by Michael R. Johnston

Created on: May 03, 2008   Last Updated: May 04, 2008

May 2, 20080
Amazon Kindle - Not Quite There Yet

I want to like the Kindle - I really do. In fact, I'm absolutely in love with the idea behind it: an electronic device that lets me shrink a mountain of books, magazines and newspapers into a portable package weighing less than just one of the books I'm typically reading at a given moment. As an obsessive reader, one rarely caught without some kind of reading material, this constitutes a revolution in portability and general utility.

But, like most new technologies that intersect with the Old World businesses - in this case the publishing industry - many issues remain unsolved, issues that may prevent most from taking advantage of what, on the surface, would seem to be one of the best things to happen to books since the advent of the printing press.

The device itself has a few issues, but by most accounts they do seem to be far outweighed by the benefits accrued from using it. The main problems with the Kindle are less with the device itself and more with some of the issues that surround it, like DRM, the price of the e-books, and the dearth of selection.

The music industry seems to be moving away from DRM and, yet, Amazon's books are all stored using a proprietary DRM method that prevents me from moving my purchased content from one device to another. I can buy my books from Amazon now, but should someone - Apple, perhaps? - offer a better device in the future, I'm stuck reading my books on the Kindle; there is no provision for moving the content from one device to another. I doubt that anyone believes that Amazon will be the only major player in this market for long - Apple, perhaps? - so when The Next Great Reading Device is introduced, how am I going to move all the content I've purchased from the old to the new? The answer is that I'm not, so it isn't as if I'm purchasing anything at all - I'm merely renting it from Amazon for as long as I choose to use the Kindle or its successor.

DRM on the Kindle wouldn't be so terrible if, for instance, I could purchase content at a significantly lower price than I'd pay when buying the physical book. But that isn't the case, or at least it isn't true for the books I'd like to purchase, which all seem to be priced at or near the price for the physical book. This hardly seems reasonable given that the manufacturing and distribution costs for electronic publishing are vanishingly small; one would think that at least some of the cost savings would be passed along to the consumer. And this has to make the potential purchaser wonder: Why am I buying this book, which will be forever tied to the Kindle, when I can purchase the dead-tree version for about the same price?

Selection, too, is a sore spot for Kindle. As of this writing, Amazon's web store is showing approximately 119,000 Kindle-ready titles available for purchase, which is a far cry from where it needs to be. If you're looking for just-released best sellers, you're not in bad shape. But, if you're like me, and you read lots of non-fiction that wasn't necessarily published yesterday, you'll find Amazon's selection to be woefully inadequate: you're still going to be carrying lots of dead-tree publications with you even if you purchase Kindle.

Kindle is a tantalizing dream yet unfulfilled, hovering in a state comparable to where the iPod was about five years ago. But much has changed for the iPod since then: mainstream acceptance; millions of songs are available for it; the major labels have dropped - or are dropping - their insistence on DRM. For iPod lovers, life is good. One hopes the same will someday soon be true for the Kindle.

For book lovers, the good life, for now at least, remains where it always has been: in the world of paper and ink.

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