Carlton's Brain

eReader Wishlist, or, How to Get Me to Buy a Kindle Monday, December 8th, 2008

So, although I can’t afford one anytime in the near future, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about getting an eReader, and, most likely, an Amazon Kindle. However, there are a number of issues that stop me from getting a Kindle. Here’s what I want Amazon to do for Kindle 2.0:

• Lower the price point: $360 is still too much, guys. I don’t want to pay for EVDO that I’d hardly ever use — make the Whispernet a subscription fee to lower the initial cost, instead of bumping the initial price up to subsidize expected bandwidth uses. Which brings me to the next point…

• Lower the book prices even more. It’s a fact: the book prices include mark-up to cover bandwidth use, but, with a subscription model, this won’t be necessary. As it stands, I have to buy over 100 books before I can justify the cost. That assumes books at 30-50% the cover price, but for most of the stuff in my wish list, the books are the same cost as paper or not available! And you really should…

• Offer public domain books as free downloads! This means, right away, without any fiddling on my part, I can just go an grab a bunch of books for free. This is added value for the Kindle for sure. And for Christ’s sake…
• Get rid of the fee for RSS feeds! Again, go with a subscription fee to EVDO only. This was a stupid idea. Even at $0.99 / feed, it’d cost me over $40 a month. And we can even lower EVDO use if you just…
• Build in WiFi support. This will allow use of internet connections already available without having to pay the EVDO fee, while also increasing speed and lowering EVDO bandwidth usage — win, win, win. And I could really use…
• Native PDF support. This would be great for use at work, storing, reading and annotating all sorts of documents, including datasheets and more. Yes, I can do that email-conversion dealie, but just being able to grab documents like that would be great. Course, if I could do that, what I’d really want is…
• A touchscreen with simple pen to mark-up documents. Heck, let me create note documents too, that’d be sweet. I don’t even need text recognition or anything. This could even be in a more expensive model, perhaps, but could use on-screen buttons to…
• Cut down on the number of buttons. Better ergonomics and aesthetics is low on my list, but, jeesh, these are ugly as sin. While we’re at it…
• Add full support for SDHC. 4 GB is fine and all, but I’d really like support for 16 GB cards and even 32 GB (although they are currently ridiculously expensive, I’m thinking long-term).

Now, the Sony PRS-700 has most of the above features, but is $400. Ouch. And Amazon has a much bigger collection of Kindle books, it seems. Plus the Sony Bookstore books cost more than the paper books on Amazon!

This could all get me more interested in the Kindle. Of course, DRM-ed books make me very unhappy, but I don’t see a solution anytime soon. I’ll probably just stick with paper books for quite a long time — they look nice, have unlimited battery life, can be gotten used for dirt cheap, will always be compatible, can be borrowed by friends and can be sold in a pinch or if you don’t like it. Give me a format that I can sell and buy used from others and then we’ll be talking — otherwise, the books better be damn cheap and make sure they’re in an open format, so I can use them years from now.