Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
E-books and e-reader products have been around for more
than a decade. However, what Bezos is announcing with Kindle goes a
step further. He wants to set up the e-book online store equivalent of
iTunes, supported by the e-reader equivalent of the iPod. To download a
current e-book from the Kindle store, you pay US$9.99. To buy a Kindle
reader, which reportedly can store hundreds (maybe thousands?) of
e-books, you pay US$399.
What Bezos is proposing raises some
serious questions. OK, the Kindle may have a great online wireless
connection system and an impressive battery life (30 hours). But how do
you store your growing and increasingly expensive online library in a
manner that will ensure that 10 years from now you still have access to
them?
Regardless of the iTunes or other DRM, a music track can
be stored and accessed from an ordinary computer and it can be burned
to CD. Will Kindle necessarily be stored in a proprietary format that
can only be accessed from a Kindle reader? If so, that raises another
serious question.
If people are going to spend US$399 for a
device that's purely dedicated to downloading, storing and reading
books (and newspapers and blogs), how long can they expect this
portable computer-like device to last? What's the average life of a
laptop or PDA? Three years? Five years? What happens when their Kindle
reader dies? Do they need to buy a new one from Amazon in order to read
the thousands of dollars worth of e-books they own? Or can they store
them on their computers in an industry standard format such as PDF?
On
the surface, the idea of dedicated e-reader integrated with an online
e-books store sounds interesting. However, questions such as those
above need to be answered satisfactorily first. Otherwise, buyer beware.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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