Two: this wi-fi-only Kindle is a contender. It’s only $139 (ships Aug. 27), making it the cheapest E-Ink ereader on the market. Our problems with Amazon and Kindle still exist: the proprietary Kindle format means that you can never completely trust that you’ll always own your books; there’s always a chance that they’ll pull a Yahoo! Music and your ebooks will simply disappear. Of course, this is true of all DRMed formats, but with Adobe DRM, you can borrow library ebooks and not spend money you might never get back. To make matters worse, Jeff Bezos is kind of a jerk, and he frequently does things that are either stupid or just kind of bullyish.
All that said, $140 is a great price—that and the presence of Kindle apps on computers and smartphones makes the whole package quite tempting these days.
As for Kindle 3 (3G version), it’s the same as the old Kindle 2. It’s black now, I guess. A touch smaller. Buttons are a little different. Otherwise the new Kindle is nearly identical to the old, and still not our first choice for an ereader.
Today at Woot: refurbished Sony Pocket Edition ereaders for $115 including shipping. That is one helluva deal. The Pocket Edition is one of our recommended ereaders for book readers (as opposed to magazine or newspaper readers). More info in our ereader comparison.
If you were considering a Kobo, think seriously about this instead. Basic-model ereaders are more or less interchangeable, and Sony supports Adobe ePub, which means you can borrow library ebooks through your local library (Kobo supports Adobe, too—the difference is 35 bucks). Sony software is a headache, but if you’re reading books and loading up only once a month or so, it’s not so bad. And $115 is a great price.
Basically, nobody wants to shut up about the new Apple tablet (supposedlydubbed the iPad–consider it nominated for this week’s dumbest new ereader name award). It’s slated to be revealed today, so I’m not going to bother parsing out the rumors. This one bit about pricing strategies and the coming battle between Apple and Amazon is interesting though. Not sure where B&N is in all this. I guess they probably shouldn’t have f-ed up the Nook launch so badly. Perhaps they are waiting for a boost from Apple? If you’re foolishish enough to get a first generation iPad (thus ignoring Apple’s track record of vastly superior second gen devices), here are some other fun uses for it.
Amazon has quietly laxed their DRM policies. So quietly that hardly anyone has noticed. In what could be an enourmous shift, Apple will allow iTunes users to store libraries in the cloud, rather than their harddrives (hopefully it doesn’t require a .Mac subscription). Besides fighting with China, Google is also in a tiff with its old buddy Apple. This may lead to Apple dumping Google integration from their devices and adopting Bing, which is of course owned by–Mac geeks are fainting left and right over this, I’m sure–the evil Microsoft. Regardless of Google’s early success (maybe) with Android’s apps, Apple is still the undisputed ruler of App-land.
It’s kinda old news, but apparently colleges are being sued for using ereaders in classrooms because blind students can’t use them. How using a braille edition to supplement a Kindle (which reads books–poorly–out loud) is less fair than if the other students use deadtree, I do not understand. It won’t help the blind, but if you’ve no backlight on your ereader and can’t figure out how to turn on your lamp, try this dongle. This Boogie Board doodle toy isn’t an ereader (and probably isn’t much use to anyone not a basketball coach) but it does seem pretty cool, and uses no power at that.
We’ll be posting on Friday about some of the many changes we have planned for our second year. There’s a lot of good stuff planned, and we’ll be getting bigger and better as time goes on. Check back Friday for that.
Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
Confused about ereaders? After CES pooped a thousand of them, it’s getting a bit crowded. Gizmodo has a guide to the major players, and news of a couple new Asus entries that will be available “this year” (meaning 2012). There’s a Samsung ereader, and a big newspaper reader called the Skiff, and probably another few dozen will come out this year. MobileRead has a guide to articles about there being too many ereaders. If you’re new to ereaders, let me provide a base camp for your shopping expedition: if you want a device to read books on, start by looking at the Sony PRS-300; if you want to read newspapers and magazines, start by looking at the Kindle. You might not wind up with those (they both have serious weaknesses, as do all ereaders), but they’ll provide a good baseline for comparison. And remember to breathe.
The publishing landscape is changing. The Wall Street Journal freaked out Friday, saying that the Web makes it impossible to get noticed from the slush pile. The Rumpus says there’s still plenty of slush (via), but then we’ve got to worry about piracy and people hating DRM, the Guardian is picking out the horsemen of the book apocalypse, and it’s starting to sound like ebooks are ruining publishing. Calm down, please (publishing is jittery and excitable), and let me posit another theory. Roughly 60,000 novels are published in English in the U.S. every year (via). For the sake of a conservative estimate, let’s cut that figure in half. Then we’ve got 100 novels a day (remember, that’s just in English, in America). Say 90% of them are obviously not your cup of tea. Soooo… haven’t been to the bookstore for a week? Enjoy sifting through 70 novels (67 of which, just guessing, are crap) to find your next read. Bookstores have become the new slush piles, and that is killing the book much more than the Web, or ebooks, or libraries, or anything else. Anecdotally, authors are now reading to handfuls of disinterested cupcake enthusiasts, literally, desperately trying to sell a couple dozen books. This is not good.
