I’ve got to say that I love the idea of a marketplace for short, digestible content that is only as long as it needs to be. I just downloaded two Singles in anticipation of an upcoming plane flight.

Update (2011-01-28): Plane trip is completed, and I really enjoyed both of the Singles I read: Homo Evolutis and Beware Dangerism. I think John Gruber got it right when he said this could be Amazon’s app store for articles. It is a no brainer to shell out a couple bucks for good content.

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Keith Peters compares the font rendering of a Kindle, iPad, newspaper,  magazine, and a paperback book under a USB microscope.

I wonder how many years before e-ink becomes indistinguishable from paper media.

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Amazon’s strategy is as sensible as any I can think of for the Kindle–make it more like a book and even less like an iPad, thereby catering to all the folks who want the equivalent of a relatively cheap, highly portable digital paperback rather than the costlier do-it-all device that is Apple’s tablet. For all the people who do their electronic reading on the iPad and/or smartphones like, um, me there should be plenty of customers left who want a dedicated device–at least for now.

Bingo.  Pre-ordered mine last night.

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The New York Times published an article yesterday which tells you just about everything you need to know about the state of the Kindlesphere.

On e-book sales:

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

On the Kindle in an iPad world:

One reason Kindle book sales have held their own is that owners of iPads and other mobile reading devices buy Kindle books, which they can read on computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android phones. But, except for the free uncopyrighted books, Kindle owners must buy or download content via Amazon. “Every time they sell a Kindle, they lock up a customer,” Mr. Shatzkin said. Some industry analysts say that many people do not consider the iPad to be a reading device the way the Kindle is, and see a need to own both. Amazon’s latest sales figures are “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement,” said Youssef H. Squali, managing director at Jefferies & Company in charge of Internet and new media research.

And the impact of the Kindle price reduction:

The growth rate of Kindle sales tripled after Amazon lowered the price of the device in late June to $189 from $259.

Every single one of these larger trends mirror my personal experience to a T:

• I’ve pretty much abandoned buying hardcover and paperback books.  If a book isn’t available on the Kindle, I almost always wait it out and instead find another e-book to read.
• Owning an iPad hasn’t decreased my Kindle usage, it has actually increased it and also made me more aware of the value of the platform.  There was something about seeing my Kindle content show up on the iPad, that just cemented the entire value proposition around its ubiquity.  And it goes without saying that trying to read on the iPad’s LCD screen both in bright sunlight and for an extended period of time only makes you appreciate the Kindle’s e-ink screen even more.
• Since the Kindle price has dropped and Kindle deals have been abound on everything from woot.com to Amazon’s own refurbished sell off, I’ve only been thinking more and more about Kindles as viable gifts for friends and family.  I’ll be shocked if there’s not some sort of Kindle charged to the credit card before the year is out.

This is all great news for the Kindle.  Keep your fingers crossed for an August Kindle refresh.

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I was surprised to see a fair amount of coverage this weekend in mainstream news channels of Jakob Nielsen’s recent study on iPad and Kindle reading speeds which concluded people read content on paper faster than content on e-readers:

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability. Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn’t be a reason to buy one over the other. But we can say that tablets still haven’t beaten the printed book: the difference between Kindle and the book was significant at the p<.01 level, and the difference between iPad and the book was marginally significant at p=.06.

Interesting, but I am not really sure there is a lot of news here.  For one, the e-book champion will find a lot of angles to nitpick at the study.  A few obvious ones: the sample size (24 participants) is very small; the study compares a behavior with years and years of reinforcement to one that is newly learned; and e-reader user interfaces will be improving so rapidly that the conclusions will likely have a very short shelf-life.

Those points however, are insignificant in comparison to another, much more important idea.  Assuming the same level of comprehension, what is meaningful is not how fast you read, but how much you read.  In my unscientific observation, people who own e-readers read much, much more frequently than those who don’t. If you read a passage in 53 seconds on paper versus someone else’s 60 seconds on the Kindle, but they are reading two books a month to your two books a year, who is getting the larger benefit from reading?  That’s the reading edge that matters.

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One of the two big changes of the new Kindle DX that was announced yesterday is a graphite case.  Is this to make it lighter? Look sexier?  Most likely, no.  It is going to improve the readability of the text on the e-ink screen.

K-Design Works, wrote about this a while ago when he explained the rationale behind his Kindle 2 font hack.

