Tagged: Amazon RSS
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Electronista: “Where the Kindle will truly hurt, however, is software. By the nature of the screen, Amazon virtually has to make its device single-purpose: e-paper doesn’t work for much else beyond text. … It should also be noted that Apple is paradoxically the most open here. It’s using EPUB, a format that’s shared by the Nook, QUE, Sony Reader and other devices. Amazon’s Kindle format doesn’t require copy protection, but it’s only ever useful within hardware and software Amazon makes.”
NYT: Three Reasons Why the iPad WILL Kill Amazon’s Kindle
“If you look at the way many of us consume content online, it’s shifting from just reading words to consuming multimedia. We view images, watch videos and add our own commentary to the content we ingest. … The Kindle’s technology isn’t evolving fast enough. … The Kindle is too expensive for a single-purpose device.”TC: “The best plan for Amazon isn’t to try to buy customers or try to match Apple’s approach. Rather, they’ll need to re-think their consumer experience from start to finish. They’ve done a great job so far of digitizing books, but now if they want to compete with Steve Jobs’ inventiveness, they’ll have to step up to be a must-have device in consumers’ digital lives. Of course, they can also just surrender and continue to sell books through their existing iPhone app, which should be compatible with the iPad like all the other apps in the App Store.”
NYT: Three Reasons Why the iPad WON’T Kill Amazon’s Kindle
“Sure, the Kindle’s potential market may have shrunk today, since the two-books-a-year folks will now choose the more versatile iPad. But the Kindle (and other devices with E Ink screens) will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period. (And they do love it; check the Kindle forums for the passion of Kindle owners.) The iPad’s backlit screen, higher price and more limited battery all make it a poorer choice for curling up with a novel. … A Kindle with color? With a Pixel Qi screen? A Kindle tablet to rival the iPad? One indication that Amazon plans to continue releasing new Kindles in the months and years ahead comes from the Web site of its design division, Lab126 … Amazon smartly separated its Kindle hardware division from its Kindle e-book store and has since released or announced Kindle apps for the iPhone, PC, Mac and BlackBerry. Despite the fact that many consumers will now choose an iPad over a Kindle, Amazon will likely undercut Apple on e-book prices.”TC: “Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. … Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489. That is pretty close already. What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference? … Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, ‘Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world’. … Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?
NYT: “With Apple, under a formula that tethers the maximum e-book price to the print price on the same book, publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction titles – higher than the common $9.99 price that Amazon had effectively set for new releases and best sellers. Apple will keep 30 percent of each sale, and publishers will take 70 percent. … In the short term, authors and publishers will most likely earn less from book sales on the iPad. On the Kindle, Amazon subsidizes the $9.99 price by paying publishers a higher wholesale price equivalent to what booksellers typically pay for print editions. But publishers were concerned that Amazon, as the dominant player, would eventually demand lower digital wholesale prices.”
RWW: “Apple’s largest advantage right now is that it’s the default e-book store on the iPad. The iPhone, however, has clearly shown that downloading a free app from the app store is something users are very comfortable with and Amazon and B&N have enough marketing power to spread the word about their apps.”
Gruber: “Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Amazon Opens Kindle
Amazon is finally opening up the Kindle to developers, has released the Kindle Development Kit; http://j.mp/8pOctH
Gerrit Eicker
Digital Text Platform
Amazon opens its Digital Text Platform internationally: upload and format books for sale to Kindles; http://j.mp/5AUhFt
Gerrit Eicker
Gerrit Eicker
Kindl DX Goes Global
Amazon starts offering its larger Kindle DX eReader internationally on January 19th; http://j.mp/8E1ISi
Gerrit Eicker
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud; http://j.mp/4xLFW
Gerrit Eicker
Amazon.com: Intraday Delivery!
Items ordered at Amazon.com before 10am/1pm will be delivered intraday (!) in 7 cities of the USA; http://j.mp/YvG9F
Gerrit Eicker
Kindle Everywhere
Amazon starts offering its Kindle eReader internationally: 3G coverage in over 100 countries; http://j.mp/4fJADL
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Gerrit Eicker
NYT: “Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device is going global. – The company announced on Tuesday evening that it would soon begin selling a new version of the Kindle that can wirelessly download books both in the United States as well as in more than 100 other countries. … International users of the new Kindle will have a slightly smaller collection of around 200,000 English-language books to choose from, and their catalogs will be tailored to the country they purchased the device in. Amazon said it would sell books from a range of publishers including Bloomsbury, Hachette, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet and Simon & Schuster. – Among the apparent holdouts: Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, said the company’s ‘discussions with Amazon about this opportunity are ongoing, productive and private.’”
Amazon.de: “In den vergangenen Jahren haben wir Millionen englischsprachiger Bücher an unsere Kunden in Deutschland verschickt. Und wenn auch Sie einer der vielen Amazon.de-Kunden sind, die gerne englischsprachige Bücher lesen, haben wir jetzt gute Nachrichten für Sie: Wir können unseren drahtlosen E-Book-Reader Kindle nun auch Kunden außerhalb der USA anbieten.”
