Apple, Microsoft, Google -- how about a Kindle Killer?

I have a Kindle and I like it, but I don't love it. I like the form factor and the e-paper display and the touch interface is OK, but I really wish it used voice input in the user interface and was well integrated with my laptop.

Reading is an active process -- kind of a dialog with the author -- and I create a lot of associations and marginal notes. I want an e-reader that lets me record those in a database while reading. Database entries would include a note, timestamp, tags (global to me, local to the document -- perhaps even global to the world), the document it was associated with, the selected passage or figure it was associated with, etc. The links would be hot.

I'd like to be able to search this database in a variety of ways, for example, finding entries with a given tag or combination of tags, free-text search or those associated with a given document and display the results in a variety of ways, for example in a table showing only the first N characters of a marginal note and the passage it was associated with.

Voice recognition -- for commands and text entry -- should be a first-class input modality. If I have selected a passage for annotation, a single voice command should initiate speech-to-text mode so I could dictate my note and tags.

The e-reader and my laptop should be integrated. I should be able to copy the annotation database to my laptop with a single command and search and display reports in the same way as on the e-reader. I should also have the option of updating the e-reader database from my laptop, uploading it to the Internet or exporting it in various formats, for example, docx or xlsx.

I've outlined a few features I'd like in an e-reader -- what would you like to see?

The business case -- low-hanging fruit

When the Kindle came out, Steve Jobs dismissed it saying “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore -- forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Amazon does not release official sales figures, but Forbes estimated that between 2007, when the Kindle was released, and the end of 2013, roughly 43.7 million Kindles were sold. Assuming a 3-year replacement cycle, about 30 million Kindle e-readers are currently in use -- for reading and purchasing content from Amazon. Regardless of Jobs' opinion, there is a sizeable market.

Apple is a device manufacturer par excellence, Microsoft has elevated "devices" to its tag line and Google sells some devices, so they all have varying degrees of manufacturing experience.

Speech recognition is the key technology that I want added to an e-reader and Apple, Microsoft and Google have world-class speech recognition products and research projects.

Amazon may be taking a loss on each Kindle and making it up on content sales, but Apple, Microsoft and Google have online stores too and could be selling the same content as Amazon.

The Kindle reminds me of the Apple Newton -- a very early "personal digital assistant" with a stylus and handwritting recognition as its primary input modality. The Newton failed because the handwriting recognition was slow and inaccurate -- like typing on a Kindle's virtual keyboard -- and it was a stand-alone device, barely integrated with Apple or Windows computers. (I've still got a Newton -- in mint condition because I only used it to look cool). Apple learned from the failure of the Newton -- the iPod was one component in a system along with the iTunes store and software.

It seems to me that a Kindle-killing e-reader would be low-hanging fruit for Apple, Google or Microsoft. If any one of them builds it, I'll buy it. (Think of the competition if they each built one)!

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Update 6/5/2014

There is a long (320 comments) discussion of this post on Slashdot.

Portable devices -- innovation and form factors

In discussing mobile and portable connectivity, we talked about competing device form factors and innovation. We have also discussed new devices which may influence future form factors and user interfaces: the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) laptop, the Apple iPhone, and, most recently, Amazon's Kindle.

Each has hardware and user interface innovations that may become standard fare on future portable devices. For example, the Kindle and OLPC laptop have low power displays that are legible in daylight, and the iPhone has an elegant touch screen interface and can be programmed to automatically switch between displaying documents in landscape or portrait mode if it is rotated. The OLPC laptop automatically forms a mesh network with nearby machines; the Kindle is directly connected to Amazon via Sprint's cellular network; and the iPhone can move between WiFi and AT&T's cellular network. The list goes on.

They each deliver different functions. The Kindle is a book reader, period. The iPhone a phone, Internet browser, email client, camera, etc., and it is now open to third party developers. The OLPC laptop is a PC running Linux. It comes preloaded with applications and there are tools for what I hope will become a vibrant developer community. It was conceived of as a computer for school children in developing nations, but in many ways it is more attractive than a "serious" compact laptop like a Sony Vaio for a business traveler.

