Amazon's Kindle "is the iPod of books" 21 Nov 2007

So there you have it: BusinessWeek has pronounced Kindle "the iPod of Books" (In case you've missed the media frenzy this week, Kindle is Amazon's new e-Book reader). The blogosphere doen't seem to agree however. Says John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

"I say the difference is that the iPod allowed you to easily play the music you already owned, and that you could (and can to this day) buy music to play on iPods in an open format."

These differences are crucial. When the iPod arrived, we simply took our existing CD collections and imported them into iTunes. With Kindle, things are different. We can't just tip out the contents of our bookshelves into it; we'll have to purchase all of our books again. This is a significant barrier to entry - and one that shouldn't be underestimated.

The format issue is just as problematic. What it boils down to is that when you purchase books for Kindle, they're wrapped in DRM and are in a format that no other software application can read. This means that you can't share them and you can't read them on different devices. Apple's DRM issues are well documented, but at least it is possible to buy MP3s from other vendors and play them on your iPod .

Furthermore, the iPod is, was and always has been a desirable object. The first time I saw it, I wanted one (even though, as a so-called usability expert, I should have known better than to make a purchasing decision based on looks alone). Kindle, however, looks terrible. It's in no way desirable. Its design is reminiscent of the Acorn / Commodore home computers of the late 70s - early 80s. And if David Emery's review is accurate, it works just as poorly too:

"The reason that Amazon Kindle will fail (and I'm pretty certain of it now I've seen videos of it in action) is that the hardware is terrible. It's really pretty simple. No amount of looking at the specifications, weighing up the pricing models and looking at the potential competitors will transcend the fundamental fact that Kindle -- as a physical object -- is appalling, from its low-rent design to its not-ready-yet e-ink screen that requires a strange separate scroll-bar because it can't refresh quickly."

What does all this mean? Well, Kindle isn't all bad - it does have one or two very nice features, as TechCrunch points out. And it's certainly a game-changer, in the sense that its integration with Amazon makes it less like the world's first serious e-Book reader and more like the world's first portable bookstore. It just isn't "the iPod of books". (If you want our opinion, the iPod (or the iPhone) is more likely to turn out to be "the iPod of books").

Related: Amazon's Kindle reignites e-Book reader interest (from September 2006).