Kindle 2.0
February 9th, 2009 | by jz | Published in Book, Future of the Internet, Generativity, kindle | 7 Comments
Amazon has just introduced its second-generation Kindle book substitute. As a reader, I’m intrigued — I can download a bunch of books and apparently use it for days without a charge. Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, I’m also intrigued, but for opposite reasons.
The downloading takes place over an “EVDO modem with fallback to 1xRTT; utilizes Amazon Whispernet to provide U.S wireless coverage via Sprint’s 3G high-speed data network.”[1] The connectivity needed to download books and browsing certain other sites is free of charge: “The Kindle Store enables you to download, display and use on your Device a variety of digitized electronic content, such as books, subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals, blogs, RSS feeds, and other digital content, [*]as determined by Amazon from time to time[*].”[2] … “Amazon provides wireless connectivity free of charge to you for certain content shopping and downloading services on your Device. You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services.”[3] So there appears to be a more generic Web browser — how locked down it is I’m not sure, but the overall platform does not allow third party apps, and I wonder if it even allows things like Flash — and Amazon will charge fees TBD for going outside the sandbox.
Suppose that Amazon does indeed get to (1) choose what Web sites its users can visit or (2) choose what Web sites will incur a wireless access fee (to the user). I’m curious whether people think either practice should be banned or limited by regulation, e.g. as a violation of network neutrality. If a standard ISP did this, would it be a problem? Does the fact that Amazon is both ISP and hardware provider make the situation better or worse? At some level a specialized device won’t substitute for “standard” Net access and one wouldn’t complain about limitations, any more than one complains that standard cable TV service doesn’t allow Web surfing, even if the set top box can tune to a handful of specialized Web site front ends for “enhanced” content. (In fact, some televisions themselves now do this, along with Blu-Ray disc players.) On the other hand, it’s clearly a platform convergent with everything else — one could imagine bringing only a Kindle on a trip and managing web and primitive email access from it.
I think we’ll be faced with more and more of these hybrid Internet appliances. I’m worried about the end of the ethos of the mainstream hobbyist PC — defined as the general public being able to define what code they want to run, without interference or undue shaping by gatekeepers — and see appliances (and managed web services like the Facebook and Google apps platforms) as substitutes rather than complements.
February 9th, 2009 at 4:46 pm (#)
[...] of books and apparently use it for days without a charge. Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, Read More|||By-the-minute coverage of the new Amazon Kindle unveiling. Read More|||For now, we haven’t seen [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 5:46 pm (#)
[...] of books and apparently use it for days without a charge. Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, Read More|||For now, we haven’t seen enough to be able to judge whether these were improved upon, and [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 5:50 pm (#)
[...] In his first post of the year, Jonathan Zittrain wrote today about Amazon taking on the role of being both hardware maker and ISP with its Kindle 2 and questioning whether or not that would affect generativity. Kindle isn’t providing the [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 5:59 pm (#)
I’m not missing the forest for the trees, here, I promise, but you couldn’t really use Flash on a Kindle, anyway. The eInk update rate isn’t fast enough yet. (Which makes me wonder whether it’s faster on Kindle 2.0 than it was on Kindle 1.0.) Certainly, there could be some excellent third party apps, if they were allowed, though.
Also, they were charging for RSS-like updates of the device with blog and newspaper subscriptions, but I haven’t heard anything about that recently.
I am staying out of the e-Reader market [at least] until I see what Plastic Logic is coming out with later this year. It sounds like their device will have some more functions than the Kindle does, though I kind of hope it will also work with the Amazon store.
February 10th, 2009 at 1:16 pm (#)
[...] of books and apparently use it for days without a charge. Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, Read More|||For now, we haven’t seen enough to be able to judge whether these were improved upon, and [...]
February 11th, 2009 at 6:20 pm (#)
Much of the article content and the comments treat the Kindle as though it was a PC.
It’s not. It’s a book. You do not browse the Internet and manage your e-mail using a book. For that you use a computer, like a laptop.
Amazon is clear that Kindle is a book and not a computer.
As to whether it will succeed, my wife tells me that books must be on paper. Otherwise they are not books. Given that she is 54 and I am older, it may be 30 years or so for this type of device to become commonplace. That is, the current generation will have to die out in order to paradigm shift a book from paper to digital format.
What do you bet that Gutenberg got the same flak over movable type? I expect he was told it will never fly. Proper books must be hand-made and illustrated.
Meanwhile, I will use my Kindle until something better comes along. That means a newer better book and not some new gimcrack computer with 3rd party apps like Flash on it that by the way lets me read a text file. I can do that already. It’s called a laptop.
February 15th, 2009 at 7:37 am (#)
[...] diventa pubblico spettacolo… Jonathan Zittrain, giurista ad Harvard, sostiene però in “Kindle 2.0” che questo, non generando copie, non viola nessun diritto… Quanto forse dovevano [...]