Last holiday season, Amazon.com unveiled its “Kindle” reader – a trade paperback-sized electronic reader. Since then sales of the device and of content for it are, according to numerous published reports, growing at a solid pace. Amazon does not disclose sales figures, and a spokeswoman responding to my inquiries probably got a little tired of repeating that. However, she did provide an interesting factoid: “Of the 135,000 books available on Amazon.com as a physical book and on Kindle, Kindle books already account for over 12 percent of units sold.”
Therein no doubt lies the commercial success of Kindle where Sony and others have failed. Amazon brings enormous content resources to the reader – books, newspapers, magazines, specialty publications – without which Kindle would just be an expensive paperweight. The unit comes with a built-in high-speed wireless service (using Sprint’s network) for downloading content directly to the device. There’s also a USB cable for getting content from a computer.
The $360 device will not win any design or beauty contests. It’s a slab of white plastic with a mini-keyboard at the bottom, and big tabs on either side of the screen for changing pages, and a scroll wheel for working the unit’s control menus. It was not the most user-friendly layout of all time. The menus are clunky to use, and there is an extra “next page” button to the left of the screen (the main one is on the right) that I inevitably hit when I actually wanted the “previous page” button above it. It’s very much a “1.0” product. (In fact, gadgetry web sites have been showing pictures recently of a purported second generation Kindle that’s a little sleeker looking.)
Limitations aside, I tested one for a couple of weeks and found it to be a very capable book substitute. The experience was little different from reading a paper version, with the added advantage of being able to blow up the text size when I didn’t feel like using my reading glasses. Content delivery by the wireless service was fairly reliable. (Like anything cellular, there always are dead spots somewhere.)
Kindle was less successful for newspapers. The 6-inch (diagonal) screen seemed cramped for that use, navigating through sections was awkward, and the newspapers’ Kindle versions were short of graphics. Magazines fell somewhere in between – heavy text publications came closer to matching their print versions that such periodicals as newsmagazines that have more photos and graphics in print.
Still, Kindle was a very attractive alternative to lugging a stack of books around on a trip or finding a place on your bookshelf to store books after you’ve finished reading them. The unit has a slot for postage stamp-sized SD cards, which can be your “bookshelf.” Another enticing feature is that you can sample the first chapter of books or get a short subscription to periodicals so you can try before you buy. It isn’t hard to imagine that a couple of evolutions from now, this kind of device is the way you read “print” publications.
At the heart of a Kindle is a screen made by Cambridge-based E-Ink Corporation. It uses encapsulated pigment particles to form text and images. Unlike conventional computer displays such as LCDs, E-Ink’s “Electronic Paper Display” consumes much less energy and, equally important, remains highly visible in bright light.
Equally as interesting as the technology, though, is E-Ink’s back-story. In the ’90s, a consortium of major news organizations partnered with MIT’s Media Lab to create the “News in the Future” program intended to help publishers and broadcasters adapt to the challenges of the then-nascent Internet. In retrospect, the project developed a lot of technologies that did help commercialize providing content on the Web. Unfortunately for the news business, it was companies such as Google and Amazon that commercialized them.
E-Ink came out of MIT Media Lab research, and some of its founders were researchers and officials at the lab. Of the many media partners who might have wanted a piece of this action, the only one that is currently an E-Ink investor is the Hearst Corporation, whose properties include WCVB, Channel 5 in Boston.
One issue the News in the Future project grappled with was finding some kind of electronic substitute for paper.
For newspapers at least, one of the considerations was whether it made any sense in the electronic age to undertake the costly capital expense of building new presses or replacing existing ones. Lab experts calculated that it could well be less expensive for a paper to instead supply its readers with some electronic device instead.
I attended a few meetings of the consortium on behalf of my then-employer the Times-Mirror Company (now part of the Tribune Corp.) and saw researcher struggle not only with the technological issues but also with resistance from its media industry sponsors to major departures from their business models.
That Amazon is the company profiting from E-Ink and Media Lab wizardry while my former newspaper company is defunct speaks volumes to me about the state of the news business today.
