Amazon released e-reader software for it. The iPhone app has always been able to display color images.
If Amazon keeps on selling Kindle hardware, it’ll presumably sell a color device someday, although someday may take a long time to arrive if the company is committed to the E-Ink technology. (I doubt that color E-Ink screens that are good enough to display satisfying pictures are going to arrive anytime soon.) But you gotta think Amazon wants to be prepared for the eventuality of color Kindle e-readers, and it’s already been saying that it wants to put Kindle books on a variety of devices. Color images in Kindle e-books are just concrete evidence that Amazon thinks of Kindle as being something greater than a single hardware platform that happens to be monochrome-only at the moment.
[CLARIFICATION/UPDATE: The Kindle for iPhone app displays some stuff that could be in color in color, but not everything. My copy of Nikon D90 for Dummies shows the cover and spot illustrations in color, but not photos…]
Today’s Windows 7 launch mostly involved stuff we already knew about, but there was a “just one more thing”: Amazon is going to release a Kindle e-book reading application for Windows. It runs on XP, Vista, and Windows 7, and takes advantage of the new touch features in Win 7 to allow gestures for actions such as flipping pages. It uses Kindle’s WhisperSync feature to sync your book library up with any other Kindle-compatible devices you own.
It’s a welcome development, and pretty much a mandatory one for Amazon given that the books Barnes & Noble sells for its new Nook device can also be read on PCs and Macs. (No word on whether Amazon will release a Mac app; if it is, maybe it’s holding back the news a bit to avoid spoiling Microsoft’s party today.)
Few if any PCs are optimized for reading books, and I’ve never bought an e-book primarily to read it on a laptop. But at this point I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on Kindle tomes–and the more devices I can read them on, the merrier. Amazon says the free Kindle app will be available next month,
That was fast! Two weeks ago, Amazon.com introduced a Kindle e-book reader with AT&T 3G wireless and the ability to download books in a hundred countries. It priced it at $279 and knocked the cost for the U.S.-only version down to $259. It seemed odd to keep the old version around at such a modest discount–and now it’s gone.
As Engadget’s Thomas Ricker is reporting, Amazon has now killed the old Kindle, marked the new one down to $259, and will be issuing $20 rebates to everyone who paid $279. As Thomas points out, this not only logically streamlines the Kindle lineup, but responds to the announcement of Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which will cost $259 and sounds like a more advanced device, at least in some ways.
Meanwhile, I lied in the headline of this post–there are still two Kindles. But it seems like a safe bet that the big-boy Kindle DX will get AT&T wireless (and probably a price cut) in the next few months. By the time the Plastic Logic Que ships, surely…
Haven’t bought a Kindle 2 yet? Good. Amazon.com, which knocked the price of its e-book reader down by $60 only last July, has cut it by another forty bucks. You can now buy one for $259–and while that may not be a magic price point, it’s a lot more tempting than the $400 that the original Kindle cost when it debuted a couple of years ago. The big Kindle DX, with its 9.7-inch screen, remains a pricey $489.
The price cut may be in part a reaction to Sony’s renewed vigor as a Kindle competitor, although the Kindle was already a deal by comparison to any of Sony’s models. (The cheapest Sony is $199 but has a smaller screen than the Kindle and no wireless; the wireless Sony costs $399.)
More intriguingly, Amazon has added a $279 variant that uses a GSM radio to let you download content in a hundred countries around the world. (In the U.S., it’s powered by AT&T; other Kindles use Sprint’s network.) You pay a $1.99 surcharge to download books outside the U.S. (reasonable enough) and the same fee to download a single issue of a magazine (pricey!). Amazon is taking pre-orders now saying the new version will ship on October 19th.
Folks in many countries outside the U.S. can buy this model, but Amazon hasn’t truly internationalized the Kindle: Non-U.S. buyers apparently have to order their readers from the U.S., and get a device with an interface and content in English, with a U.S. wall adapter. One presumes that now that Amazon has engineered a GSM electronic reader, we’ll see it start to roll out some truly localized versions in other countries before long.
We don’t even know for sure whether Apple will ever release a tablet–although there’s lots of compelling evidence that it will–and already there’s a lively debate about whether the company is interested in using said tablet to do to printed reading materials what iTunes has done for music.
Until recently, the smart money seemed to be on Apple staying out of the e-reader fray–cue references to Steve Jobs saying that nobody reads anymore. But over at Gizmodo, Brian Lam is reporting that Apple has been in talks with publishers of textbooks, newspapers (the New York Times, specifically), and magazines–presumably as it gets ready to announce its tablet. Maybe the company is interested in catering to those of us who do read after all.
I hope so–and as a former magazine guy, I’m most interested to see what Apple might do with the medium I left behind but for which I’ll never lose my affinity. For all the things that are right with Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader, its treatment of magazines is pretty horrible. It may have signed deals to offer thirty-six well-known titles, but every Kindle magazine I’ve seen has been stripped of most of its formatting, graphics, and…life. There’s no particular benefit to Kindle magazines except for saving some trees and space on your coffee table, especially when far more dynamic, engaging, interesting versions of most of the same content is available for free on the Web.
And ultimately, I don’t think largely static downloadable magazines such as those offered by Amazon (as well as PDF-like print replicas such as Zinio versions) are going to revolutionize anything. We don’t need new formats for magazines that compete with the Web–we need to use Web technologies to create more compelling digital versions of traditionally pulp-based publications. An electronic version of, say, the New Yorker shouldn’t be an entirely different beast from NewYorker.com. It should be a variant that can be pushed to a device (be it from Amazon or Apple) and read even when you’re offline, with slicker type, graphics, and overall presentation than the Web currently permits. And what the heck–it should retain the wonderfully browsable, print-oriented concepts of a cover, a table, of contents, and a sequence of pages from beginning to end. (In this case, it should also involve cartoons interspersed throughout, which you can choose to read first.)
Like Web pages, these magazines should work on multiple devices from different manufacturers–if Newsweek is available in slightly different, incompatible variants for the Kindle and Apple’s tablet, it’s just going to drive everybody crazy.
Oh, and whoever solves this problem needs to figure out issues of screen orientation–one of the big gotchas with Zinio magazines is that they’re portrait-oriented publications in the mostly landscape-oriented world of computer displays.
I don’t know if Brian’s story is right on the money–and if it is, I have no idea what Apple has in mind. But I do know that even though I don’t currently subscribe to any digital magazines, I’d happily plunk down my money for ones that got the format right. So far, nothing’s come close. I’m a happy optimist, so I’m assuming this will get solved relatively soon–if not by Apple, by somebody.
