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Amazon hopes to ignite trend with innovative Kindle

By Randall Stross
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Jan 27, 2008, Page 12

The Amazon Kindle uses E Ink technology to display images in four shades of gray and is easy on the eyes. An e-reader performs well when placed in page-to-page competition with paper. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Printed books provide pleasures no device created by an electrical engineer can match. The sweet smell of a brand-new book. The tactile pleasures of turning a page. The reassuring sight on one's bookshelves of personal journeys.

But not one of these explains why books have resisted digitization. That's simpler: Books are portable and easy to read.

Building a portable electronic reader was the easy part; matching the visual quality of ink on paper took longer. But display technology has advanced to the point where the digital page is easy on the eyes, too. At last, an e-reader performs well when placed in page-to-page competition with paper.

As a result, the digitization of personal book collections is certain to have its day soon.

Music shows the way.

The digitization of personal music collections started, however, only after the right combination of software and hardware -- iTunes Music Store and the iPod -- arrived.

PAVING THE WAY

As Apple did for music lovers, some company will devise an irresistible combination of software and hardware for book buyers. That company may be Amazon.

Amazon's first iteration of an electronic book reader is the Kindle. Introduced in November, it weighs about 300g, holds more than 200 full-length books and can display newspapers, magazines and blogs. It uses E Ink technology, developed by the company of that name, that produces sharply defined text, yet draws power only when a page is changed, not as it is displayed.

Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: Books and other content can be loaded wirelessly, from just about anywhere in the US, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.

DAZZLING DEBUT

This may turn out to be a red-letter day in the history of convenience -- our age's equivalent of that magical moment FedEx introduced next-day delivery and people asked: "How was life possible before this?"

The Kindle is expensive at US$399, but it sold out in just six hours after its debut on Nov. 19. Since then, supplies have consistently lagged behind demand and a waiting list remains in place.

The Kindle gets many things right, or at least I assume it does. I haven't had much of a chance to test out my demonstration unit.

My wife, skeptical that a digital screen could ever approach the readability of ink on paper, was so intrigued by the Kindle when it arrived last week that she snatched it from my grasp. I haven't been able to pry it away from her since.

I can see that the text looks splendid. But when one presses a bar to "turn" a page, the image reverses in a way I found jarring: the light background turns black and the black text turns white, then the new page appears and everything returns to normal. My wife wasn't bothered by this at all.

Apple Inc CEO Steven Jobs has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod. It displays text in four exciting shades of gray and does that one thing very well.

And it can do a few other things. It has a headphone jack and can play MP3 files, but it is not well suited for navigating a large collection of music tracks.

SMALL FRIES?

When Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of Amazon's Kindle, he was quick to heap scorn on the book industry.

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the US read one book or less last year."

To Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.

Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests.

This year, book publishing will bring in about US$15 billion in revenue in the US, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.

One can only wonder why, by the Study Group's estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?

If a piece of the book industry's US$15 billion seems too paltry for Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently.

COMPARING NOTES

Last week, Apple reported that it posted revenue of US$9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to last month, its best quarter ever, after US$24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.

But as recently as 2001, before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was a niche computer company without a mass market hit. It was badly hurt by the 2001 recession and reported revenue of only US$5.3 billion for the year.

This is, by coincidence, almost exactly what Barnes & Noble reported in revenue for its 2007 fiscal year. In neither case did the company owners look at that number, decide to chain the doors permanently shut and call it quits.
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