Legal Research

Open-Sourcing the Kindle

Yesterday ZDNet’s Open Source blog called for Amazon to open up the Kindle:

“… so far Amazon seems to think it’s going to be the Apple of eBooks, not the Google. Be the Google. While Apple made a ton of money selling iPods, the big bucks here are in the blades, not the razors. They’re in the books, not the players. The only way this works is if the technology becomes as ubiquitous as, well, books. It should work inside any device you have, any device you want, any device you can imagine, or what anyone else can imagine. If it’s stuck in this squarish, plainish, plastic case it’s not going to fulfill its potential.”

I snorted and moved on. No way that’s gonna happen, I thought. Then last night I read this article from Computerworld:

“The introduction of ‘Whispersync’ technology may well be the bigger technology news from Amazon.com Inc., which announced its Kindle 2 e-reader today in New York. Not much was said about Whispersync by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during today’s announcement, but the official Amazon.com press release defines Whispersync as technology that ‘automatically syncs Kindle 2 and the original Kindle, which makes transitioning to the new Kindle 2 or using both devices easy for customers.’ What has caught the interest of industry analysts, however, is the next sentence from Amazon: ‘Kindle 2 will also sync with a range of mobile devices in the future.’ The statement suggests that a Kindle 2 user could start reading a book on the e-reader and finish reading it on an iPhone or an Android phone, analysts noted.”

This’ll make the author of the first article above feel pretty happy.

As a test, I decided to see how painful it was to read a book on my Android phone. I chose Flatland from Google Books Mobile. I admit I didn’t read the whole book. But what I did read was surprisingly easy-on-the-eyes. Scrolling didn’t make me scream. It could work.

So maybe Amazon SHOULD be the Apple of eBooks. They can produce a nifty gadget that’s a design icon. And like Apple’s (finally) doing now, they can also sell content that can be played on a wide range of devices.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).