I’m disappointed. Amazon’s Kindle is the first e-book that has caught my interest. But they sold out after only three weeks on the market! So I ordered mine, but it won’t be here for in time for Christmas.
To be honest, I just haven’t paid much attention to the various iterations of handheld e-books that have been introduced and mostly languished over the past few years.
I have been aware of the Sony Reader eBook and considered checking it out, but didn’t have a compelling reason to do so, although the airport billboards were beginning to pique my interest.
The idea of yet another electronic gadget to juggle (along with cellphone, blackberry, iPod) is pretty daunting. It’s not just the gadgets. It’s the cords, battery charging, and so on, that gets old. One of my great pleasures in life is lying on the couch in the sun with a good book.
But once I saw the Kindle on the Amazon home page, I could actually picture myself curling up with an e-book, and my reservations dwindled. It didn’t take much research before I hit the 1-Click button, even though I knew that they were backordered. (I wonder if that was intentional—create a scarce resource so that more people crave it.)
I think it’s the Amazon brand experience
that did it for me. Yes, the Sony eBook is more mature, and Sony is
great at consumer electronics, but Amazon is where I buy most of my
books, and Amazon has changed my life almost as much as Google has.
With Kindle, when I hear about a book or an article, I’ll be able to
download it immediately and read it in comfort, without having to
connect to a PC to order or download. That will work well for me. Just
think how many $9.99 books I’ll consume! I imagine that I’ll buy even
more books than I already do. But I also imagine that I’ll read more of
them, because it will be easier to carry them around and dip in when I
have a few minutes.
Based on the reviews to-date (the 914
customer reviews on Amazon and all the great reviews on the Web), the
Kindle seems to fall in the “I’m almost in love” or “it doesn’t do it
for me” category for most people, with very little in between. I
particularly liked the
published review on Gizmodo.com[1]
in which the Kindle was tested in bed, in the bathroom (but not yet in
the tub where I want to use it), and on a plane. I also appreciated
Gizmodo’s comparisons between Kindle and the Sony Reader.[2] 
After reading the comparisons, I feel pretty comfortable with my
choice, even though it was an impulse buy, especially, because after
browsing the titles available on the Kindle, I found a large number of
my favorite authors represented. I even found one of my own books (Customer Revolution), although not the latest one. I’ve emailed my publisher about that!
I don’t think the Amazon Kindle will rival the iPod for popularity. But I DO think that it will continue to sell well to the high-tech early adopter/gadget freaks. I believe that Amazon’s Kindle will spark renewed interest in the e-book category—creating a tide that causes all e-book gadgets to rise. There are lots of improvements I’d like to see to the Kindle and its business model, but the debate is already raging. That’s a good sign that Bezos has a winner on his hands! Having customers happily electronically tethered to you is the best way of all to make money!
**FOOTNOTES**
1) http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/our
2) http://gizmodo.com/gadgets
**FOOTNOTES**
RSS 2.0 Feeds
Comments