Let’s get one thing right at the very onset of things. No matter how good you think Amazon’s Kindle is, it is no competition to the iPad. I know they tout low-fatigue reading even after reading for hours but the average reader nowadays does not have time enough to pore over a text for 4-5 hours at a stretch. As for the long lasting battery life, it is absurd to think that a person would not require power for a week. His phone would die the next day and his laptop will die that night. As long as important devices like those do not have this extra long battery life, Kindle’s week long battery life ceases to matter.
And those are the only advantages the Kindle has over the iPad. So in defending themselves against Apple’s latest innovation, Amazon should be trying to at least match the capabilities that the Kindle is missing as compared to the iPad. Like a touch-based UI and an app store. However, Amazon has quite some way to go before they are ready to to play catch up in that manner. They have already released the Kindle Development Kit SDK for developing apps on the Kindle platform. And they have also acquired a company (TouchCO) who specialize in making multi-touch multi-user interfaces.
But since getting there will take them a lot of development time, Amazon is apparently going to release a newer version of the Kindle pretty soon. It will be a lot like the present day Kindle but it will be a lot faster at turning pages and a whole lot thinner. It will also have a sharper contrast, which is always a good thing for reading devices.
However, as you can see, there’s no color screen or touch. I am not sure Amazon realizes that such a feeble attempt at upgrading the device will not win them back much of the market that they are losing out to the tablets. Even though the eBook reader market still has a niche audience to target — this audience is fast shrinking in size. It is simple to see that a lot of the users are perfectly happy carrying a device that does not have that long a battery life but has a fantastic touchscreen and surfs the internet beautifully. Like I said, people like carrying around fewer gadgets. That is the whole idea of convergence — the central idea behind the personal technology innovation of this century.
And Amazon is also losing out on the price war. The major publishers have already made sure that Amazon does not undersell their titles on their store and that has forced Amazon to push up prices to Apple levels. And then, Apple’s $499 starting price for the iPad makes sure that the competition is more or less neck to neck even when it boils down just the device prices. Sure you can buy the latest Kindle for $259, but if you want a Kindle that comes close to the size of the iPad and has auto-rotation plus more storage, you will be spending almost the same amount of money — $489.
The only thing going for the Kindle still is their large collection of titles from the various major publishers that have agreed to put up their titles for sale. But Apple is trying its very best to fill that gap and move past it. In the mean time, Barnes and Noble is apparently upgrading their Nook eReader to put out a ‘lite’ version that is WiFi only. So over all, Amazon is surrounded and needs to clean up their act before it is too late.
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