Tag: amazon

• The Less-Than Doomed E-reader

   
  

  I’ve been seeing more and more writing lately about the allegedly imminent death of standalone e-readers (and really, Kindles, because no one is buying Nooks or Kobos). It seems that sales of the devices year over year have been trending downward, spurring many to wonder if the entire category is in its death throes.

  But as I noted in 2012, e-readers aren’t as perishable as the more rapidly-changing category of phones and tablets. I wrote:

  Think about your TV set. If you’ve bought one in the past eight years or so, you probably have a perfectly good flat-screen LCD or plasma HDTV set that you have no reason to upgrade, unless you’re dying for a bigger screen than you have. But chances are the change in the performance of the device itself is not something you’re probably even thinking about.

  I think this is what it’s like for Kindles and the like. You use your TV to watch video content, and that’s about it. Very little has changed fundamentally in recent years to compel frequent upgrades. Likewise with e-readers: you’re buying one to read books, and that’s, again, about it. … My wife has a Kindle 2 from 2009, and isn’t the least bit interested in upgrading. She loves it.

  (I should note, she only this past week upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite, but she had her original Kindle for five years. Almost no one keeps a smartphone for five years.)

  Todd Wasserman at Mashable recently made this same point:

  Unlike smartphones or tablets, e-reader models don’t really evolve, so there’s no need to upgrade. A Kindle you bought in 2011 is pretty much the same as the one you’d buy in 2014. [And] if you own a tablet, a single-function e-reader is also a luxury.

  Interestingly, a few months ago I sold my own Kindle because I was reading so much on my iPad. And now I regret it, so presuming I can scrape together the scratch, I’ll eventually be in the market for a new one again.

  Kevin Roose echoes the idea of the Kindle as an unnecessary luxury, writing, “The death of the standalone e-reader might be good news for consumers, who will have one fewer gadget to buy and lug around.” But I think that’s overthinking it. Kindles are too small and light for the word “lug” to apply to their transport. But there’s no denying that the pressure to buy an additional device that largely mimics the functionality of something you already have (presumably a high-resolution tablet or large, hi-res phone) is something most folks can do without. Especially for those who aren’t voracious readers.

  Roose also understands why smartphones and tablets don’t quite cut it for devoted book readers:

  [T]here’s no getting around the fact that smartphones aren’t designed for focused, sustained reading. … [They] breed short attention spans. On a phone or a multi-function tablet, e-books have to compete for attention with Facebook, Instagram, Pandora, Angry Birds, and everything else you do. It’s the difference between watching TV intently, and watching TV while folding laundry, talking on the phone, and doing the crossword puzzle.

  All of this leads me to think that e-readers are not doomed, but that they’re going to cease to be an explosive category of mass market technology. Instead, I think we’ll see them continue to be honed and improved for a slightly niche market of frequent book consumers. And since they don’t require frequent upgrades on par with phones, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see two general categories of e-reader devices:

  1. Free or nearly-free commodity e-readers that Amazon may just give away to Prime subscribers, for example, because they encourage e-book purchasing, and
  2. High-end “luxury” e-readers (like the Paperwhite) with advanced, ever-more-readable e-ink screens, improved lighting, and premium builds.

  And that would be fine! Amazon alone could sustain that kind of market, and even other companies like Kobo could carve out their own corner of the market with their own takes on the luxury e-reader.

  So while the adoption of e-readers may be flattening out, I think the device category itself isn’t going anywhere. You just may have to pop your head into coffee shops and libraries to find them in the wild.

  September 6, 2014

  amazon, e-books, e-readers, Kindle

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• Additional Thoughts on the Kindle Paperwhite

  I posted some initial thoughts about my first couple of hours with the Kindle Papaerwhite a few days ago, and after some more substantial use, I have a few additional thoughts on what I think is an important device.

  First, the hardware really does feel good to hold. The finish of the back feels different from the finish of the bezel, and they feel very different from the texture of the screen (a papery matte finish, almost, yes, pulpy), and all feel just right.

