Cartwright Reed

The Kindle Review

I've been using Amazon's Kindle ebook reader a lot over the last two months. I'd promised earlier to blog about it, but I wanted to wait until the honeymoon wore off. A dozen books and a few blogs and periodicals later, I'm sold: the Kindle really is the first practical ebook reader.

I just finished a round of meetings with publishers, and although the hard data won't be out for a few weeks, it would appear that a lot of people agree with me. Kindle titles are doing quite well, in spite of the fact that Amazon has had trouble keeping the ebook reader in stock.

Unlike the polished Apple iPhone, the Kindle is a work in progress for Amazon, but the ease in browsing and purchasing content (no surprise from Amazon), and a "good enough" reading experience should enable Amazon to become a substantial ebook reseller. Amazon will continue to iterate the Kindle design: this first Kindle is close in kinship to the first Apple iPod, which also got mixed reviews.

My most serious reservation about the Kindle relates to the supply chain that Amazon has created to feed it. Unlike the iPod, which supported MP3 music files from the start, the Kindle doesn't support standard ebook formats like epub, so the Kindle experience is a closed garden experience, at least for now.

A side note: it's surprising how much power the Kindle uses on standby. If I don't turn it off, it shuts down in a day or so, even though e-ink displays aren't supposed to use power if the pages aren't being turned. We worked with PVI, the e-ink display manufacturer, on several display prototypes, and those prototypes lasted a lot longer.

the iofy platform: the future of spoken audio

In 2005 we were working on the next generation of the iofy spoken audio platform. The company had been successfully selling our first digital spoken audio on websites like PimsleurDirect for a year or so, but we had a lot of work to do, and there were some pretty dispiriting things going on - like the Sony Rootkit scandal.

About that time, I came upon Fred Wilson's post on the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Fred's vision of how media should be was clean and refreshing, and it was what we wanted to do. We wanted to make spoken audio content an intelligently chunked, non-proprietary, syndicatable, monetizable citizen of the net.

Three years later, we are finally completing a solid platform; where we can enable people to enjoy spoken audio in a way that goes with the grain of the Internet (courtesy Paul Graham). We've gotten validation from publishers, resellers and distributors: now we need to show consumers a good time.

I'm looking forward to talking to people about this at the PLA in two weeks. See you soon!

More Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audiobooks

More publishers are coming on board!

iPhones, Apple, audiobooks and ebooks

I switched from a BlackBerry 8830 (great phone!) about six months ago to try out Apple's iPhone. In spite of some problems with ATT service, I'd agree with those who say that Apple has made the first convergent device.

The iPhone is the first device I've used that did a "good enough" job as a phone, email reader, browser (the best mobile web browsing I've used -- in spite of the limited EDGE connectivity from ATT) that I don't take more than one device on the road. Although the pseudo GPS capability is quite poor, I find myself tolerating this and leaving my nuvi 650 at home rather than take two devices.

As you can imagine, I've pushed hard to make sure that iofy audiobooks are compatible with the iPhone and Apple iTouch as well as the standard iPods. People were pretty happy when we rolled out software to support the iPhone and iTouch a few weeks ago.

As iofy is a digital media platform developer as well as a device designer, I'm keenly interested in Apple's plans.  Today's NYT has an intriguing article by John Markoff where he opines on the future direction of Apple media devices:

On Wednesday, at a financial conference, Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook, confirmed that the iTouch was a platform, not a single product. That would indicate that there is something like a Safari Pad in the offing — a Wi-Fi connected device that would be a scaled-up digital media reader.

I think Markoff is right, but that the focus will be on an iTunes Pad, not a Safari Pad. Apple's story on the video side is just gearing up; a six or seven inch iTouch would drive sales of movies and tv shows -- and maybe tell an ebook story as well.