Amazon's Kindle DX: The End of Paper?

Jeff Bezos is known for many things: his irrepressible enthusiasm, his extraordinary tenacity, and, perhaps most memorably, his indescribable laugh. It is a penetrating laugh... high pitched, continuous, relentless and unstoppable. Yet the sound of his laughter is unique and, as I said, ultimately indescribable.

Earlier today, as he announced the new Kindle DX, Amazon's newest and most impressive entry into the electronic paper arena, he was not laughing. Neither were the technology journalists, photographers, and camera crews that had filled Pace University's auditorium in New York to capacity to witness the products' unveiling. Even though two Kindle devices have already been launched and several other electronic book readers are on the market, something different was happening.

More than a decade ago, a brilliant scientist named Joe Jacobson, working at the MIT Media Lab, unveiled the first practical electronic ink display. He predicted the imminent arrival of a new form of handheld and bendable display that would be inexpensive and ubiquitous. Best of all, it would be capable of updating information, like written news stories, on the fly. Later, he spoke confidently of the day when a version of this "E-ink" technology would bring color (and therefore perhaps even video) to such displays. Years and millions of dollars in research have finally pushed electronic ink displays out of the lab and into customers' hands. They still are not in color but these movable, addressable pixels suspended in polymer are finally available to threaten the dominance of the printed page.

Now, I give you permission to roll your eyes and to hear the sound of the kind of laugh only Jeff Bezos can make. That's because futurists have foretold the death of paper, especially newsprint, for well over four decades: ever since the cathode ray tube, the advent of the LCD screen, and the networked universe of email and PDF files. Yet, at least for the past two decades (and probably longer) approximately seventy-thousand trees in Canadian forests have been pulped to make enough newsprint for each and every Sunday print edition of the New York Times. (I've lost my New York Times tree-counter over the past few years so I may be off by a couple of forests here and there.) We are making more paper copies today that ever before. According to a recent Coopers & Lybrand study, there are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. and that number grows about 22% per year.

Which brings me back to the Kindle. You can already download Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book, "The Tipping Point," in less than a minute onto either of Amazon's two earlier electronic readers. Starting this summer, Amazon's latest version, the new Kindle DX, should hit the market. You'll still be able to download Gladwell's bestseller and now access 275,000 other books. You'll be able to store 3,500 books on this new device and read them on a screen that is twice as large as Amazon's previous readers. The device is equipped with a PDF reader so you'll be able to use it for most other documents as well.

But, now, Amazon has made deals with the three of the larger higher education textbook companies (which comprise over 60% of the market) to let students have textbooks available on this device. (They are in negotiations with other large textbook publisher as well.) Instead of lugging thirty pounds of books to class, students would be able to carry all of these and more in a device one-third of an inch thick and weighing less than 20 ounces. Four universities also announced plans to give Kindle DX units to students in pilot programs to test their efficacy as a learning tool.

And newspapers, remember those guys? Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, came out on stage to join Jeff Bezos to let us know that the Times and the Boston Globe will be available for daily download on this new device. (That's comforting to many of us who wonder how long the Boston Globe will still be available in any form considering the dire speculation that surrounds it and the ad-sparse New York Times.) Through the 3G wireless connection built into Amazon's new Kindle DX, readers will also be able to download dozens of other popular magazines and periodicals, including The New Yorker, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and outstandingly popular blogs like this one. Bezos hopes the Kindle will not only simplify the distribution of books and newspapers but will also reduce the massive environmental waste and clutter of paper and print toner cartriges.

So, have we finally come to that tipping point, where paper copies and paper books and newsprint are finally obsolete? No question, I agree that finally I NEED a Kindle. The screen is crisp, the storage capacity sufficient, and the advantages over carrying textbooks and hardcovers are obvious. The battery life seems adequate and the form factor is lovely. I am even looking forward to having the new Kindle's text-to-speech engine read me books when my eyes get tired or I'm driving the car.

But there is a pretty serious flaw making this e-book less available than it should be: the whopping $489 price tag. Naturally, Amazon had to start somewhere and they know early adopters don't mind paying through the nose. It will take quite a few months before production of these devices ramps up, so it's fair to expect Kindle prices to remain stable (i.e., ridiculously high.) That's a shame as Amazon has finally made an electronic book reader with a large enough screen that is fun to use, easy to carry, and sensible in every way except price.

One last note about Joe Jacobson: his vision that we would one day get our news on an inexpensive screen has been partly realized... in a classy, sharp, and readable way. In a few months, we should finally see many other electronic readers, including one with a screen that actually rolls up... just the way Joe envisioned it. As for e-books coming out in color, my bet is we'll see this materialize using other technology; more stable variants of OLED (Organic light-emitting Diode) displays.

Everyone who has predicted the demise of paper has so far been completely wrong. But that was before the advent of a fully-functional full-figured e-book reader. The Kindle won't end the pulping of forests for paper and newsprint but surely it will light the way.

Follow Dan Dubno on Twitter: www.twitter.com/blowingthingsup

Comments

[noamjunior]

the Kindle will be the end of paper- like the Apple Newton was the end of the typing keyboard

[KillTheMessenger]

That's an excellent analogy.

