Amazon Kindle Apps: They'll flop, but welcome to the land of competition
By Christopher Dawson | January 21, 2010, 9:21pm PST
Summary: It is abundantly clear that the days of the black and white, vanilla, paperback substitute e-reader are numbered. The pending release of the KDK should be welcome news to educators, suggesting that the promise of e-readers and MIDs is right around the corner and countless hardware and software companies are scrambling to beat Amazon at its own game.
With the announcement of a “Kindle Development Kit”, Amazon signaled their panic over an increasingly competitive e-reader market in which ubiquitous access to e-books, though convenient, is hardly enough to stay on top. Fellow ZDNet blogger, Jason Perlow, panned the effort as too little, too late.
From an Ed Tech perspective, however, this is a real windfall. It’s a good thing in our world, not because the apps on the Kindle will be terribly compelling or finally bring us the e-textbooks with smart DRM for which we’ve been asking, but because it signals a new level of competition. Jason summarizes the prospects for successful apps on the Kindle quite nicely:
As successful an eBook platform the Kindle may be — which Amazon is still cagey in releasing actual sales figures for — it’s no match in terms of audience when compared to Android or BlackBerry, and certainly nowhere near striking range of iPhone OS, which is presumably what sits at the core of iPad.
Larry Dignan makes a similar argument:
…if Kindle users decide they want more out of their apps Amazon’s device may look a bit dated. For instance, the Kindle doesn’t have color. Web browsing is so-so at best. Simply put, there are a few limitations with the Kindle. Clearly, these apps won’t be like iPhone games. Will Kindle users live with that?
I firmly believe that Kindle’s limitations (and user expectations) are such that any foray into apps will be limited at best and dismal failures at worst. The Kindle is a fine substitute for a stack of paperbacks and my 7-year old is thrilled that he can hand me a couple bucks and I’ll download just about any book he might want instantly. If it’s apps you want, then you should probably look elsewhere.
That’s not really the point as far as I’m concerned, though. It is abundantly clear that the days of the black and white, vanilla, paperback substitute e-reader are numbered. Amazon is hardly the only game in town and plenty of MIDs/slates/tablets are rushing to market at aggressive price points that will make the Kindle irrelevant in education (and in plenty of other markets). A few apps on a grayscale e-ink screen can’t compete with wide-open development platforms (and I include Windows in that group) that can support the next phases of 1:1 and digital learning.
E-ink isn’t dead and neither is Kindle. Not by a long shot. But the pending release of the KDK should be welcome news to educators. The promise of e-readers and MIDs is right around the corner and countless hardware and software companies are scrambling to beat Amazon at its own game. The limitations inherent in the Kindle (and other 1st-generation devices) will be addressed in a variety of ways. Perhaps just as importantly, they’ll need to be addressed much sooner than later by Amazon in a much more aggressive way than opening up development on the Kindle. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to leverage all of the content to which Amazon has access/distribution rights in an innovative device that meets educational needs better than the Kindle has ever been able? It’s coming…Apps are just a stopgap as Kindle enters the world of fierce competition.
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Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems. In 2011, he became the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network SaaS provider.
Disclosure
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson is the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., by day and a freelance writer and educational technology consultant by night. Well, most of his colleagues at WizIQ are based in India, so really he's working with them whenever he can stay awake. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.).
He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now owned by Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years). Follett is paying him a monthly honorarium to act as a presenter for their "SIS Voices for Student Achievement" community (he produces occasional blog posts and hosts a monthly webinar on the use of student information systems to inform data-driven instruction and school-wide change.
He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he does) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have).
Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as have Dell and Lenovo with their educational offerings. He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others.
Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair.
Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards.
Adobe provided him with a pre-release version of the CS5 Master Collection for evaluation and ultimately provided a full, licensed copy for ongoing testing of educational applications of this admittedly expensive software. Like the Gunnars, if the license expires or they come out with CS6, he'd actually go out and buy it himself. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap.
Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.
Finally, because WizIQ is a virtual classroom and learning network provider, Chris, as VP of Marketing, frequently interacts with, seeks out deals with, and directly or indirectly competes with a whole lot of LMS, SIS, and other Education 2.0 companies. In general, he'll limit his reporting about these companies to news that does not impact his relationship with them or with WizIQ. If he reports on them, it's because what they are doing is newsworthy or worth the attention of his readers and not because he's trying to broker some deal, damage competition, or otherwise advance his position in his day job. LMS and SIS companies, along with other online learning communities, are a pretty important part of Ed Tech. If he stops reporting on them completely, there won't be a whole lot left. He'll be sure to call out any overt conflicts of interest if they are unavoidable.
Finally, Follett Software Company pays him a little tiny honorarium every month to present on their SIS Voices webinars and to write the occasional blog or discussion thread for them. Since Follett recently bought X2 (maker of an awesome web-based SIS that Chris just happened to have used, served in advisory groups for, and frequently reported on), this is probably also worth disclosing.
Biography
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, a couple-year stint in private industry, teaching high school math and technology, and 2 years as the technology director for his local school district. Most recently, he started his own consulting business and is now the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network provider.
He lives with his wife, five kids (yes, 5), 2 dogs, and a hateful cat in a small town in north-central Massachusetts. Although he is no longer teaching, his roles with WizIQ and ZDNet allow him to continue helping students and teachers add value to education with technology rather than merely adding to the bottom line.