  It’s just — just! — on the border of being a touch heavier than it ought to be, especially in comparison to the vanilla Kindle 4, which delightfully, is barely there. But this means that the magnetic cover makes it just a smidgen more awkward to hold in one hand than would be utterly idea, but we’re in ultra-micro-femto-nit-picky territory here. That said, the Amazon-made cover is itself really excellent. It wakes and puts to sleep the device, and feels sturdy and, well, classy.

  I also mentioned the “blotchiness” of the screen light that appears at the very, very bottom. It is a touch distracting, just barely, but I’ve found I find it less annoying when I change my thinking from “this is a disembodied screen illumination” to “the light emits from the bottom so that’s why there are sight shadows,” it somehow mitigates how much it bothers me. Again, very small stuff.

  Most importantly, I’ve found a way to make the most of the higher resolution of the new display and the new menu of fonts. I noted in my first post that though Amazon was offering additional typefaces, they seemed to me to look blocky and sloppy, unlike the much-improved default font. Turns out the real problem is the frequency of page-refreshes for the e-ink. The default setting for the later-generation Kindles is to only do a complete screen refresh (see the screen go black for a split second as every pixel refreshes) every six pages. Though I suppose this speeds up page turns and removes what some see as a distracting black-flash for five out of six pages, it also compromises the integrity of the lettering on the non-refreshed pages. The characters look, well, pixelated and craggy.

  By going to the device’s settings and turning off the option for a delay on the full refresh, what you get is, yes, a quick flash of black with each page turn, but also a huge improvement in the resolution of the typefaces, and, more importantly, a huge improvement in the consistency of the typefaces’ quality with each page. No more degradation. Suddenly, the additional font choices, which I had poo-poo’d initially, look much better and cleaner. That said, they’re still not as solid as they ought to be, and the default font still looks best, but now the additional fonts are genuinely usable options.

  Allowing the device to refresh the screen with each page turn probably has a detrimental affect on the Kindle’s battery, but given that it’s supposed to last for something like two months, I’m willing to take the hit.

  Thinking more globally, as much as I’m enjoying the Kindle Paperwhite, I find myself wishing it wasn’t necessary. The iPad 3 I have has an amazing display, but it’s too big and heavy for really comfortable long-form reading (though I’ve done plenty of that on it). Meanwhile, the Kindle is, by design, less functional as it is exclusively an e-reader. What I wouldn’t give for a device that had the size and comfort of the Kindle and the display quality and functionality of an iPad. Such a device will likely exist soon, but it’s not the iPad mini in its current form. Not with that crummy display. And so I wait.

  November 13, 2012

  amazon, Kindle, technology

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• Oh, That’s Why People Like Tablets So Damn Much!

  The so-called post-PC revolution came to my house. This has been my first weekend off in a couple of weeks, and though I’ve been browsing the Web, tweeting, and now blogging, I didn’t even turn on my computer yesterday, and if you know me at all, you know that the only reason this could be so would be if I was hospitalized and unconscious.

  Look, I know. For millions of people, this is already how they live their digital lives (not unconscious, the whole post-PC thing) — without a “computer.” But I didn’t get it before. And I assure you, it’s not because of the new iPad announcement (lord if I could afford one), but rather because I began to boil down what I actually wanted to do on a device.

  Let’s face it; even for so-called “power users,” which I sometimes fancy myself as being, 95% of what we do on our devices is low-intensity, passive consumption. We browse the Web, we check email, screw around on the social networks. Put apps and games and the like aside. Mostly, we’re sitting and staring at pictures and text. This does not require a 12-core Mac Pro and a Thunderbolt Display. But for a while, I was saying that it did at least require a MacBook Air; though underpowered in terms of processing heft, its physical slightness and its speedy solid state drive is/was more than enough for, again, 95% of what people actually do, save for software developers and feature film editors. Indeed, my contention has been that an 11” MacBook Air, which I have, entirely obviates the need for a tablet — it’s so small and light that something like an iPad would be redundant. A tablet, I thought, was a powerful-yet-mostly-unnecessary toy.

