Kindle

Amazon.com has released the Kindle, a hand-held reader. Kindle works with electronic versions of books. Amazon.com would like you to purchase books through them, but Kindle allows for books in Mobipocket and plain text formats, and Amazon.com provides utilities to convert HTML, MS-Word, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and Microsoft BMP to its proprietary format.

Now, let me say that the name 'Kindle' strikes me as a poor choice for anything to do with books, and an especially poor choice for the elimination of paper books. Yes, I know that Amazon.com want to 'kindle new ideas' but this is not the market for that name. The name 'Kindle' conjures up visions of book-burning.

While Kindle includes The New Oxford American Dictionary, it's not clear that it comes with a copy of Bradbury's Farenheit 451. (Its also not clear that F451 is even available for the Kindle. Amazon.com has set up the Kindle web site to allow searches by bestselling, price, customer review, or publication date, but not by title or author. Possibly searching by title or author would emphasize the limited number of titles available. Amazon.com needs to fix this.)

I suspect that the true audiences for the Kindle are college students and textbook publishers. Certainly the younger crowd is faster to use new tech and adopts it more readily. (But they also may have higher expectations, be more critical, and be more likely to reject a 'dud' technology.)

Textbook publishers win in several ways. They have a shorter time to market and reduced costs. They can sell new versions of their books every year. They also shut down the used textbook market, driving up annual sales.

Losers in this scenario will be the students who buy used textbooks. Since you are not allowed to transfer Kindle books (at least the Amazon.com-proprietary ones), students will have to pony up for the full cost of a new book.

Losers may also include society in general: People other than students buy used textbooks. I have purchased old, used textbooks, because they present information better than today's textbooks. (And because they are cheap.) Textbooks (and other books, and printed items in general) are our civilation's collective memory. If textbooks move to the electronic format, we lose a bit of that memory. Paper lasts longer than electronic patterns and requires less maintenance. I can read books from ten, twenty, fifty, and even one hundred years ago. Will we be able to read Kindle-2007 format books ten, twenty, or fifty years from today?