EG: Ogling the Kindle

So I didn't post much Monday and Tuesday because I was immersed in EG2007. I'll post more about some fascinating things I learned as soon as I can.

Favorite moment, though: Today at the lunch break, I wandered over to a sunny spot where Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis of Applied Minds were talking. Bezos pulled out his recently introduced Kindle e-book reader. Soon Kevin Kelly, Wired's founding editor, and VC Sam Perry crowded around and a lot of discussion got going about the Kindle's pros and cons.

No question that even these tech geeks are impressed with the device and the service behind it. Bezos confirmed that the main criticism of the device has been how easy it is to accidentally turn pages by hitting the buttons along each edge, and said Amazon will consider that in future versions. He did, though, say that once people use the Kindle for a while, they get used to where to hold it and don't have much of a problem with the page buttons.

Hillis brought up a point that Bezos seemed to find interesting. He said he'd like to be able to buy a physical book and get the electronic book thrown in as part of the package -- so he'd have the book on his shelf, but be able to take it on the reader if he wanted. Publishers have resisted anything like that, Bezos said, but he thought he might try to convince them to test the idea.

Interesting too: I asked if Sprint had ever gotten a request like Amazon's -- to give the Kindle a constant EVDO wireless connection, but not bill customers for it. It comes as part of Kindle, and is only used for downloading books, shopping and some Web browsing. No, Bezos said, Sprint had never dealt with a request like that. Amazon had to pave a whole new path.

Sounds like college textbook publishers will be fans of selling on Kindle or other ebook readers. Bezos noted that they have a "used book problem." College textbooks get resold about four times. A Kindle ebook can't be resold, so even if the publisher makes less on each sale, it will sell the book more times. Students get the benefit of buying the ebook for less than the print book, and could load all their textbooks on a single device so they don't have to haul books to class. Sounds like a win-win.

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