Kindle 2 Rumors Persist, Now With Pictures

A few weeks ago, Amazon was telling the rumor mills to stop buzzing about the next generation of Kindle and that if a Kindle 2.0 was coming at all it wouldn't be until next year. But now that Sony has announced their new PRS-700 Reader and it's getting all sorts of press, Lo! What should appear the very same weekend? Leaked spy shots of the next Kindle. Coincidence? Nah.

Granted, these are the sneaky tactics you expect in an election year, when it seems everyone is doing their best to play a game of one-up-manship. Presidents, banks, and reality TV contestants are all queuing up to see who can fail the most spectacularly in their efforts to win the hearts of all the Joe Sixpacks and hockey moms. However, we at E-Reads don't want to see either the Kindle or Sony Reader products fail. We love them both. They both deserve the limelight.

But the possibly fake/likely real Kindle 2.0 spy shots by "Boy Genius Report" make me think the device isn't yet up to par with the latest Sony Reader, and I'm sure Amazon isn't entirely pleased with seeing these pictures getting blogged at heavily trafficked Gizmodo.com. The revised Kindle in the spy shots has cleaner lines, but it looks more like a Star Trek medical tablet than ever before, and I assume all those buttons mean that it won't be a touch screen, like the new Sony. But it is reported to be sturdier and recharge via USB cable. Maybe Amazon is still playing catch-up, maybe they're simply refining a low cost alternative to the Sony Reader. Who knows what's really going on. All I know is that when your product has rumors and buzz, it's going to take on a life of its own in the public's mind. And anything that puts ebooks in the public's mind is good by us.

- Michael

Second Gen of E-Book Readers Swoops in on the Wings of the iRex Reader 1000

Hard on the heels of the announced unveiling of Plastic Logic's unnamed tablet reader, Andy Greenberg of Forbes reports the imminent launch of iRex Technologies' iRex Reader 1000. What does it look like? The image at the right is all that anyone gets to see until Monday September 22nd.

With Sony and Amazon developing next-generation e-books, the race for the hearts, minds and wallets of the consumer is on, and tablet-sized screens will definitely be a critical factor. Forbes will win handily in that aspect, as Plastic Logic won't get its product out till late spring at the very earliest. But who will win the contest on the basis of quality is anybody's guess. In any case both business and student users will be the beneficiaries, and though this blogger has restrained his temptation to buy a tablet up to now, it's more than likely he will succumb when all the entries are available.

One thing that will affect my decision is the price: the projected price for the basic iRex 1000 will be about $650 but add-ons will increase the cost, bringing it to about twice the price of Kindle and Sony. On the other hand, that's about half the price of a tablet PC. And iRex may deliver twice the value.

According to Greenberg,

The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle's 6-inch screen or even iRex's own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.

Some other issues inhibiting consumers are lack of color and no video, says Greenberg. So, even business men and women who can afford it (assuming they can even afford lead pencils in the current economy) might want to sit out the dance until those features are in place. That will happen in the next four years.

-Richard Curtis

Rip, Burn and Mash - Downloaders Cast Their Eyes on Textbooks

If you've been wondering, as I have, when the E-Book Revolution would find its way to textbooks, it's now no further than your keyboard.

If any aspect of the book business were ripe for revolution it's textbooks, because it's closest to the music industry in terms of the SRI - the Student Resentment Index. College students have been complaining for decades about being compelled to pay preposterously high prices for school books of which they may be required to use only a few chapters. Though there is a secondary market for those books, publishers and authors have gotten around it by producing new editions, often merely cosmetically enhanced, and requiring students to buy them instead of used ones. The process is particularly cruel on families on a tight budget. And it's not that hot on the spines of students lugging fifteen or twenty pounds of books in their backpacks.

The logical question is, "Why can't we just download?"

Noam Cohen's article in the New York Times, Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free discusses new approaches by students and parents who feel ripped off by a conspiracy of publishers, textbook authors, and colleges.

