4th Edition, Kindle & The Future of Gaming Books

[Zaister]

Before getting too enthusiastic about the Kindle you should read Amazon's Terms of Service regarding the device and consider the ramifications of its rather restrictive DRM.

This is very enlightening: The Future of Reading

 

[Plane Sailing]

Seems more like Computer forum fodder than 4e discussion, so I'm moving it over there.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I really like these sorts of devices (Kindle, Sony Digital Reader, I-Rex, etc.), but they are still too expensive, IMO, to justify the purchase price. It's taking an awful long time for their prices to drop much, either, it seems. Hopefully this latest offering will put the EReader market into the necessary competitive phase so that prices will be more reasonable... well, at least for this consumer.

Consumer technology seems to follow a certain pattern.

Generally, a price-point is established, and that price-point does not change for some time (e.g., from 1982 to the late '90's/early 00's a good home computer cost always $2,000 - $2,500). Instead of the price coming down as technology advances, the number of features increase.

At some point though, the "feature" space becomes saturated, and prices come down as people say "I really don't need that powerful a CPU; the cheaper model is fine." This happened in desktop computers several years ago. It's now happening in laptops too, as the Asus EEE PC or the OLPC demonstrate. The only people who go "top dollar" for computers anymore are gamers. But even they will eventually say "My eyes simply cannot perceive any difference; I don't need a better graphics card." That'll probably happen in 2012.

I think the eReader space still has some improvements in the feature space to make before prices come down. A color e-ink screen will be a killer app. A touch sensitive one will be too. Stylus support for scribbling notes in the margins of your books will be an important feature. More wireless standards will be supported; from Bluetooth to Wifi to "long range" solutions like WiMax, EVDO, CDMA and whatever standard the upcoming 700 Mhz spectrum settles on.

But at some point the feature space will become saturated. The eReader will be "more than sufficient" in every category and usage pattern. But until then, prices will not comes down too much.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

I´d be really excited about this if i hadn´t been researching multimedia history a couple of months ago and there were droves of similar projects laying on the bottom of the tech-graveyard, forever forgotten.
Who knows, perhaps Amazon can pull it off? Wait and see...

 

[Li Shenron]

Yeah, but if you are a reader of paperbacks, you don't seem to save anything yet.

On the long run, you save a lot of trees Also, you save a lot of space if you're a heavy reader and have thousands of book in your shelves.

Personally the only problem I have with it is that I just can't get used to reading books from a screen. I guess the Kindle screen feels different from a PC, but I'd have to try it. At least, for me it must be possible to read clearly without scrolling the page.

 

[Holy Bovine]

$400 just for the device, and then you need to buy the books to read? As cool as it looks, I'm not interested at that price. I'm with Hobo. If it is still around and in wide use in 5 years and costs less than $100, I might consider it.

Of course by then Apple will probably have adapted the iPod to do the same thing, but better for a lot more money and you can only get new books from Apple.

FIFY

 

[Cabled]

On the long run, you save a lot of trees Also, you save a lot of space if you're a heavy reader and have thousands of book in your shelves.

Personally the only problem I have with it is that I just can't get used to reading books from a screen. I guess the Kindle screen feels different from a PC, but I'd have to try it. At least, for me it must be possible to read clearly without scrolling the page.

But you're only saving the space on your shelves until Amazon decides to stop supporting this thing, and all those DRM books you've "rented" suddenly can't find thier/your digital authentication anymore.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

But you're only saving the space on your shelves until Amazon decides to stop supporting this thing, and all those DRM books you've "rented" suddenly can't find thier/your digital authentication anymore.

Exactly

That's why I bought the Sony version earlier while it was still available. I had this intuition that the corporations manufacturing these things were going to start getting more and more restrictive with their code and DRM. So I wanted to get mine before this became standard.

I have a few main problems with the Kindle
1.) It's wireless, for me that's a major no-no, it's a book reader it doesn't NEED wireless capacity and that capacity is a massive security vulnerability.
2.) It connects to Amazon's service, not my home network, and I can't download directly to the device. Instead I'd have to buy books in a DRM format from their service. And if I wanted to read my own files, which are in open standard formats I might add, I'd have to send them to Amazon and PAY for them to be converted to a proprietary format for the device. And what happens then Amazon eventually pulls the plug on its authentication or goes under those protected files are worthless, not to mention all YOUR files they had a nice long look and probably kept copies of.
3.) The damned thing calls home using its wireless capacity to inform Amazon of all your usage habits.

In short if you want to get an e-Reader while I'll happily endorse e-paper as a great new technology find something other than the Kindle. That thing is a nightmare waiting to happen for customers. There's a Sony e-paper book reader that's slightly smaller but in about the same price range and has far fewer restrictions with easy to bypass or break DRM. And I think at least one more model from Europe that's comparable with a somewhat larger screen and a bit more expensive as a result.

 

[ashockney]

I'm very excited by the prospect of the kindle. I love the idea of reading my weekly and monthly news magazines, as well as the dail paper, on this device. The first thing I thought of was reading my Dungeon and Dragon magazines on them.

I'm not really concerned by DRM at all, although having to send my pdf's or word documents to have them converted to be viewed is certainly "less than optimal".

 

[Mark Plemmons]

I so very much DESPERATELY WANT one of those. How was it for the PDFs?

Well, since the Archos 605 wi-fi isn't a dedicated PDF reader like the Kindle, it's not great, but not bad either. Just basic touch or button scrolling, and zooming in/out. Takes about 10 seconds to load each page, and there's no bookmarking or anything fancy (though you can bookmark movies or music). So you wouldn't want to use it during a game to quickly look up rules, unless you remember what page the rule is on. But for just holding in your hand and reading a PDF it works just fine.

I used it on vacation last weekend to check the forums, watch the new Doctor Who "Time Crash" special on YouTube, and read about 16 pages of a Fading Suns PDF. So it's definitely a nice little toy to have.

One of my favorite things is the hard drive support - just plug in the USB to my computer and it acts like an external hard drive, so I can drag-and-drop files. You can also rename/delete files directly from the Archos 605 itself. Initially, I was irked that I ordered the 30GB instead of the 80GB, but so far I've barely used more than 10GB at a time, so 30 seems to be more than enough for me.