Can kindle be the next iPod?

1 mIn days where more and more people are turning away from books, it is great to find something that would encourage people to read more. A survey released by the National Endowment for the Arts last week found that reading is in steep decline with one-half of those age 18 to 24 never touching a book. Even more worrisome: Just 30 percent of 13-year-olds picked up a book daily. In my previous posts, i have introduced Amazon's Kindle to be an amazing breakthrough in technology. This device have surpassed its alike including the Sony Reader.


Not to talk again about the specifications, size, feasibility, pros and cons, this $399 device has been successful in making it easier for those turning away from the books to be still able to read. However, some people are turned off by some of the bad features that the kindle have and think that learning from the iPod would make Kindle a much desirable device.

If the Kindle can become the iPod of book devices, that will be a boon for everyone, especially employers who depend on an educated work force. But the Kindle, may never enjoy such popularity because of price and the fact that there's no huge store of free content on the Internet or thousands of user-established sites that supplied content for iPods and other MP3 players. Add to that the limited memory available (256MB internal flash hard drive). Ipods ship with different size up to 160GB. Thats a very good selling point for music and video lovers.

Then there’s the price of the Kindle books. Music downloads cost about 99 cents for a 3MB song. There is no way are we going to pay $10 for a book of less than quarter the size.

More importantly is that the poor design compared to the iPod. It’s hard to hold the thing and just read, without accidentally pressing a button or two. “There’s no place to hold your hands”

There's talk that Amazon is trying to entice textbook publishers to the Kindle platform, which could go a long way to attracting young readers. Students will also benefit from instant updates to texts and the offloading of 40 or so pounds of texts they'll no longer have to carry on their backs.

There is a long way ahead of the Kindle. And if Amazon wanted to attract more people, adding some of the features that the iPod has would definitly boost their sales.

Source
Marny