10 Reasons Why The Kindle Is Toast
It became obvious to me at the start of the year that the Kindle was going to fail as a consumer device. The sales had not been bad – encouraging actually, with Amazon running out of stock over the holiday period. That should have been auspicious, but on New Years Eve I ran into one of the entrepreneurs who founded Lexcycle, the company that introduced Stanza. I reported on our conversation in
…I don’t agree with the author and I posted my response to this article as it appeared on seekingalpha:
http://seekingalpha.com/user/214712/comment/501916
You make some good points here. But the biggest selling point for the Kindle is the e-Ink screen and its readability. Reading books on a backlit LCD screen is hard on the eyes, which is why e-book readers haven’t been popular until now. So a 10-inch tablet computer from Apple may be a problem for Kindle, but I’m not really convinced.
That’s also why a Kindle application is somewhat pointless. It’s all about the screen.
But the other points are right on. It’s far too expensive for what it is, and there’s simply no more room in my pockets. A smart device that combined the functions of an iPhone with e-book reading would be perfect, except it seems that consumers don’t want to read books on their smart phones. People want a reading experience closer to the Kindle. The solution (in my opinion) is a slightly larger format smartphone with color e-Ink technology (a few years away, at best). For under $400. Only then will you see any kind of shaking out of the gadget market.
Ern is right – the whole point of the Kindle is the e-ink and reflective, not transmitting screen. The Apple price is too high, yes; the distribution (specially overseas) is poor – not just the gadget, but content which relies on the US Sprint network. A Kindle killer would keep the e-ink and the “paper” impression, be considerable cheaper and finally – when the e-ink concepts includes colour. A reader is not a computer, nor is it a messaging device.
Q