Dan Keldsen's Library tagged kindle →  View Popular

Interesting take at BusinessWeek by Douglas MacMillan regarding Amazon releasing the Kindle app for the iPhone.

My take:
The ongoing revenue stream for Amazon is clearly in the electronic books themselves, not in the Kindle (or Kindle 2), and in general, as I found out when I was consulting with a company who served the microfinance world - credit card companies aren't competing with each other, they're competing with CASH.

Amazon isn't competing with Apple, they're competing with non-consumers of books and magazines, and for those who, particularly in this economy, who aren't willing to pony up for the Kindle but who still want the content. I have the Kindle app on my iPhone, and while it works just fine, I agree with the general sentiment, that for serious readers (I frequently consume 2-3 books a week), the iPhone isn't the format you're going to want to read. The Kindle? Perhaps.

The economics of e-books are still a bit expensive for the consumers, and publishers have only begun to get their heads around this "new" distribution model. Then again, Apple's iTunes Music Store wasn't exactly an overnight success. Innovations take time to find a foundation. All sorts of baggage that needs to be undone, for consumers, authors, publishers, and on and on.

www.businessweek.com/...tc2009034_069800.htm - Preview

kindle cannibal innovation iphone e-books businessweek douglas_macmillan

As mentioned on @stevegarfield's qik video - http://qik.com/stevegarfield#v=664377 - mentioned as a way to quickly get files you're going to want to read on your Kindle (not that I have one, yet) or other mobile device. Quickly PDF and e-mail to that device, and you're good to go.

"Use PDF Download to do whatever you like with PDF files on the Web. Regain control of them and eliminate browser problems, view PDFs directly in Firefox as HTML, and use the all-new Web-to-PDF toolbar to save and share Web pages as high-quality PDF files."

addons.mozilla.org/...636 - Preview

firefox pdf download pdf addon web2.0 utilities kindle

Stumbled onto this post via http://twitter.com/billtrippe - analyst at Gilbane. I'll summarize the post as "E-books $$$? WTF?"

"Calculating a fair price for e-books By Ficbot

How much should e-books cost if they don’t require facilities like the one in the photo? (see site for warehouse image)

An interesting thread over at MobileRead has generated a lot of thoughtful comment from the e-book reading Internet community.

People keep saying that e-books, with their lack of physical medium, need for shipping and need for warehouse storage, should be priced appropriately cheaper than their print counterparts.

And as well, since they have no second-hand market (and if they did, it could only be enabled to the publisher’s satisfaction using cumbersome DRM!) the price should reflect this loss of privilege."

www.teleread.org/...ating-a-fair-price-for-e-books - Preview

teleread e-books kindle pricing

"BTW - those of you using the Kindle - according to the latest research on Content Delivery, which I should be publishing next week, you are indeed part of a select few, in a corporate setting anyway. The research found that the use of multimedia content, and the re-purposing of content in creative new ways within the firewall lags far behind the Internet. Stay tuned ..."

Still can't believe that Carl's blog was published on Kindle before me. Ironically, I submitted the paperwork to be compensated for the publishing of my blog, almost a year ago. Carl did not, and he beat me to the punch. Still took almost a year for them to add him, however.

Anyone can fire up a cloud-based infinite amount of storage, elastic computing power, etc., via Amazon, but it takes a year (or more) to pull a blog onto the Kindle store? Wow, process, process, process - I smell a need for some automation.

www.takingaiim.com/...on-architected-for-kindle.html - Preview

kindle takingaiim carl_frappaolo amazon information_architected