If you look at the Kindle 2, it is a pretty device – shiny and white, sleek and modern. It has a bright white case surrounding a gray screen. Unfortunately, Amazon set themselves up for a disappointing user experience by using this combination – the screen always looks dark gray relative to the whiter, more reflective bezel. It must because the screen reflects about half as much of the light as does the white plastic. …an object of constant brightness is alternately perceived as lighter or darker based on its surroundings. Based on the psychology of perception, the Kindles bezel should be darker  i.e. less reflective than the screen so as to make the screen appear as light as possible… Design must take advantage of our visual perception.

This is all about making the improvement on the new E-Ink Pearl screen even more dramatic to the reader.

It’s rather interesting that Amazon seem to be utilizing every method possible to clear up Kindle 2 US stock and Kindle 2 stock. We have $189 Kindles and a $150 Kindle deal at Woot and a $139 refurbished Kindle 2 US deal at Amazon. Amazon seem intent on sending out as many Kindles as they can. Combine that with the surprise arrival of the Kindle DX 2 today and all signs point to the imminent arrival of a Kindle 3.

My thoughts exactly.  I think we got a preview today of at least two features of the Kindle 3 with the DX 2′s graphite case and improved e-ink screen.

That said, I am still fighting the urge to pick up a Kindle or two for some friends and family today at the Woot price.  At $150, the decision to buy a Kindle requires so much less deliberation for the potential buyer.  It really validates the wisdom of the strategy that Seth Godin outlined in his “Paperback Kindle” post.

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Kevin Rose walks through five items on his wish list for Amazon and Apple to add to the Kindle and iBooks, respectively. He nails a key point — e-readers are Internet-connected devices, however we’re still talking about bookmarks and highlights as opposed to new features that would dramatically enhance the reading experience.

Every idea here hits the mark.  I’d love to see all of these hit the product roadmap for both Amazon and Apple.

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via Geek.com: Qualcomm demos Marisol e-reading display technology that does color and video

There is a rumor that Amazon may be considering an LCD screen for the Kindle in the wake of the iPad.

That would be a mistake.

If we assume that the goal for the Kindle hardware is to create the world’s best standalone e-reading device, and not morph into a bad imitation of the iPad, then the screen has to be based on a non-backlit technology.

In the past, I felt that improved grayscale rendering was more important than color for the next generation Kindle, but that was assuming the display would be based on e-ink.

Qualcomm’s new Marisol display technology (featured above) is quite impressive. It has vibrant color, longer battery life than e-ink screens, supports video, works in the sunlight, is not backlit, and is arriving at least a couple years ahead of the conventional wisdom on when e-ink could go color.

Wow.

Note to Amazon: I just added this to my Kindle 3 wishlist.

Earlier this week I read a “real” book for the first time since I got my Kindle last year.  It was interesting to see how much my brain had retrained itself to the Kindle:

• The biggest surprise? For the first few hours I found my thumb reaching for a phantom joystick that wasn’t there anytime I saw a word I wanted to define.  I didn’t realize until then how much I’ve come to rely on having a dictionary at my fingertips.
• The biggest frustration? Not being able to highlight passages of interest and store them into a central repository.  I know –  people have underlined books for centuries, but it seemed so much more inefficient to me than having all my highlights from all my books in one place.  I settled for dog-earing those pages even though I knew it was unlikely I would go back and transcribe the sections that were of interest.
• What I enjoyed the most? Being able to quickly browse forward again to see how many pages were left until a chapter wrapped up.  I have always wished the Kindle would add some sort of “how much is left in this chapter / section” feature.
• The second biggest surprise? I have really gotten used to holding the smaller form factor of the Kindle.  I write this next sentence knowing it sounds totally ridiculous, but it took me an hour or two to get re-acclimated to holding a two-paned book that continually pushed against my fingers to remind me that it would be much happier if I just let it return to its natural closed state.
• A final random thought? Quickly thumbing back to pages I’d previously read to find the first reference to a person, thought, or concept wasn’t materially better or worse for me than the Kindle search.  I could have argued both sides of that one, but it’s really a tie.

It surprised me to see how after only about six months, the Kindle has changed my perspective on something I’ve been doing for virtually my entire life.  My internal frame of reference for long-form reading is now the Kindle, not a physical book.  Crazy.