Random of the week: My favorite parts of the Leno/Conan debacle have been Maureen Dowd’s evisceration of Jeff Zucker, this video of Leno’s ’04 torch-passing speech, the fact that “I’m with Coco” on Facebook has more than a thousand times as many fans as “I’m with Leno,” and Leno laying down and taking it while Kimmel destroys him on his own show (embedded below). Sometimes it helps to watch a meaningless battle with a pretty clear villain, just to take a break from unknowable tragedies like Haiti (give here).
You can buy a Nook, a Kindle, and a Sony Reader Touch for the QUE's asking price
So CES officially opened today and, sure enough, prices were announced for the Spring Design Alex and the Plastic Logic QUE. Up until today, I would’ve classified the Alex and the QUE as the two most exciting new ereaders. Then I saw how they’ll cost: The Alex is going for $399, and the QUE is $649 with WiFi, $800 (!!?) with 3G.
Yesterday, I guessed that the Alex would go for $350, and the QUE for $500. I considered those conservative estimates; i.e., I was ready to be pleasantly surprised. Eesh, was I ever wrong.
The big takeaway from these price announcements is simply that ereader manufacturers don’t care about the casual reader. These devices are getting more expensive, not less, and that’s not a trend that’s going to steal the Kindle’s thunder anytime soon.
But there’s more to glean from six digits and a couple dollar signs.
1-6-10. Looks weird. Anyway, here’s some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
CES 2010starts tomorrow. I’m most excited about, predictably enough, a couple of ereaders: the Spring Design Alex, and the Plastic Logic QUE. Presumably both will premiere tomorrow, and hopefully they’ll be selling by the weekend. Among the questions in my mind: First of all, how much will they cost? Are the Alex’s dual screens useful or gimmicky? Is the QUE’s touchscreen as awesome as it first looked? And lastly, how much will they cost? If I had to guess, I’d say QUE-$500, Alex-$350.
There are a few pieces of pre- or non-CES news floating around. First of all, there’s the new iRiver ereader, which might or might not be laughably expensive. And everybody’s jumping on the Wall Street Journal‘s story that the Apple iSlate is coming in March for one cool grand. Sooooooooo… wait till April and get it for $700? There’s also the Skiff, the biggest ereader in the world, and the new Cool-er, the smallest (that is, the smallest with a six-inch screen and an overinflated price tag—but it comes in green!). I’m still waiting for a netbook with a detachable, backlightable E-Ink screen. It’s a few years away.
To get excited for the coming year from a, you know, reading perspective, here’s the Millions’s list of books to watch for in 2010. I’m looking forward to Robert Stone, David Mitchell, and Ron Rash, whose last novel, Serena, was among the best books I read this year. Salon does the same thing for January, though with sadly only four fiction books on the list.
So, this op-ed in the Times, it’s a publisher saying that the role of the publishing industry is basically to have good taste, to find and polish excellent books for people to read. He says, “A publisher — and I write as one — does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer’s work.” There have been a lot of responses: at E-Reads, Booksquare, and Salon, among many others. My own response is a little shorter: When there’s more than 70,000 books about vampires on Amazon, maybe publishers should do more selecting, and less promoting and positioning (not to mention less worrying about William Styron ebooks).
Random of the week: Did you see the Burj Dubai/Khalifa opening? Think Bellagio fountains plus explosions plus helicopter shots. They might have spent more on fireworks than the Empire State Building cost to build.
Here’s our last links update of the decade. First though, we’ve updated our eReader Comparison page as well as our Best Ways to Get eBooks, so check them out. Both will be seeing quite a few more updates in the coming weeks and months as much is happening with ereaders and ebook sellers. In fact, we’ve got a lot of changes planned for C4 in the near future as well; we’ll be posting on many of them at some point in January. Also, be sure to check out our Best Books of 2009 series if you haven’t already. We’ll be continuing the series through January.
The PRS-300, "Pocket Edition," has a smaller screen than the 505, a simplified interface, and no mp3 or picture capability. It also comes in gray and black.
For nearly a year now, I’ve used a PRS-505, and I’ve recommended it without reservation for those who want to casually read books (i.e. won’t need to take notes) and don’t read newspapers. It has the best build quality and the best interface of any ereader I’ve used, and the most logical feature set for book readers.
So how does the newer PRS-300, Pocket Edition, stack up? Some critics have said the 300 is stripped down—it doesn’t have many of the extra features of ereaders like the Kindle.
Well, I got one for Christmas for my sister (and got a deal on it—TeleRead also found this deal), and after getting a chance to play around with it, I can tell you it’s every bit as good as the PRS-505 and might actually be better.
The Astak Pocket Pro (my review here) is selling for $99 at BooksOnBoard. What’s the catch? Well, the catch is that you have to buy $400 worth of BooksOnBoard ebooks. I haven’t shopped there in a while, but from a brief glance through their selection, most of their ebooks are $9.98, with new/popular releases going for $14.98, about $5 more than Amazon and Sony. Doesn’t quite add up, but it’s out there.
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So Amazon announced the new Kindle Wednesday. Two big pieces of newsworthiness here.
