I'm surprised (and pleased) that the author doesn't try to rail at the DRM in the kindle, but does praise the benefits the kindle brings to the market as a whole.
He happily accepts that DRM will inevitably fail in books, as it has in music. I absolutely agree that DRM is bad, but I also admire his ability to let the issue slide at this early stage in the market.
e-books are far older than mp3s and avis. Baen Books has been selling speculative fiction in non-DRMed e-book formats for years and (disregarding the fact that almost all of their stuff is shit) it's done very well for them. Cory Doctorow gives away all his books for free, and it's increasingly a tactic adopted by others in the speculative fiction business; four of the five nominees for the Hugo Award this year were released in DRM-free format (for FREE, even) so Hugo voters could have a better chance of reading them.
So, if this is the early stage of e-books, I wonder what it'll look like when the market is mature.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
The ease of readability is what will ultimately make or break ebook readers. If the display is large enough and easy on the eyes and the interface simple and intuitive I can imagine a device capturing a certain following. Other things like price of the unit, prices and restrictions on books, and portability will be addressed if the market is there.
I remember reading ebooks on my Palm several years ago and finding it a less-than-enjoyable experience. Though I've never actually used a Kindle it seems to be a large step in the right direction.
Interactivity will become increasingly important as well. I think we'll eventually see ways to interact with books that no one had thought of before. E-ink displays like the Kindle and the Sony Reader will therefore go the way of the dinosaur. They are great for daylight readability and low power use, but they are too slow!
It would be cool if e-books made it easier to read in foreign languages. In a language that I mostly but not entirely comprehend, I very often want a translation or explanation of a word or passage. Reading a real-world book with a dictionary at hand is a huge pain.
What about a "translation mode" where every time you pointed at a word, there would be a pop-up definition. Probably also enable swipe-highlighting a passage and getting a translation as well.
One interesting idea is that of printing every book you want, on demand. Using http://www.lulu.com/ you can get prices of $8 per copy plus $8 postage, and you provide a PDF (around 250 pages is ideal). It's $16 per item too - no need for an order of say 30 books. Multiply that into $300 and that's quite a few books you can stack on the shelf.
I don't think the Kindle is in any danger of shutting down the ink-and-paper presses yet. 10% of sales, on Amazon, of books available electronically is a vanishingly small percentage of the market.
Now if you could rent books via the Kindle in the style of O'Reilly Safari, that could be a game-changer.
Reference books would be great for something like Kindle but with a more interactive interface. Being able to search and flip back and forth quickly between bookmarks would be great for reference. And the great thing about lots of kinds of reference? People will pay subscriptions for the kind that gets updated often! People will pay just to have information at their fingertips and not have to carry 3 or 4 thick volumes around.
What seems odd is that Amazon seems to be trying to avoid a game change.
They want to make reading /book ownership & retail different with as little effect on what goes on further up the value chain as possible.
Prices are more or less the same, for one.
Amazon is the king of online book sales. They're connected to the world's publishers and authors and they're really enjoying their position above everyone else.
If the way we view eBooks were to change, if eBook prices were to reflect their true costs, the entire online book industry would be shaken.... it most likely will happen, sooner or later, but Amazon (smartly) doesn't want to be the one to instigate such an upheaval that would leave them in a risky situation.
It's very likely that should such an event occur, they would adapt and remain the kings of online media sales - but it's a risk that they don't have to take - they're already at the top so it's nothing to gain and everything to lose.
They're trying to shape the emerging market by their own hands in their own way, a step at a time, to ensure that they'll always be safe.
If what collapses the current industry structure is apple's device, they'll probably come out in a decent position.
If that's what's going to happen anyway, isn't it better to lead? Especially if there's a chance of locking users in to a device with DRM. And it seems impossible that there won't be a change. The whole economics of printing is built on the realities of.. printing. How long can they keep pretending that books are being printed?
But I guess you're right. It's not 'no sense' it's 'no cojones'.
He happily accepts that DRM will inevitably fail in books, as it has in music. I absolutely agree that DRM is bad, but I also admire his ability to let the issue slide at this early stage in the market.