SO: “Der Kindle kann ab sofort online für 279 Dollar im US-Portal von Amazon.com vorbestellt werden. Das Gerät soll dann direkt nach der Frankfurter Buchmesse am 19. Oktober ausgeliefert werden. – Der einzige deutschsprachige Inhalt, den man derzeit bei Amazon für den Kindle kaufen kann, ist die elektronische Ausgabe der ‘Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung’. Die digitale ‘FAZ’ wird wie 45 andere Zeitungen aus den USA, Großbritannien und anderen Ländern über Amazon.com vertrieben.”
heise: “Auf der Buchmesse in Frankfurt dürften der Einstieg von Amazon in den internationalen E-Book-Markt und die Lizenzierung von Titeln in deutscher Sprache ein wichtiges Thema werden. Zwar spielen E-Books selbst in den USA beim Buchabsatz noch eine untergeordnete Rolle. Allerdings verkaufte sich jüngst der Bestseller ‘The Lost Symbol’ von Dan Brown bei Amazon als E-Book besser als die fast doppelt so teure Hardcover-Version. ‘Für Bücher, die wir auf Papier und digital vertreiben, kommt durchschnittlich auf zwei gedruckte Bücher ein E-Book’, sagte Bezos.”
Gerrit Eicker
Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS)
Via Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) customers can experience easy purchasing on their mobiles; http://j.mp/BN4GK
Gerrit Eicker 09:05 on 1. February 2010 Permalink |
pC: “So how does the iPad stack up against its more single-minded competition? We can’t say yet how it really compares to reading a novel on a Kindle, textbooks on a Kindle DX or business pdfs on a Que. What we can do is lay out the specs and features side by side.”
NYT: “To Deliver, iPad Needs Media Deals … Critics who suggested that Apple unveiled little more than an iPhone that won’t fit in your pocket don’t seem to understand that by scaling the iPhone experience, the iPad becomes a different species. Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way.”
RWW: “According to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, ‘millions of people now own Kindles.’ Sadly, Amazon has always kept the exact number of Kindle sales under wraps. According to some analysts, consumers in the US bought roughly 3 million e-readers in 2009 and the majority of these were probably Kindles.”
NYT: “And now (drum roll) the Toy of the Year award goes to … the Apple iPad. – That’s a reasonable prediction for this time next year, once children start swiping at iPad’s puddle of interactivity.”
TC: “The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers. People who don’t like the idea of upgrading their 3D drivers, or adjusting their screen resolution, or installing new memory. Who don’t understand why their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it, who have 25 icons in their system tray and have to wait ten minutes for their system to boot up every day.”
Macworld: “For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person.’ I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort. … Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done. – If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”
TC: “Don’t think about the iPad as just a computer. Its true potential lies in its potential as a communications device. Already, it functions as an electronic reader, helping to bring the world of books to computers. But there is video and audio too, with the potential for VoIP apps and even one day a camera for video messaging. The artificial walls that separate our notion of communications and computing are being broken.”
NYT: “The more, the better. That’s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the ‘wisdom of the crowd‘ and ‘open innovation.’ … Yet Apple … suggests another innovation formula – one more elitist and individual. – This approach is reflected in the company’s latest potentially game-changing gadget, the iPad tablet, unveiled last week. It may succeed or stumble but it clearly carries the taste and perspective of Mr. Jobs and seems stamped by the company’s earlier marketing motto: Think Different.”
Winer: “One recurring theme in defense of the closedness of the iPad is that it gives you access to the web and that’s the most open thing around. Maybe, but if I want the web there are much better and less expensive ways to get it that don’t compromise on flexibility and the ability to run other software. In other words, if you want the web and only the web, iPad would be a poor choice.”
TC: “Both Apple and Google are very popular with consumers, but their offerings are very different – while aiming for the same market. And as two companies that were once as close as could be, it’s also fascinating to watch the tension and awkwardness as they now compete in an ever-growing number of areas. – If this market between laptops and smartphones proves big enough, perhaps the two frenemies can once again find a common ground and band together to defeat their common enemy: Microsoft.”
NYT: “Concerns over the lack of Flash in the iPad and iPhone may be short-lived. Many online video sites have been experimenting with a new video format, called HTML5. Unlike Flash, which is a downloaded piece of software that can interact with a computer’s operating system, HTML5 works directly in a Web browser. And although this new video format does not work in all browsers, it will allow iPhone and iPad users to enjoy more Web-based video content. – In addition, the patents surrounding HTML5 are owned by a group of companies; Apple is a part of that group.”
RWW: “While it’s not perfect, HTML 5 might just be the step you need to decrease the time and cost of developing across devices.“