At the time, I used a Palm PDA. After a couple of trips hoisting books back and forth in my luggage, I discovered the delights of ebooks. eReader.com (it used to have a different name back then) sold books online; they can be read on my Mac, on my PC at work, or on my Palm. These days, their software runs on Windows Mobile handhelds as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. With ebooks, I could carry 10-20 volumes with me, and I had them available at all times: standing in the queue at the airport, in the bathroom, at dinner when I sometimes ate alone; you get the idea. For a full-time traveler like me, ebooks were a godsend.
When Amazon introduced the Kindle a few years back, I was intrigued. From a device perspective, it looked (and still looks) like a piece of crap. But there is still the draw of being able to carry dozens or hundreds of books with you wherever you go. The price ($350) was extortionate, however, and it wasn’t something that I could put in my pocket and have with me everywhere, so its utility was greatly diminished.
Last night, Amazon quite unexpectedly released the Kindle for iPhone app, available as a free download from the iTunes store. When the buzz started spreading, I downloaded it and purchased a few ebooks to try it out.
Compared to the eReader app, it’s very deficient. First, you can’t actually purchase books from the app itself; you have to do that from Amazon’s website. Next, it has no customization available; for example, you have to swipe the screen to turn pages. With the eReader, you can customize it and select the “tap” mechanism to turn pages, which is much easier to do for long periods of time. You can change the font size, but you can’t switch from serif to sans-serif type, like the eReader, and you can’t turn off text justification, which makes it horrendously difficult to read, especially at large font sizes.
It’s obviously a very immature product, but I expect that it will grow and mature over time. What it has, and what eReader.com lacks, is access to the hundreds of thousands of books available through Amazon, at their substantially lower prices. For example, Larry Niven’s Flatlander costs $7.99 from eReader.com, but only $6.39 from Amazon. (There’s also a version for $1.27; I don’t quite understand why Amazon sells two versions of the same book for different prices. The books look identical, just with different dates.)
eReader’s site claims to be “the world’s largest ebook store,” but Amazon obviously has far more customers, and is thus more likely to make a dent in the market.
Will ebooks become mainstream because of this? Not yet, but someday. Personally, I look forward to the time when school textbooks are available electronically; my son’s backpack usually weighs 50-80 lbs. Books are much more likely to be read if they don’t physically mutilate you.
