Is Kindle the answer or does it just raise questions?

Stan Beer
Monday, 19 November 2007 15:13

Opinion and Analysis

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.