Amazon are really cornering the reader market. Not only do they have one of the best ebook readers, but its also one of the cheapest (using there ability to ship many of them). But what really smashed it for them has to be the app which pretty much runs on everything. From PC’s to Android phones. Windows phone 7 to the ipad. Now there launching a kindle for the web. This will optimise any browser into a ebook reader. Impressive stuff.
But I’m worried…
This all seems to be out of the same play book as Apple and there itunes music ecosystem. I can already imagine the special links being sent around social networks pointing into the kindle ecosystem. The only saving grace is the kindle for the web.
Hopefully Amazon will follow the Google approach with these things and leverage the web not fight against it.
If Amazon screw up, Google seem to be right behind with there own ebook store.
What does this mean for the Kindle device, well this is all good news for the Kindle. Kindle is a fantastic eink device but shouldn’t be the only place to see ebooks. Hopefully more people will make there way through ebooks on devices like their phones then make there way towards reading on a eink device. I use to read my ebooks on my PDA (compaq ipaq) and it was painful but I found myself getting use to it. Now I can’t imagine using a phone or anything LCD like to read large amounts of text. But thats just me…
Its great Kindle is everywhere, and people can choose how they want to view the ebooks, period. Choice is good!
Now if they can just sort out the ability to buy a book and ebook version at the same time that would be great.
In thenUS, at least, Amazon has serious deficit in the library market. Most public libraries are using Overdrive Media for control of their lendable ebooks and audiobooks, which remains incompatible with Kindle, but available for Sony, Nook, etc. I have seen a few people already move away from Kindle due to this.
Of course, since ebook lending remains constrained by licenses, it so closely resembles the print bookspace in public libraries to reduce the utility markedly.
Thanks Eric for this… Its such a shame they can’t get together and support a couple of standards instead of pissing around with there own DRM affairs
[...] My problem with ebooks is simply the DRM. Yes I have a kindle right now and there’s readers on most devices and platforms (no linux client by the way, but there is a web client now) but what happens when I don’t? [...]
[...] If this works well, I’ll try collaborate editing with someone else in future but also if this does actually work, it will be a really nice way to collaboratively edit notes at a conference and I can certainly see it taking off in the future. Specially if as I suspect you can annotate and collaborate on notes on many different platforms and devices together. [...]