Recognizing the injustice, at least one denizen of academia, Professor R. Preston McAfee of Cal Tech, has forgone the traditional route and a big advance in order to deliver a free download of an economics textbook he has authored. The book is also for sale in an on-demand print edition, but for a fraction of the price that students would have to pay at their college bookstore. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” Cohen quotes Professor McAfee. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

Cohen cites other attractively priced approaches to Web delivery of math, science, economics and other big-ticket textbooks. These breakthroughs come along just as tablet-reader technology solutions accelerate. A tipping point may be closer than anyone (except a core group of wild-eyed visionaries like yours truly) could have imagined a few years ago.

- Richard Curtis

Plastic Logic Brings E-Newspaper Closer to Your Doorstep

Driven by the same E-Ink technology that powers Sony's eReader and Amazon's Kindle, Mountain View California's Plastic Logic will soon release a large-screen reader designed to carry your daily newspaper, according to Eric A. Taub in the New York Times. The screen will be twice the size of the eReader and Kindle and just about the same weight but two thirds thinner.

You'll be able to buy it in summer of 2009, but the economics of newspaper subscription haven't been worked out. It could be far more expensive than subscription to the paper version, not even counting the cost of the device itself. In time we may see the newspaper equivalent of Gillette's "Give away the razor and sell the blades," but too much remains to be settled about technology, economics, psychology and customs before the next generation is as comfortable with downloading newspapers as today's aging populace is with ink on newsprint. But with magazines and newspapers dying, the lure of huge savings on downloads may prove overwhelmingly tempting. Though European culture may not be an accurate guide, the iRex'a iLiad newspaper and magazine reader may show us how an Old World society can adapt to a completely new way of reading the daily news.

The Plastic Logic reader (it doesn't have a name yet - you got any suggestions?) also brings us a little closer to the tablet-sized device that will inevitably revolutionize the classroom.

- Richard Curtis

Apple Sleight of Hand Sets the Stage for Tablet Macs

Further to our discussion of Kindles as learning tools, if Apple can pull off a scheme to create a full-sized keyboard for a tablet device, they will be that much closer winning what I call the Premio Gordo: universal adoption of a tablet (or tablet-oid) computer by colleges.

According to Sam Oliver, writing in AppleInsider, a 52-page patent filed by Apple Inc. "illustrates a number of techniques that would pave the way for tablet Macs that display a near full-sized multi-touch keyboard and run an undiluted version of the Mac OS X operating system." In plain English, Mac users would be able type with both hands on the screen, an absolutely essential feature of any student computer.

- Richard Curtis

Kindle Sequel on the Way, But Will it Play on Campus?

(Pictured right: The Intel Classmate prototype)

Speculation on the next generation of Kindle (my wife refers to them in Yiddish as Kindeleh) is reaching fever pitch, such as this piece on cnet news by Adam Richardson and another on engadget by Thomas Ricker.

The prognostications seem to be focusing on student applications, and though Kindle 2.0 will probably be a bit bigger for collegiate use, my own opinion is that that is not where e-book readers have to go to win the premio gordo of universal college adoption.

At the dawn of the E-Book Era, circa 2000, I recognized that pocket-portable e-books would never succeed for student use. The reason is size. Textbooks and other illustrated books simply cannot be crammed into anything smaller than a screen close to the size of a laptop. That's why I advocated the tablet concept and design. Tablets have all the virtues of laptops PLUS touchscreen functionality. For students, reading books on an e-reading device is highly desirable but not as imperative as the ability to handwrite notes on their device's screen. Resistance to widespread adoption of e-textbooks is explored in an excellent article by Andy Guess in Inside Higher Ed, Next Step for E-Texts. "Whether — or when — e-textbooks become as ubiquitous as laptops or smartphones on campuses depends on several factors that continue to hinder widespread adoption. Observers of the nascent market point variously to available hardware, consumer demand and the dearth of content made specifically for digital formats," writes Guess.

Manufacturers are not unaware of these issues and have been developing a variety of readers, variously called netbooks, ultraportables, and mini-notebooks such as the Intel Classmate, that appeal to the specific needs of the student. No one has hit a home run yet, but there's a fortune waiting for the manufacturer that does.

- Richard Curtis