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wishlist for an ebook reader

October 20, 2008 – 10:50 pm by caleb

Sometimes it takes near on a year to finish a thought, so here goes.

Early hype of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader raised the question of whether it could revolutionize the book industry the way Apple’s iPod had recorded music. “Revolution” and its variants are some of the words I most commonly read or hear in discussions of the Kindle.

The Kindle is available now at a reduced price of $359. It makes me wonder, who is this revolution for? Amazon is transforming who’s reading? For how much?

My teachers tried to warn me in 4th grade. “The American Revolution was a revolt of the aristocracy in the colonies against the aristocracy in England”, they said. Revolutions don’t mean anything. Revolutions are for the rich. Was I dulled into complicity, or warned about the future?

A typical Oregon school library has a materials budget of $3,000, and the mean for the whole state is $20 per student (source: Oregon State Library). Or, assuming all the content was free, a school library serving 500-1,500 kids and their teachers could buy 8 new kindles every year. Let’s pretend they get a 20% discount and get 10. Big woo.

Given these circumstances, here’s what I think Amazon should do to revolutionize reading:

The Kindle should be indestructible or near to it. These things are going to be dropped, thrown, stepped on, sat on, smashed, run over with bicycles, chewed by dogs and spilled on. And that’s just what would happen at my house, if I had a dog.

I imagine them coming in bouncy foam rubber cases and thick scratch proof screens. I’m thinking Nerf Etch-A-Sketch. I want them to last 4-6 years.

Any detachable parts are going to get lost, so the power adapter has to be part of the device. It’s a moving part that also has to be indestructible. The pull-out USB plug on Flip video camera is kind of what I have in mind.

Students should be able to load whatever they want on their Kindles, but they should come at the beginning of the year with sharable content selected by teachers. Not by a committee, or the principal, or the district superintendent or the state department of education, not Texas or California or some frickin federal law.

And I know that textbooks don’t come out of a school library’s budget, but I think $20 is a good starting price. Cursory Google-Fu tells me textbooks are about $30 each. So lets price them at $25 - even if a school could afford to buy new ones every year, they still need to be cheap enough to be replaced regularly and to leave room in the library and textbook budgets for regular-old books.

And then we can see if we can spark a revolution.

Now, I know there are some problems with this idea: if a kindle is $359 today, then the latest, greatest Kindle is always going to be around $350-$400 regardless of the cost of materials, the engineering or the economy in general. If Sony or someone else can get it together to have a $200 model, so will Amazon.

I know this because my walkman in 8th grade was $100, and the iPod shuffle I bought three years ago was $100. We can think of this as a ‘price point’ - what I am willing to pay for a music player, but Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, shows that the first price we see for something influences, long-term, how much we are willing to pay for it.

And I may be the only person who expects an iPod to last 6 years. It will be 4 in February and I really have no idea what I am missing. Even better shuffling? I was recently awkwardly interested and relieved to notice that Rachel had a phone with lots and lots of buttons. She said it was also 4 years old or more. So maybe I’m not the only one.

But still, if a Kindle lasts 3 years, it will probably be because Amazon screwed up the release date of the next model. It would be a shame to have to be giving kids old tech all the time. I remember working as a systems librarian in California, someone was always trying to give away the library’s old computers to needy third world countries. Why did they assume a 286 was not going to end up in a landfill in Africa? Why don’t charities ever give new computers to third world countries?

And then there’s the content - publishers (and distributors like Amazon) will make money any way they can, so schools will be sure to foot the bill for “converting” all of that paper into ones and zeroes.

But all of those reasons why my cockamamie idea won’t work also show why we need a revolution in electronic books to begin with, because last and most importantly, reading is not equivalent to education. We need devices to write and share books as much as we need ones to read them with, and ones that we aren’t actually looking at all the time.

The XO Laptop is probably closer to what I am looking for. It’s cheaper to start with, anyway.