Each is physically different:

	iPhone	Kindle	OLPC
Height (in)	4.5	7.5	9.5
Width (in)	2.4	5.3	9
Depth (in)	.46	.7	1.25
Weight (oz)	4.8	10.3	51
Pixels/inch	183	167	200
Resolution	420x320	600x800	1200x900
Screen diag (in)	3.5	6	7.5

The iPhone is a smart phone with a bright and large enough screen to browse the Web and read email fairly comfortably. The Kindle is designed for easy reading, and the OLPC laptop's high resolution display may be even better.

Which form factor do you favor? Are you willing to carry around a 3 pound OLPC laptop? Is the iPhone screen large enough for your portable applications? Would you rather carry a Kindle or a paperback book and a magazine when you board a plane?

Portable devices -- the Kindle book reader

Over the years a number of vendors have marketed portable devices for reading books, magazines and other material, but none have caught on. The latest attempt is Amazon's Kindle. Kindle is both hardware -- the portable reader -- and a service. The service includes an online store with 90,000 books, magazine and blog subscription and free downloading using Sprint's cellular network. It also includes a backup copy of everything you buy or transfer to your Kindle in case it is lost or damaged. That is the good news.

The bad news is that the Kindle service is a "walled garden." It is like having a cell phone that can only call one number -- the Amazon book store. Furthermore, the cost of downloading and backup must be covered, so a subscription to a blog which is free on the Internet might cost $1 per month, and you must pay to put your own Word files or other documents on your Kindle. The charges cover the backup and downloading service.

Would you be willing to have a specialized book reader or would insist upon a portable device capable of other functions like listening to music, Web browsing and email? Would you want a portable device that was tied to a single vendor, Amazon?

Should you be buying and selling textbooks at Amazon?

I have long predicted the demise of conventional textbooks, but they are hanging on. For now, the textbook is king.

Faculty like textbooks because they save them time. There are only a few candidate books to choose among for a course, they come with teaching material like PowerPoint slides, review questions and test banks, the publisher maintains a Web site for the book, and the table of contents determines the course syllabus.

As teaching loads increase, faculty are driven to rely more heavily on textbook publishers. (I stopped using textbooks years ago, saving my students a lot of money, but costing me a lot of time).

I still think textbooks will fade away, but while you wait for the demise of the $100 textbook, you can use Amazon's beta-test textbook buyback service to ease the pain. A student with books in good condition can ship them for free to Amazon, and receive Amazon gift card credit as payment. That credit can be used to purchase new or used textbooks for other classes or anything else. Textbook ordering is also simple -- enter the ISBN numbers of the textbooks you need, and a one-click search returns links to all of them.

Amazon also offers many textbooks in electronic form for distribution on their Kindle e-book reader. The current Kindle has significant limitations as a textbook reader, but it also has some advantages, and many companies are working on other devices. (Maybe textbooks will be a killer application for the much rumored Apple tablet or whatever Hewlett Packard is cooking up).

The average US student spends $702 annualy on required course materials, and, as shown below, about 23% of that goes to the bookstore and distribution. Amazon hopes to get a piece of that.


(Click on the picture to enlarge it).

Let us know if you have been buying or selling textbooks online or using an e-book reader like the Kindle.

Electronic text books

Monterey College of Law is distributing Apple iPads to all students enrolled in a supplemental curriculum program that helps them prepare for the state's bar exam.

The program is motivated by the desire to save time for busy night students who typically work full time and have families, not cost. However, technology improvement coupled with new business models will eventually drive the cost of electronic textbooks well below that of printed textbooks, as shown in this cost breakdown.

Electronic book sales have already passed hard cover sales at Amazon, and the cost of a Kindle reader is down to $139.

In addition to cost and time savings, electronic textbooks will have new features including capability for social or collaborative reading. It is too soon to know what those features will be or how they will work, but check the Institute of the Future of the Book if you are curious about the possibilities.

Would you prefer electronic to printed textbooks?

