The interesting thing about the Amazon Kindle is that it’s a year old and people are still pontificating about whether it’s going to succeed or not. They wonder if it’s got the right functionality, how it can be better. They go on at length about how its limited online scope hurts it, or, in the opinion of the New York Times Book Review, helps it.
I received a Kindle, quite unexpectedly, for my birthday last July. It was never something I considered getting: the DRM bugged me, it was expensive, and I liked my regular books too much.
But it grew on me. I’m finding the Kindle as an excellent tool for a geek in general, and a sci-fi fan in specific. And, believe it or not, the Kindle can be a way an SF geek can save money - (once you get past the initial price tag).
- You can email PDFs and other files to your Kindle for $.10 a file. Or put them on the device for free if you connect it to your computer (but come on, email’s so freaking easy I don’t mind the dime).
- Many podcast-to-print SF books are available via free PDF: Jack Wakes Up, and Digital Magic and The Case of the Pitcher’s Pendant, to name a few.
- Several publishers are starting to release books via free PDF, including Small Beer Press (Magic for Beginners and The Ant King and Other Stories and others), Tor.com (various titles at different times; you must be a member of the site; it’s free) and Baen.com (the Baen Free Library).
- James Lewin recently stated, “The Kindle is a basically an expensive device that lets rich people get access to a store that lets them buy other expensive stuff.” And while I won’t argue that the price of the Kindle needs to come down, I wonder if he’s actually looked at the Kindle store. Most books are $10 or less, and I’d make a safe bet that nearly all are cheaper than their print versions. And yet I didn’t see him complaining about the price of books.
- Speaking of the Kindle store, you can also get subscriptions to both Asimov’s and Analog on the Kindle (which works out great for me, as I’d let Asimov’s run out and I hate it when I miss a James Patrick Kelly or Connie Willis story). I pay $2.99 per issue.
We geeks are a lot who like instant gratification, and the Kindle feeds that quite well. One morning this summer I was at a remote beach house with no Internet and I was suffering from insomnia. I got up at 5 in the morning and decided to browse the Kindle store. I was reading a new book within a minute.
People like to talk about how the Kindle isn’t the “iPod of eReaders yet” and they mention the high price and the problems, and yes, I don’t deny a lot of those are true. Still, it’s been out a year now, and people are still talking about it. That’s a good sign - if it was really not a factor, people wouldn’t still be talking about it. I’m looking forward to seeing what Amazon does with future versions of the Kindle, and eager to see if they drop DRM.
Right now I feel super powerful with mine, carrying around a library, with access to more books at any moment. Kinda like a tricorder. Now all I need is to be able to read life forms with the thing and I’ll be set.
(On the topic of the free books and Creative Commons, I’ll pontificate on that at a later date.)
Excellent article, Mur. I am currently saving up for a Kindle as I, too, feel it is kind of expensive. However, if I save $5 here, and $10 here, it will slowly add up. I think people forget about saving up for big purchases. We used to do that a "long" time ago (1980s), but not so much any more. I am retraining myself to save for large purchases.
Thanks for all the great content, Mur. :) Can't wait for a sequel to "Playing for Keeps".
Thanks for the write up. Just an hour or so ago I was twittering about how I wanted to pick up two of them (one as a gift, the other for self) but that the price was keeping me away. (And secondarily the 3-4 week delivery time frame.)
I hear that it also plays MP3s, but that the playback quality isn't great. I think that would be OK since I really just want to listen to podcasts. It might be a deal breaker if it could also play screencasts, but at that point it might as well be a bigscreen iPhone.
I love my Kindle. I have had it since February (a birthday gift several months early) and I can't get over it. I use it CONSTANTLY. I put documents on it, books on it, magazines on it, newspapers on it. I wanted to read the F.D.R. book that Obama talked about and, though I'm told the local book store is sold out, started reading it minutes later.
Of the great free sources, you've forgotten Project Gutenberg. Also, if you use an SD card in your kindle, you can just put content on that and not bother with the USB connection.
I've been excited about ereaders since I first heard that Sony was coming out with them so many years ago (what was that, three years? Someone out there knows). Anyway, the convenience of a Kindle sounds about as deadly as the iTunes store is for me right now.
Sometimes I feel as though I am singlehandedly reinvigorating the economy via iTunes. Other times I'm just being a podcast junkie.
That's great news about being able to transfer all the other free PDF's to the Kindle though, and the $0.10 price point is painless enough that it shouldn't act as too much of a hurdle. Very interesting...
I haven't made the leap to an ereader, even though I have a lot of books in pdf format on my laptop. What has made me hesitate is that the Kindle is an expensive device, the books formatted for it are more than what I usually pay for mass market paperbacks, and there is no guarantee that I'll still be able to access the files for the next decade, let alone a lifetime.
Maybe I'm an oddball, but I have 20 and 30 year-old paperbacks on my bookshelf that I still reread on occasion. And, even better, I can read those books in the bathtub or on the beach without worrying about ruining my whole library if I drop them in the water, I can share them with my friends, and, if I leave them on the train, I've only suffered a minor loss.
If they dropped the price of the Kindle significantly - closer to $100 than $400 - I might consider it. But at the moment I'm pretty happy with the dead tree versions