Kindle

Overheard - eBooks reaching the tipping point

Like the move from silent pictures to ‘talkies’, the transition to electronic publishing will prove fatal to laggards. Those aggressively pursuing and developing e-books will rise to take control of the publishing industry. Mike Elgan, Here comes the e-book revolution

Mike Elgan’s done a good job breaking down the reasons why eBooks are about to reach the tipping point. This week’s announcement of the Kindle app for the iPhone was just one more ingredient in the perfect storm.

Overheard - Kindle is a platform, not a device

Amazon’s expansion of Kindle to the iPhone makes me wonder if we’ll soon see Kindle as not just a device, but as a full-fledged publishing platform. Nick Mediati, Amazon Brings Kindle to iPhone

Back in 2007, there was a lot of speculation about Apple going head-to-head with Amazon by creating their own “Safari Pad” reader to compete with Kindle.   How very smart of them to PARTNER with Amazon instead. I think Nick Mediati has hit on something important — especially after seeing how very easy Amazon has made it to publish on Kindle. Kindle is a platform, not a device.

My prediction? Short stories will become popular again. Teachers will publish third grader’s stories on Amazon so Mom and Dan can download and send to Grandma.  Nicole Lee compared the reading experience on both devices.  Check it out.

This is just one more reason why Apple is so smart. You see, the key to the iPhone’s popularity is not just its “cool” factor — it’s how well it plays with others.  And that’s a lesson that Apple is using to win the browser wars.

Industry watchers Net Applications recently reported that Safari owns 67 percent or the market share for  mobile browsing.

With the recent release of Safari 4,  Apple is finally making some progress drawing the PC desktop crowd away from IE and Firefox. How are they doing it?  By promising them speed. The official press release states that Safari 4 “executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3.  Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.”

Overheard: Kindle

I’ve tried to narrow down why I think it will fail to once sentence: It solves problems that don’t really exist. Ed Kohler, Why the Kindle Will Fail with Business Book Readers

At first I agreed with Ed Kohler, but after shopping for books this weekend on Amazon, I’m not so sure. The problem Kindle solves is instant access. With Kindle you can think of a book, order it and start reading it within three minutes. Doesn’t get much better than that.