Get a free copy of Twitter for Good -- a how-to for organizations with social goals

When Twitter started up, its prompt question was "What are you doing?" A lot of early traffic was simple answers to that question -- interesting to your friends perhaps, but not particularly significant.

The prompt today is "what's happening?," which solicits a broader class of comment.

There are many stories of inventions that came to be used in ways their creators did not envision, and Twitter is one of those. In the preface of Twitter for Good, co-founder Biz Stone tells the story of James Buck, a photo journalist covering Egyptian demonstrations. When Buck was arrested during a demonstration he tweeted one word -- "arrested." The word spread via Twitter to his colleagues and diplomats, and within hours he tweeted again -- "free."

It is now clear that Twitter can be used for more than telling friends what you are doing. It has been used for disaster relief, political organizing, live reporting of events, as a broadcast medium for popular figures like athletes, actors, politicians and journalists, even, sadly, for coordination of terrorist activity.

Twitter for Good is a how-to book with tips and case studies for organizations and individuals that want to use Twitter for good. It's oriented toward social action, but many of the recommendations are also relevant to any organization that wants to use Twitter for public relations, marketing, and customer or community relationship management.

I have only skimmed the book, so cannot write a full, critical review, but, if it sounds interesting, you can get a free copy. Starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 an electronic version of the book will be available for download at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Click on the Kindle (Amazon) or Nook (B&N) edition, then purchase them for free. The B&N version is in ebook format.

The offer is good for 24 hours. If you miss the free copy, all is not lost -- you can enter to win a copy here.

Amazon Project Kuiper vs SpaceX Starlink

Amazon's Project Kuiper is far behind Starlink and is under time pressure, but Amazon has several things going for it.

In 2019, I wrote that Amazon would be a formidable satellite-ISP competitor. I still think so, but I didn’t expect it would be over four years until they launched the first test satellites. In the meantime, SpaceX has put over 5,000 satellites in orbit and has over two million Starlink customers.

Amazon has permission to launch 3,236 satellites. They must manufacture and launch at least half of them by July 2026 and the remainder by July 2029. Can they do it? After many delays, they have finally launched two test satellites, confirming that inter-satellite laser links (ISLLs) worked at 100 Gbps while sending traffic “in both directions from the internet over an AWS fiber-optic connection to our ground gateway station, up to our satellites, and then down to a customer terminal at our test location.” All Starlink satellites launched since September 2021 will have ISLLs, so by the time Kuiper is complete, all or nearly all Starlink satellites will have them, and they will have a much larger constellation.

Amazon has not launched any production satellites and they will have to hurry to meet the 2026 and 2029 deadlines. They have signed contracts for 83 launches over a five-year period, which they say will provide capacity for “the majority” of the constellation. SpaceX was conspicuously not one of the vendors, and a shareholder lawsuit pointed out that Amazon had not considered SpaceX as a provider and nearly 45% of the overall value is for launches and engines from Blue Origin, a rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos. Subsequently, Kuiper signed a 3-launch contract with SpaceX.

(Note that Blue Origin has not yet launched their forthcoming New Glenn rocket, which was initially scheduled to fly in 2020. The New Glenn will have greater capacity than SpaceX’s current Falcon rocket, but significantly less than their forthcoming Starship.

Amazon's Project Kuiper is far behind Starlink and is under time pressure, but Amazon has several things going for it:

• In his first letter to stockholders, Jeff Bezos stressed that Amazon was an infrastructure company and that has been borne out by subsequent investments in facilities and services. Amazon will bundle Kuiper access with data storage and cloud computing services.
• Kuiper will offer service-level agreements to non-consumer customers.
• Amazon will be Kuiper’s largest customer. With over 1.5 million employees staffing offices, warehouses, and other facilities, Amazon will use the Kuiper constellation internally as will their fleets of delivery trucks, planes, shipping containers, and perhaps delivery drones someday.
• Amazon is already in the space business with its satellite ground station service.
• The US, Taiwanese, and other governments and militaries will see Amazon as a more reliable supplier of critical infrastructure than Starlink given Elon Musk’s political activism and Tesla’s dependence on China.
• Some potential customers may not approve of Elon Musk’s political involvement.
• Re-usability gives Starlink a large launch-cost advantage, but if Elon Musk can afford Twitter, Jeff Bezos can afford Kuiper.
• Amazon's New Glenn rocket is designed to be reusable and eight Chinese private and state-owned entities are developing reusable rockets.
• Kuiper will be launching state-of-the-art satellites and selling state-of-the-art terminals.
• Satellite antennas are expensive, and Amazon has experience designing and manufacturing consumer devices like the Echo and Kindle. 
• Amazon has announced three Kuiper antennas.
• A user terminal is more than just an antenna, and Dave Täht, Chief Science Officer at LibreQoS, has been calling attention to Starlink’s latency problem for years. It now seems Elon Musk is ready to listen. Amazon should talk with Täht.
• Amazon is already talking with enterprises, governments, schools, hospitals, and mobile operators. They have contracts with Verizon, Vodafone, and NTT and licenses to operate in more than 15 countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, and the US.

I could go on, but you get the idea -- I think Kuiper will survive despite a rocky start and will eventually offer Starlink healthy competition.

Update Feb 9, 2024

I listed Jeff Bezos’s wealth and the expected use of the Kuiper constellation among the causes of my optimism. A report on the capital expenditures by the three major cloud service companies puts Amazon’s commitment to invest $10 billion over several years in Project Kuiper in context. In 2023 alone, “Amazon’s (relative) CAPEX austerity continues, as the company spent a measly $53.7 billion, a decline of 20%" and it has invested around $380 billion since 2000.

Update 5/26/2025

Tech CEOs at the Trump  inauguration (source)

Amazon launched its first batch of production satellites on April 28, 18 months and 22 days after its test satellites. (Starlink launched production satellites 15 months after its test satellites.) It remains to be seen whether they can meet the FCC deadlines for having 3,216 satellites in operation by July 2029 and half that by July 2026. 

If they fail to meet one or both deadlines, they will request a delay and may face political pressure from SpaceX. Amazon's Jeff Bezos has made Trump-friendly editorial changes at the Washington Post and supported Trump financially, but has not paid as much as Elon Musk. Both had VIP seats at Trump's inauguration along with Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook.

Update 7/16/2025

SpaceX launched a batch of 24 Project Kuiper satellites, bringing the constellation up to 78 satellites in orbit. 

Amazon has contracts with United Launch Alliance for 47 launches, Blue Origin for 12 with options for 15 more, Arianespace for 18 launches, and only two more launches from SpaceX, which are expected to take place this year. 

The small SpaceX contact was precipitated by a lawsuit filed in 2023 claiming that Jeff Bezos and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy “consciously and intentionally breached their most basic fiduciary responsibilities” by not selecting any launches that used the Falcon 9 rocket, "the most obvious and affordable launch provider, SpaceX, from its procurement process because of Bezos’ personal rivalry with Musk.” 

Is a MOOC with "only" 700 active students a bad deal?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this morning that a Coursera professor, Richard McKenzie, had decided to withdraw from his course Microeconomics for Managers. (The course will run to completion with a new instructor using McKenzie's videos).

Professor McKenzie was disturbed by the level of student engagement and commitment . In a note he posted on January 30, McKenzie noted that just under 37,000 had enrolled, but “fewer than 2 percent have been actively engaged in discussions,” and he worried that unprepared students were wasting the other's time "The problem is especially acute when students who have not watched the videos and have not done the readings contribute comments that we all have to read at some level."

In the forum thread discussing his withdrawal, there is little if any criticism and a lot of appreciation and explanation for low participation rates. McKenzie stated that “I will not give on standards, and you also should not want me to, or else the value of any ‘certification’ won’t be worth the digits it is written with."

I did not take the course, but watched some of the video. The format was uninterrupted lecture for around 30 minutes followed by multiple choice questions. The lectures I watched were engaging and presented well. He used easily followed examples in which rational economic thinking often leads to non-intuitive, perhaps politically incorrect, conclusions.

So, what went wrong?

