Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Here are some interesting Kindle related snippets -

1. Two books that were $1 are now free – Amberville (with free bonus material) by Tim Davys, and Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison.
2. In an article in Esquire Charles Schwab has high praise for Amazon -
   

   I don’t know whether you like Amazon or not, but they’ve done an incredible thing for the consumer. Brought the cost of books down, the distribution, the Kindle. It certainly hurt local bookstores, but, you know, that’s the way of the world. 

3. Frederic Filloux writes about Publishers’ concerns with Apple not giving up subscriber information. He also writes ‘Apple needs the Publishing Industry’ which is probably why the iPad is being called the savior of all types of Publishing.

A Spotify for eBooks?

At Tech Radar UK, Gary Marshall asks whether Spotify’s business model could work for eBooks based on these figures -

while the paid-for numbers aren’t huge (250,000 paying subscribers at the beginning of 2010, compared to 7 million users in total) Spotify is still persuading them to pay for music

Would Publishers and Authors be okay with a model where 6.75 million people read free ad-supported books and .25 million pay for books?

Don’t think so.

Who in their right mind would push for such a model when the Kindle and Sony Reader and Nook are creating channels where 100% of people are paying for books?

Textbooks that Professors can rewrite?

NY Times has a very interesting post on digital textbooks that Professors can re-arrange, re-write and so forth -

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

In addition to that we have the promise of lower prices -

The modifiable e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional print textbooks. “Psychology,” for example, which has a list price of $134.29 (available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $122.73), will sell for $48.76 in the DynamicBooks version.

100 DynamicBooks titles will be introduced in August 2010.

It’ll be really interesting to see the reaction to these dynamic, rewritable textbooks.

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