P-Books, E-Books, eBooks, web.

Some notes on the Amazon Kindle app on the iPhone

I've been twittering with a dash of friendfeed instead of blogging over the last few months, but I'd like to add more than 140 characters to the discussion on the release of the Amazon Kindle app to the iPhone. I've put up a quick Flickr review of the app here.

In particular:

1. The Amazon Kindle app is a pretty nice ebook reader. It has a similar feature set to eReader and Stanza, and it does a good job of displaying and downloading existing titles purchased at Amazon for the Kindle reader.

2. It doesn't seem to be hamstrung to make it a less attractive reading experience, although the Amazon spokesperson slammed the iPhone experience in this WSJ article:

"Mr. Freed says he expects that users of the iPhone application would read their books for 20 to 30 minutes at most, after which eye strain or battery life might become a problem."

The primary downsides are that it (a) only allows you to transfer ebooks that are in your Kindle, not newspapers, blogs and (presumably) other content that you've sent to the Kindle; (b) doesn't have the ability for you to buy new content within the application, as can be done with eReader and Stanza; (c) doesn't appear to have the text-to-speech capability of the Kindle 2 (although Amazon has backed off on offering this feature on all ebooks).

3. The ability to autosync your bookmarks for your ebooks between devices is a great feature and appears to be working between my iPhone and Kindle 1 in preliminary testing.

The WSJ article alludes to supporting other devices in the near term.

ebooks on the iPhone

Got the new iPhone 3G, and I upgraded my older iPhone to the new 2.0 firmware, which allows you to get iPhone applications from iTunes. I've been having a great time with the new iPhone (although things were definitely funky for much of Friday - launching MobileMe, the new iPhone 2.0 Firmware and the Apple 3G at the same time would be a stretch for any company).

I'll blog about what I've found with the new iPhone sometime later after I've had a chance to play with it some more, but I'm really happy to finally have an eBook platform for the iPhone - so I thought I'd do a quick walkthrough of the new eReader software that you can get for free in the iTunes app store. [Disclosure, I work for Ingram Digital, and we do support eReader software as part of our ebook distribution solution].

Downloading the eReader software from iTunes just took a few seconds on the 3G (still less then a minute on the older iPhone). Launching the app is also very fast, only a few seconds.

Some screenshots from Charlie Stross' latest science fiction title Saturn's Children (review courtesy Cory Doctorov). Reading eBooks on the iPhone is gratifying, page turning is a finger flip, and the interface is spare and simple.

Turning the iPhone sidewise gives you the long view. The title bar doesn't disappear, but the developers say that will happen shortly (see the blog comments to this Teleread post). Both views are easy on the eye.

Logging into your bookshelf for eReader.com or Fictionwise.com is straightforward.

Some readers had some difficulties last week, but I had no problem accessing my ebooks. I did get one time-out when I attempted to download all my ebooks, but the second try worked fine.

Here are side-by-sides of the Kindle and eReader on the iPhone (The Stand by Stephen King). The smaller, brighter iPhone screen is showing the same number of words as the Kindle. The Kindle is the premiere ebook reader, but I think that the eReader/iPhone combination is compelling. Listening to music while reading off the iPhone screen is a great experience.

The Kindle is still the winner when you're buying ebooks, though. I bought a few titles from Fictionwise and eReader from the iPhone, but it's not nearly as easy as Kindle's Whispernet experience. Of course, you can only go to one bookstore on the Kindle :-).

 

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.

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.