Were there economic problems? The Chronicle reported that some students complained about the amount of work McKenzie assigned and others balked at the price of the textbook "The New World of Economics: A Remake of a Classic for New Generations of Economics Students," which Amazon sells for $79.95 in paperback or $63.96 for the Kindle.

I don't know what Professor McKenzie's business relationship was with Coursera, but the lectures were produced and copyrighted in 2011 by RBMCourses.com (which is not a registered domain name on the Internet).

The teaching material was re-purposed and so were professor McKenzie's expectations for the class. He was not prepared for the variance in online student commitment compared to his classroom at UC Irvine. Enrollment numbers like 37,000 have to be understood as browsing, not commitment. He has learned that lesson, writing:

As it has turned out, the enrollment count is meaningless, with fewer than 40 percent of the students actually logging in during each of the first two weeks. Only a fourth of the enrolled students have done as much as watch a single video lecture over the last week.

But, how bad is that? Even if, say, only 700 students actively participated, the course seems to have made economic (and social) sense. The course will be picked up by Melissa Loble, Associate Dean for Distance Learning at UC Irvine, and run to completion using Professor McKenzie's videos, quizzes, midterm and final exam. The videos and textbook were sunk costs, so the MOOC was a way to generate some extra revenue and offer a course at the same time at relatively little marginal cost.

Based on my sampling of professor McKenzie's lectures, I would guess that his MOOC was as effective as the typical (perhaps not the best) microeconomics course for business students. If that is the case, a low marginal cost class with "only" 700 students sounds viable to me. It even leaves some slack for continued investment in the teaching material or additional presentation resources.

The future of the (text)book

New media start by emulating old media, then evolve. Gutenberg's movable type was first used to print large bibles that, like their hand-copied predecessors, were kept in monasteries. It took about 50 years to evolve the form factor of the smaller "portable" book and still longer to settle on conventions for typography, punctuation, tables of contents, figures, indices, footnotes, and so forth. It took 80 years for early movies, shot with a relatively static camera, perhaps filming a stage play, to evolve into the fast-cutting style introduced by MTV.(Change is not always for the better :-).

The textbook is no different. A couple weeks ago, our class saw a digital book presentation by McGraw Hill. They are developing digital versions of their print books, starting with the best sellers and moving down the list. They supplement those with PowerPoint presentations, test banks, links to video, etc. geared to that textbook.

But, like the Gutenberg Bible, this is only the first step. I do not know where the textbook is headed, but I know we are not yet there. A few rough guesses as to future directions are that ...

• There will be a place for collections of modular teaching material rather than integrated textbooks for an entire course -- the professor will become a curator or editor, assembling material as opposed to a textbook adopter, selecting a textbook.
• Communities will form -- students, professors, and authors of learning material will be able to interact with each other, and their roles will blur.
• We will have different user interfaces. We are beginning to see new options with touch interfaces on tablets, but will see more. For example, we should be able to use voice input with speech recognition for control and annotation.
• Standards will evolve for formats, user interfaces, social platform interaction, etc., just as we evolved standards for book pagination, format, and punctuation. We are at version .1 today.

I could keep going on like this, but it is general and speculative. Many people are working diligently on the task of reinventing the book -- thinking about it and developing research prototypes and early standards and products. Here are some you might want to check out:

• The International Digital Publishing Forum is a trade and standards organization. Their activities include holding an industry conference and developing the open Epub format.
• Epub is an open standard for book publishing -- you can see reviews of Epub readers here.
• Archive.org has pioneered online access to audio, video, books, Web site archives and more. They have books in many formats including Epub, Kindle and PDF.
• Internet Archive also has a prototype reader. To try it out, pick a book, navigate to its detail page and click "read online," or jump straight to this example: Darwin's Voyage of the HMS Beagle.
• Pushpop Press has a noteworthy publishing platform and tablet user interface. Check out this 6 minute video demonstration featuring Al Gore's latest book.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book is a research institute focused on, no surprise, the future of the book. They value scholarship and research as well as aesthetics.
• If you'd like to read an old-fashioned book on the history of the book, check out Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text: a Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993.