Wednesday 1 December 2010

Re-Kindle Your Interest...

Those who know me know that I'm a gadget fan. I started reading eBooks in the nineties when I purchased an HP95-LX "Palmtop Computer" and heard about "Project Gutenberg".

There are a number of eBook formats, with Microsoft Reader's ".lit" format being one of the first. As companies looked at this market, many developed their own eReader with its own proprietary format, meaning that you couldn't change supplier once you bought one particular device.

Amazon seem to have realised that their "Kindle" will not in itself be enough to attract legions of buyers of the device. However, realising that the object is to sell eBooks from their store, they've announced the development of a free Kindle "App" so that iPhone, Android phone, iPad, Mac and PC users can download "Kindle" format eBooks, magazines or newspapers to their platform of choice. You can therefore switch from an android phone to an iPhone (to take a simple example) and not have to re-purchase your entire eLibrary, according to their TV ads! They've thus extended their potential market.

So far, so good, but with all the pros come the inevitable cons, which mainly seem to revolve around the quality of newspaper and magazine subscriptions that are available on the Kindle. In brief, the Kindle versions may lack quality, functionality or are (in the eyes of the reviewers) over-priced. The comparisons are sometimes fair, sometimes not. To put things into perspective, the same criticisms have been levelled against the iPad versions of newspapers and magazines.

In the case of price, you pay for convenience, for (usually) not having adverts to distract you, and finally you pay VAT as digital magazines are subject to VAT unlike their paper counterparts.

eLiterature still has a way to go. It needs to be easily obtainable (wireless and internet take care of this), seen as value-for-money (the jury seems to be out on this one) and (most important) transferable. When I buy a newspaper, magazine or book, I can lend it to whomever I like. Electronic formats often come "tagged" with a password that means that only the platform onto which they have been loaded can open them from then on.

Amazon may be about to change this.

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