Amazon.com, one of the busiest online marketplaces in the world, has been wildly successful in moving book-shoppers online and has sliced a considerable chunk of sales away from brick-and-mortar stores. However, it has struggled to take the next step and convert those customers from paper-and-glue readers to electronic ones. The new Amazon Kindle, a handheld e-book reader, is a brave new foray in that direction.
Until now, the problem has been breaking centuries of tradition in the physical act of reading. Customers are used to buying a book and receiving a series of pages between soft or hard covers , bound with glue or thread. Previous e-book readers have flopped, largely because customers felt uneasy reading for long periods without flipping pages or adjusting the bulk of the book on their lap. Amazon seems at last to have found a solution.
The device itself is a series of ultra-thin LCD screens welded to a metal “spine” and containing a small slot at the top for a memory card (presumably carrying the e-book) to be inserted. The amount of screens depends on the specific size of the model. The Kindle is sold in 10 sizes, ranging from the basic, “Roald Dahl” model, at 400 screens, to the deluxe, advertised as being able to carry the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy at the same time (conversely referred to as the “Tolstoy” model).
Customers can choose their size and are advised to buy more screens (pages) than they need, so that they can be guaranteed to fit the entire book onto one Kindle. Once an e-book has been placed on the Kindle, the Kindle reads it and displays the pages on the LCD screens and the customer can flip through, mark, close, open and spill coffee on the Kindle as if it were an actual, flesh-and-blood hardcover.
Customer reactions have been mixed. One Amazon.com review bemoans the stiff nature of the screen-pages, complaining that it is no longer possible to “dog-ear” a page and return to it later. Several broken Kindles have so far been returned by irate customers who, confused by the resemblance of the LCD screens to actual pages, tried to dog-ear them. Some used pliers. Others used wrenches, and a few have been hospitalized with injuries. Other complaints have arrived from those who routinely lick their fingers to turn the page, as it smudges the screens and in one case caused the electrocution of an unlucky reader. Still others are simply unimpressed with the experience of reading on a screen instead of a page.
Amazon declined to comment when their headquarters was contacted, but for the company the failure of the Kindle to change the ways of hardcore readers must be a disappointment. Already the company has announced a second, more pliable model arriving next year, made with revolutionary film-circuits and employing the latest in display technology. Early previews leaked to computer hardware magazines reveal that the new model supports dog-earing, paper texture and even highlighting with special markers.
Concurrent with the launch of the Kindle was the launching of a used e-book store on the site, where customers who have finished with their e-books can put them up for sale. However, it doesn’t seem to be as successful as other parts of Amazon’s lucrative business because the specter of piracy has already reared its ugly head over the service. For instance, the entire canon of English literature was posted yesterday on “The Pirate Bay,” a torrent site based in Sweden.
Still, Amazon remains optimistic that the paper-reading majority is a market that can be cracked.
“I think once people get used to how radically different our product is, they’ll be able to see what it can do for them,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said recently in an interview.