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If I want to order the latest New York Times best selling books in paper format then I can do that from every bookshop of the world. No-one cares, which edition I buy, where I live or where I buy it.
So, why should e-books be handled different than paper books? I would be happy to be able to buy e-books from different publishers. But, at this moment I don't have any choice at all.
There is a "digital" wall standing between me and the Amazon website in the USA, that forbids me to buy anything else than the paper edition.
The "old" paper book "copyright system" works fine for everyone, despite the fact that every country in the world has different copyright laws in place. There is no need to change that. If that same "system" would be applied to e-books, then e-books have a great future.
I got a Kindle as a Christmas present from my wife and do indeed think that the device need some improvements. Sure, I can live without a colour screen, because that most likely brings down the battery life. Nor would I be interested in any apps that won't run well on the Kindle.
I only wish for now that they improve the user interface of the Kindle, like better ways to organize my books the way I want it or the ability to import more book formats.
What I want to see most is that all digital books will have an international copyright, so that I'm not limited to buy books for my part of the world only. Not to mention of course that all publishers should make all their books available in digital format. As for now there are far to many books that I'd love to buy for my Kindle, but can't.
... would require governments around the world to agree on copyright law.
It would also force authors to deal with only one publisher and to give that publisher exclusive world-wide rights.
Not gonna happen. What you really need is access to more books from more publishers and that requires more publishers to recognize the value of putting their books into electromnic format. Many publishers (especially those with a limited audience - like textbook publishers) to move into the Twenty-First Century before the technology is fully mature.
The "something for nothing" attitude of so many doesn't help. Just because a book is in electronic form does not mean it is any less expensive to compile, edit, and produce.
Electronic publishing saves shipping, storage, and distribution costs (while putting the traditional bookstore out of business) but it does not make it any less expensive to compile, edit, or produce a book. This is especially true for books with a small audience such as textbooks, reference books, and professional publications.
If I want to order the latest New York Times best selling books in paper format then I can do that from every bookshop of the world. No-one cares, which edition I buy, where I live or where I buy it.
So, why should e-books be handled different than paper books? I would be happy to be able to buy e-books from different publishers. But, at this moment I don't have any choice at all.
There is a "digital" wall standing between me and the Amazon website in the USA, that forbids me to buy anything else than the paper edition.
The "old" paper book "copyright system" works fine for everyone, despite the fact that every country in the world has different copyright laws in place. There is no need to change that. If that same "system" would be applied to e-books, then e-books have a great future.
I own a Kindle and love it's size, two week battery life, and it's minimal weight. But I especially love the e-ink which allows me to read in bright sunlight and to read for long periods without fatigue. A tablet isn't going to come close to any of these very important features. As for Kindle apps, I didn't buy it for games or computer-like features however I can easily see things like crossword puzzles, soduku, vocabulary builders, foreign language software, streaming stock quotes, movie listings and reviews. Tons of useful things that give it a bonus. But the bottom line is that Kindle users really bought the thing to read books and it does that better than any non e-ink computer is ever going to be able to do.
... is that it brings e-reader developers to the table.
There is not an e-reader on the market today that is well-suited for reading textbooks or reference books.
Even with it's marginal PDF reading capabilities (much better than most devices) the Kindle does not make reading a magazine or newspaper format easy.
In order for an e-reader to be suitable for reading a magazine format, for instance, one must not only display PDF (or other equivalent format) as-is (as the Kindle can), it must be able to "unwrap" the content. In a magazine or newspaper, following text down one column and then jumping to the top of the next column is straightforward. On an e-reader device, one must continually page down, and then page back up again to move from column to column.
An ideal e-reader would be able to display this content as one continuous column. Fonts would need to be user-selectable, and Graphs and images would need to be available in-line and be completely zoom-able and scroll-able.
Further, imbedded graphs and images would need to be indexed into the column text itself so when the reader comes across a reference to "Table A" there is a link to "Table A". Same thing with a footnote, image, table of contents, glossary, whatever.
Today, only a handful of bible-reader products have any of these index capabilities but they are a long way from being capable of dealing with magazine/newspaper layouts.
The closest any of these e-readers can come is a content search and that is just not good enough.
Perhaps a Kindle DK will encourage the developement of more and more sophisticated readers which could be sold either as "add-on" capabilities or standalone e-reader software for the Kindle.
If the governments and corporations -- and, yes, writers -- aren't able to get on the same page as consumers, you have to realize that consumers are going to get the product on their own terms anyway. They did so with music before iTunes came along, were already doing it with video before Hulu and streaming Netflix arrived, and many still do, because the industry was so slow to give the people what they want that it created a culture of acceptability for copyright infringement.
The publishing world's only hope for avoiding that without fulfilling their market's desires was that there would be only one monolithic e-book platform that would be such a pain to hack that no one would bother. Amazon's slowness to recognize that people who are paying for a little computer want to use it as a little computer means that there are going to be plenty of devices that'll read Kindle, .lit, .epb, PDF or whatever other formats books are available in, with the DRM stripped off. Already, if I had a Kindle, I could move the books I bought to my Palm Pre and read them there, which I gather was Amazon's big nightmare.
Apple had a shot at dominating the market with a platform that was at least inconvenient to hack, but if they're really going to get $800 for it as rumored, the tablet market that rises from the ashes of the e-book reader market is going to be even more heterogeneous than the smartphone market. And e-books tend to be a lot smaller and easier to pirate than mp3 files.
