Amazon announced this week that they have passed an important milestone in sales of their Kindle e-reader. As The New York Times reports:
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition [...] The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.
I've been a Kindle owner for about six months now and I'm not at all surprised at this news. I've found the Kindle to be very easy to use. Thanks to the wireless delivery system, purchasing books is a breeze (after all, if there's one thing Amazon does well, it's sell books) and the e-ink is easy on the eyes and holds up well in almost all light conditions, even direct sunlight. The selection of available e-books in the Kindle store is vast and is supplemented by a large library of free public domain books, so there's always another book to read. I really like how easy it is to change font size and change the orientation to landscape for when I want to read sideways. Now, I have to admit the most glaring shortcoming of the Kindle is that it's a dedicated e-reader, it's not a web browsing, e-mail checking, twittering tablet of the sort made by Apple. It doesn't even do color. And even though there may come a time in the very near future when the Kindle I own will look as antiquated as a black-and-white TV, I'm quite happy with it being very good at the one thing it does because it does it well.
Have I no critical comments? Well, yes, I do. Amazon has released some Apps for the Kindle that allow you to read your books on your PC or your mobile device and these are great apps. They probably contributed to Amazon's e-book sales figures because the amazing thing is, you don't need to own a Kindle to use the Kindle App. All you really need is an Amazon account and a PC or a mobile device and you can download and setup your Kindle App and you can begin reading e-books. You can even read Kindle e-books on an iPad because, yes, there's an app for that. It's genius! However, there is one major drawback that, if you are not aware of, may leave you feeling a bit shortchanged.
I downloaded the Kindle App for the PC for a very specific reason. I tend to read novels before going to bed, usually escapist fare as a distraction from the cares of the day, and I've been neglecting the newspapers and magazines that I'd subscribed to on the Kindle. Let's face it, the news is so depressing these days, who wants to read news right before going to sleep? So, I thought I'd download the Kindle for PC App and read the news on my computer during the day. Good plan right? Well, once I downloaded the app and opened up my archived library I found my e-books there, but none of the magazines or newspapers that I expected to find. I fired off an e-mail to Amazon to ask for help in fixing this problem and to their credit they replied quickly. Sadly, their reply said that only e-books are available by App. So, it's not an error or a glitch, it's a feature. Great. This really undermines the utility of the app for me and I doubt I'll use it much. I can't imagine why they would hobble their own app by not syncing the full library of purchased items, it seems like a bad move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Still, I can't imagine why publishers accept their e-subscriptions being shut out of a such a worthwhile platform. If I have an interest in reading the e-version of a newspaper or a magazine and I'm willing to pay for it, they should not discourage my interest, that's just bad business, especially in this time of diminished ad revenue for the major print publications.
So, given that, would I still recommend the Kindle e-reader? Yes, absolutely! I've found it easy to use and convenient to take with me when I travel. It's a remarkable device that has contributed greatly to my reading pleasure.
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
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