Amazon Expands Kindle To the PC 149
An anonymous reader writes "Windows users will be able to use a new Kindle Books application to purchase, download and read e-book titles from Amazon's Kindle Store service. The PC application will be offered as a free download and will support Windows 7, Vista and XP systems. The news comes as Amazon is suddenly finding itself with a fresh crop of competitors in the e-book reader market. Earlier this week hardware vendor Spring Design entered the market with its Alex device, while publisher/retailer Barnes and Noble presented an even more serious challenge to Kindle when it unveiled its Nook reader device." Worth noting, if you're in the market for any such device: the base Kindle's price is now down to $259.
Shame about the kindle (Score:2, Interesting)
If it had internet access like it apparently does in the states, I'd seriously consider it. As it is, a netbook will ultimately be the better investment.
Cross platform? (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it have killed them to use a cross platform library and provide support for OS X and Linux as well? It's not like this is a legacy app or anything.
Will it disable the (Score:4, Interesting)
And the race begins (Score:5, Interesting)
Major geek cred for the first person to write a script that automatically pages through the book and takes a screenshot of each page, crops out the non-text, and runs OCR on it. No reason to even bother removing the DRM on this one.
eBook readers (Score:3, Interesting)
Are there any eBook readers that are good with 8.5"x11" PDFs yet? I'd love having something to read scientific papers on, but I don't think a full page of 10-pt font would be very legible when reduced by a factor of two for a Kindle screen.
Re:MIsleading (Score:2, Interesting)
To be quite honest, I find it weird that people use 'PC' as a synonym for 'PC running Windows', why not just say 'Windows'? as in: Windows games, Kindle on Windows, Windows only, etc.
Re:MMmmmm... my head will explode. (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who never bought a DRM-laden piece of music, but buys plenty of stuff for my Kindle (but was never one to rant much about it), the reason is simply one of practicality.
I'm in grad school, have a small room, move a lot, and tend to fulfill some of those 'digital nomad' stereotypes, so the benefits of e-books are pretty strong for me -- however, there is no way to purchase DRM-free e-books without extremely limiting my choices. I figure that by purchasing and using the device, as its useful for me and I feel informed what the DRM implies, I can help to show that there is a market, and that more competition will force more openness, as it did in the music industry.
Music had two critical differences to me. One was that I could purchase a CD and rip it with little effort (I still prefer to purchase music by album, so single-serve songs meant little to me) -- this made it easy to get most of the benefits without the DRM (plus ripping to FLAC). The second is repeatability and cost/length: buying a new copy of an album every year just to relisten to is absurd, while if I were to decide to reread a book 5 years from now, it doesn't seem as ridiculous to rebuy it, thus making the DRM-associated risk less.
That said, first DRM-free e-book store that appears with a comparable selection, I'll jump to immediately, just as I started using the Amazon MP3 store as soon as it appeared.
Re:MMmmmm... my head will explode. (Score:3, Interesting)
If they did a little market research they would learn the reason for any wallet-voting, though I acknowledge that for political reasons there may be little incentive for them to do so. For that reason, perhaps it should be accompanied by some kind of form letter advising them of why the product was not purchased.
I agree that e-books are extremely convenient. I just don't want that convenience to be the bait at the end of a hook to cause the acceptance of something that is profoundly anti-customer and really needs to go the way of the dinosaur.
Now that's a really good argument. Not only is it abundantly plausible, it might end up being the best way to deal with this issue particularly in the absence of conscientious customers. I also wish that the posters in this thread who assume that no DRM will destroy the e-book industry would take a hard look at the music industry as you have done.
Re:MMmmmm... my head will explode. (Score:4, Interesting)
Markup is not the only problem (Score:3, Interesting)
I just looked at the UK Amazon site.
They list it at £199. According to Google, this is $324.569 and some zeroes. A more realistic comparison is $400 if the exchange rate was actually set at the true relative value of £ and $.
For this, we get a "cut down" version and a much smaller choice of books.
If the application is free (unlikely), I might consider it for my laptop. For now, the Nook sounds interesting but the Sony one is actually here and a lot cheaper than the Kindle. I just have to ask myself "Do I actually want one?" We'll see...
Re:Thanks for the link (Score:1, Interesting)
If I am a company and I know that a portion of my customers strongly value software freedom, and then I release software (at no cost or any cost) that does not support such software freedom, and then I receive a backlash, that's my fault. That would be my own failure to understand the market I intended to reach
I used to work for a company that released some closed source binaries, we got nothing but complaints and demands that we were either in breach of the GPL or just being corporate bastards as various people wanted to customise the drivers. The fact was we had code in there that did not belong to us and we were not permitted to make it open source did not seem to matter to them, so rather than make nothing at all for the linux community we chose to at least provide binaries, from what I understand they don't even bother with that anymore due to the negative response they got from an honest attempt to do as much as we could for the community.