“Uh-oh,” is the reaction we can imagine Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had when watching today’s unveiling of the eagerly awaited Apple iPad tablet. The new Apple device looks, at least upon first glance, like it will completely eat Amazon’s lunch. In fact, Steve Jobs even eulogized the Kindle in his unveiling.
“Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further,” he said while unveiling the iPad’s iBook e-reader software. But is the Kindle really dead? Amazon proudly proclaimed the Kindle as the number one selling product on Amazon.com, with a huge banner on their home page today. Can it really be all over so fast?
Here are four reasons why the Kindle is dead, and four more why it might still have some life left in it.
Why It’s Dead
1. iPad Starts at $499
Going into today’s announcement at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, most pundits predicted the Apple tablet would cost at least $600 and perhaps as much as $1,000. Steve Jobs dropped a major bombshell when he announced that the non-3G, 16GB base unit iPad would be priced at a very respectable $499.
In other words, just $10 more than the top end Kindle DX — a device with a comparatively measly 4GB storage capacity. A recent University of Georgia study found that cost was a major factor when choosing an e-reader. “Nearly all respondents balked at the Kindle DX’s $489 price tag for reading a newspaper,” according to the survey.
While $489 might be too much for just an e-book reader, $10 more for a device that does a whole lot more may be worth it to a lot of people.
2. Just Reads Books
Out of the box the iPad has 140,000 apps available to it by virtue of the fact that it runs the iPhone OS. That means the iPad can do a ton of things the Kindle can’t — like play games, access social networks, display photos and videos, etc. In fact, because the iPad can run any iPhone app with no modification, that means even the Kindle for iPhone app will run on the iPad, giving iPad users instant access to Amazon’s library of Kindle-formatted books.
The iPad also has a built in web browser powered by Safari, which means that it can access millions of pages of web content in addition to books. The Kindle is limited to only the books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs that you can download to the device. (The Kindle does have a very basic, text-only web browser, but the web experience is very limited.)
Then again, the Kindle will soon offer apps of its own, making potentially it more attractive to those wanting more than “just an e-reader.”
3. iBooks Looks Sweet
Apple took a direct shot at the Kindle by launching iBooks, a digital bookshelf app with a number of high profile publishing partners. The early impressions of the iBooks app during Apple’s iPad unveiling were mainly positive — the reading and book management experience looks slick and the app integrates with iTunes.
If anyone can do for books what Apple did for music earlier this decade with the iPod and iTunes, it’s Apple. And the iBooks/iPad combination looks like it has the potential to be another game changer.
4. Kindle Lacks Color and Video
Sure a color display and video are mostly unnecessary if all you’re planning to do is read text, but just reading text isn’t what most people want. As bandwidth gets cheaper by the day, media consumption is shifting toward the visual. Even the New York Times application demoed today at the Apple iPad event included embedded video and full-color photos within articles, and last month’s vision of publishing’s tabletized future from Time Inc. put a premium on video.
Indeed, as the media landscape becomes more animated, the lack of video could be a nail in the coffin for Amazon’s current generation Kindle.
Why It’s Not
1. E-Ink Display is Gorgeous
Though the tablet now actually exists, it won’t be on sale for another couple of months, and it remains to be seen what the backlit IPS LCD screen on the iPad really looks like (early reports are that it looks great — at least, indoors in Apple’s controlled lighting environment), and whether it will be ideal for reading in all situations and for extended periods of time. What we do know already, however, is that E-Ink screen on the Amazon Kindle is beautiful to read — everywhere.
One of the biggest advantages the Kindle may still have over the iPad is that its screen is ideal for reading, and not just for reading, but reading indoors or outside in the sun, and for long periods of time. If the iPad’s screen really is just like a giant iPhone, as some early reviews have said, then it may not be the best choice for a long, lazy day of reading at the beach.
2. Free 3G
The iPad starts at $499, but if you want data, the price starts going up rather quickly. 3G versions of the device come at a $130 premium (so the cheapest device with 3G is $629), and a data plan costs at least $14.99/month.
The Kindle, meanwhile, comes with free, worldwide 3G coverage baked in. It doesn’t do nearly as much as the iPad, but it will always be connected without requiring you to shell out a penny more. Because the smaller, 6″ version of the Kindle is priced at $259, and still comes with free, global 3G coverage, the Kindle definitely wins on price.
3. Huge Book Selection
Even though Apple announced an impressive list of launch partners, including Penguin, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillian and Hachette, it is unlikely that they’ll be able to match the Kindle’s selection right away. The Kindle currently offers 400,000 books, plus newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and recent moves to entice new publishers with higher royalties should attract even more titles.
Of course, the iPad can run Amazon’s Kindle iPhone app, meaning it technically does offer the same number of books. Bottom line: the jury is still out on this one, but for now, the Kindle has a better selection of books — sort of.
4. Crazy Battery Life
The iPad’s battery life, according to Steve Jobs, is an impressive 10 hours, and it has an even more impressive one month of standby time. Still, it’s likely that getting the full 10 hours means doing things that negatively affect the experience (like lowering screen brightness, turning off WiFi, not playing video, etc.). The Kindle, on the other hand, can give you a full week of reading time with wireless on, and two weeks with wireless off.
If all you’re interested in is reading a book, the Kindle might be the better choice, allowing you to take a week-long vacation without bringing the charger. Your iPad might be dead by the time to step off the plane — or even before that, if you’re on a long flight with a few layovers or delays.
What do you think? Is the Kindle dead in its current form or is there still a market for e-readers? Sounds off in the comments.
Tags: amazon, analysis, apple, Apple Tablet, ipad, Kindle, List, Lists
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