  Especially if one already has an iPhone/smartphone — and an e-ink Kindle too! Tablets? Please.

  But let me tell you what I think affects all of this, which I think may still be true in some contexts: not living alone.

  Think of this. You’re sitting in the living room with your spouse or significant other. Nothing much is going on, there’s some light chatting, perhaps your partner is watching something on TV, but only half paying attention. You want to do your Web browsing (or as I usually refer to it, your dicking-around), and you have either your iPhone or your MacBook. If you’re on your iPhone, admit it, even in this day and age of Utter iPhone Ubiquity (UiU), you still look like a closed-off, toy-obsessed douche when your attention is focused on a 2.3 by 4.5-inch rectangle in your hand. You know it’s true. Even while you’re using your own smartphone in the most noble, serious, and non-douchey of ways, you still think other people on their phones look like douches. Or crazy.

  But let’s say instead you opt for the MacBook (if you’re opting for a Windows PC, I don’t even know what to say to you). Well then, even with the smallest laptop, you’re opening up a two-paned device, the display of which instantly takes dominance within the horizon of one’s vision. Once you’ve opened up the laptop, even if you are doing nothing more than clicking a few likes on Facebook, to anyone else in the room you are now “on the computer,” and that’s it, you’re effectively not there. How many times have I heard, while doing nothing that commands my attention, heard from my lovely wife, “Do you have to be on the computer now?”

  (And a Kindle? That’s a book. Different territory altogether. When you’ve got a book open, you’re reading a book, and people get that, and that’s what you’re doing on a Kindle, so this is not terribly relevant to this overall thesis.)

  So: I received a Kindle Fire as a gift, and being a tablet doubter, I mainly disregarded it — not because I didn’t like it, it was obviously quite neat, but I figured that it was, as I said, redundant. But the more of my day-to-day work that I’ve done on my personal computer, and the more cognizant I’ve been of being present for my family without crunching my attention into my wee iPhone or disappearing behind a laptop display, the more I’ve wanted something that allowed me my dicking-around and a level of acceptable environmental and social awareness.

  And there was that Kindle Fire.

  It’s not a perfect device by any means. Both my iPhone and my MacBook are an order of magnitude better than the Fire at pretty much anything I’d want to do with it (save for reading books, which I do on my e-ink Kindle anyway). This is a big reason I neglected it. But in the contexts I’ve described above, it suddenly became the perfect device. A tablet allows for the casual, passive consumption of content without leaving the appearance of being absorbed in something that either looks like “work” (on a computer) or a “gadget” (on a phone).

  In many ways (and may The Steve forgive me for saying so) it’s better than an iPad because of its size; being 7 inches makes it close in size to an unintrusive-looking trade paperback rather than the iPad which is more physically prominent, nearer to a clipboard in size. (I’m not crazy. A Retina Display and Apple’s seamless merging of hardware and software are much preferable to Amazon’s otherwise-laudable efforts in this arena. But I have what I have and can afford what I can afford.)

  But more to the point, it’s become my primary device for that aforementioned 95% of stuff that I actually do. When I’m working on a piece of long form writing (like this post), doing more complex creative work like videos or presentations, or recording and mixing music, I absolutely want my completely awesome 11” MacBook Air, and probably attached to my 24-inch display. Taking pictures, making quick Twitter observations, or getting information wherever I am, I want my crazy-amazing iPhone 4S. But for just about everything else, I get it now. The tablet is the way to go.

  I thought I’d miss heavy multi-tasking, quickly jumping between windows and applications, and having several things my field of attention at once, but I don’t — unless, again, I’m working on something. In almost all other cases, though, holding a medium-sized slate of glass and pixels makes by far the most sense.

  I think my wife agrees. But I haven’t asked her, because I’ve been on the computer.

  March 11, 2012

  amazon, apple, ipad, Kindle, technology

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