[thebigbike]

Gee WHIZ I can buy an AWFUL lot of books at the Goodwill for $395.00 ( plus tax and shiping) OOOPS RE_READ: FOUR FRIKKEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY NINE Dollars PLUS tax and shipping) Goodwill prices them at $.95 per hardbound volume, --that's ninety five CENTS for hardbound -- People are giving them to Goodwill, and I have about twice as many books that sound like GREAT reads or valuable reference than I can read in the remainder of my life. and if it gets too bad I can use the duds and losers in the fireplace for warmth rather than giving them back to Goodwill or the SPCA book sale, (they're MY books I can burn 'em if I want! If you ask real nice I might just give them to you and I would never tell you you can't go buy your own) Unlike Amazon which can make "cataloging errors"

[0henryj]

laurelei23 has a good point. The Kindle is really only good for books you don't need to keep and reread. I tried to open some 10-year old Word documents the other day from my college days. They won't open in any current version of MS Word, or Pages, or Open Office. Don't expect the Kindle, or the documents on them, to be available to you in a decade. You could say that goes without saying, but when they advertise the ability to store a library of 3,500 books on the device -- for most people that's not their shelf of throw-away editions, that's everything, and Amazon is clearly pitching this device as a replacement for your library, not an addition to it.

There's also the issue of electronic "updates" to texts you've purchased and stored on the Kindle. While this may be handy for a travel guide, I like knowing that my copy of a book on, say, the war in Iraq isn't going to be revised while I'm sleeping.

[YewNeekId]

I'll take my printed in the USA books over any made in china Kindle - any day.

Let's try to keep a few jobs in America folks

[KillTheMessenger]

The Kindle might be assembled in China, but it was mostly made in the US. That's a small but very important difference.

[Daniel Dubno]

My friends, the sad fact is the US printing industry has been largely dead for about 20 years... and guess where the majority of our books are printed? China. They pulp our trees (and Canada's) though... and for a long time took much of our used paper for recycing..­. all shipped off to China. Now paper prices are so low, the recycled market is somewhat in turmoil.

The Kindle was largely designed largely here... and most of the books we read in the US are still written here... but many of these new e-readers are being and will continue to be designed out of the US. Paper or plastic, we have to make sure OUR KIDS, the future designers, will be reading and learning how to design things!

[KPinSEA]

My Kindle 2 has become an indispensable part of my daily mass transit commute: morning newspaper, magazines and books in one light package that slips in next to my laptop in its bag. It's readable in any light that a paper or book was, but far more manageable in the cramped confines of a bus (or airline) seat. It's far superior to a computer screen for extended reading, electronic ink is the only way to go here.

My only fear about the larger-format Kindle (and future e-ink reading devices) is that the current Kindle format for newspapers and magazines is beautifully clutter-free: just the text of the story, with easy section navigation. As bigger formats become available, the temptation will inevitably be to duplicate the formats of the hardcopy newspaper or magazine or ... worse yet ... the godawfully clunky Web formats that major news sites use.

Keep It Simple, Amazon .... you've got a good thing now, don't screw it up.

[LiberalDem]

Why should I fork over my 300 bucks or whatever this device will cost, to Amazon so that I can then pay more money to read a book or newspaper that can read only on Amazon's device? Sorry, I'm not about to jump on the Amazon bandwagon.

How many bookstores are going under because of Amazon's huge advantages of scale?

[plzchuteme]

I don't know that much about the Kindle. I know that reading from a screen of any kind is distasteful to me so there is little incentive. I can see where this is going though. Obsolescence every few years, fighting amongst technology innovators and manufacturers about incompatible formats, and control over content that you have "purchased­." If I buy a book, I can pass it around to all of my friends and family. If I want to share my electronic book with friends, will I have to lend them my $400 display unit as well? I have books that I have collected and reread over a period of 40 years. Where will my brand new Kindle be in 40 years? This technology is an interesting and useful addition to ink and paper books, but replacing them? I don't think so. Without ink and paper, the purveyors of this technology would have a firm grasp on our collective scrotums, and we know they would not be afraid to squeeze.

[TBB]

The Kindle sucks. It cost to much and you can't loan a Kindle "book" to a friend.

[laurelei23]

The technology for making them may be wildly out of date, but you can still pick up and read a Gutenburg Bible 500 years later. Think you'll be able to use a Kindle in 20?

This is about controlling, and restricting, content and information.

[ComradeRutherford]

I have yet to understand why I should hand over my hard-earned money to an evil Wal-Mart / Starbucks like company like Amazon just so they can corner the market on all books. They want to be the Monsanto of publishing: no one can read unless they pay Amazon a user fee. And the batteries never go dead on books.

Amazon is evil, Kindle is evil. Naming your ebook after the stuff used to start a fire is perverse. They are advocating the burning of books with this name.

Companies such as Amazon, Monsanto, Wal-Mart and Starbucks are such a deadly evil, they never have and never will get a dime of my money.

[Lannie]

Luddites! I suppose the cell phone will never catch on, either?

[pizzmoe]

It's funny that the biggest objection to all of this has nothing do to with the actual reading of books.

[Samnchgo]

It's interesting that you give this lovefest to the Kindle on the same day that another article on the Huffington Post shows that it can't pronounce things properly like "Barack Obama" and "Celtics." Newspapers aren't dying because of the Kindle. They are dying because, for decades, they've tried to shape opinion and the news based on the political and corporate affiliations as opposed to reporting the actual news. Books are dying because many students who graduate from high school are bare functional when it comes to reading and writing. (I teach at a college -- so I see what kinds of reading and writing skills are being turned out.) These things are wobbly right now -- but it has nothing to do with the Kindle. And, for what I've seen about it, I'm not sold on the Kindle either.

One also has to wonder if Amazon, due to the recent "ratings" debacle, will ask that the Kindle be programmed to prohibit gay-themed books.

I'll take a pass on the Kindle.

[alewis14151]

"... many students who graduate from high school are bare functional when it comes to reading and writing ..."

Um, and what's "bare functional," professor?

[ESerafina42]

Oh, yeah - and what I don't have $350 or whatever it costs these days, plus the money for the books?

[ESerafina42]

What if the battery dies? Can I lend books to my friends? Can I buy them used?

[pizzmoe]

Do you need a used e-book? Not sure what that would look like.