Just heard about Amazon’s new reading device, the Kindle. Click on the Kindle Video in the top left corner of the page.
I just spent $55 on books last weekend at the Wake County Public Library book sale. I got 4 boxes of books for that price, and some of those books were real finds. I have given about 20 away to friends and family already.
But having the ability to carry the same 4 boxes of books on a device that weights 11 ounces…
Well, it’s not quite worth $400 to me, yet. But I’ve added it to my wish list nonetheless…
(Gavel Bang, on a stack of books, to Clive Crook)
Update:
Arnold Kling has the right criticism of the Kindle, for now:
The show-stopper for me on the Kindle is the limited selection. None of the books that made a splash on this blog in 2007 seem to be available. No Myth of the Rational Voter, no Farewell to Alms, no The Forgotten Man, no Discover Your Inner Economist, no Radicals for Capitalism…If there were a “premium channel” for political economy that included these sorts of books, then I might be willing to pay $50 a month for a subscription. But I would actually have a hard time finding books I want to read if I were limited to the mass-market fare offered with the Kindle.
Update:
A fair question, one that perhaps Dr. Margolis will answer for us on Econ NC State night and asked by Megan McArdle: Does Kindle’s success depend on Network Effects?
Comments (3)
…the true pimp effect would be when it gets hacked, and then you can put all kinds of books on there.
Essentially, this is a book ipod. So you either purchase your own files directly from bookTunes, or you load your own .rtf files. True. At least, that’s the way it works in my ‘i love hackers because they WILL figure out how to get something done’ world.
“I have given about 20 away to friends and family already.
But having the ability to carry the same 4 boxes of books on a device that weights 11 ounces…”
But the Kindle is DRM’d, and you can only download titles you’ve purchased to your own Kindle (I’m sure this will be fixed soon).
What I’m worried about the most though, is that Amazon’s actions in DRM’ing a proprietary digital format is that it inevitably ruins the possibility of a secondary-market. How can you resell a title you’ve purchased but no longer like, when you can’t even donate it? How can I buy a used title? What does “used” even mean when we talk digital?
Indeed, what does “used” mean in the digital world? If ownership entails transferability, can one even “own” a drm’d book? Digitized information will not respond to the same legal constraints as physical property.