[Ike Elliott, a friend and colleague, has a blog called Telecosm. It is worth reading. Ike had a blog entry on December 18th which I found insightful and fun to read. I thought the bearonbusiness.com readers would enjoy it.]
I am hoping to find a Kindle under the tree at Christmas. I think that Amazon has hit a home run with their new book-reading device.
What is so cool about it? It has built-in 3G EV-DO hardware, so you can download newspapers and books wirelessly, wherever you are. It has a built-in wireless data subscription on Sprint Nextel’s network, meaning you never get a bill from Sprint Nextel or any other wireless provider. The cost of the network access is built in to the price of the books and newspapers that you buy.
It is easy on the eyes, using E-Ink, which looks like regular ink on paper. It automatically saves any books or papers that you buy up in the network, in case your Kindle dies, or in case you lose your Kindle, so you never have to worry about backing it up.
It is environmentally correct. Think of all the paper you avoid using!
I admire Amazon for daring to innovate on the business model for Kindle, and hiding the wireless data subscription costs from their subscribers. Think of it: what brick and mortar book store charges you extra for the truck that brought the books to the store? What you really want to buy is a book, so why should you have to worry about renting space on the truck to get it to you? This is similar to the way that Amazon has free super-saver shipping for orders that are large enough, to help remove shipping costs as a barrier to sale. Amazon has done the same with Kindle, and just removed the distribution costs from the offer price for a book. And the book price is often lower than the paper book would be, because they saved the cost of printing the book and putting it on a truck.
Good product. I hope Amazon sells a ton of them. Now, if they would only integrate an RSS reader with it, for access to free web content, I wouldn’t even wait for Christmas to get one.
Please visit Ike Elliott’s Telecosm blog at http://www.ikeelliott.typepad.com/telecosm/
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