Can the iPhone take on the Kindle?
By Dave Jeyes
A surge in book-related releases for the iPhone has some people wondering if the device can displace the Kindle as a lower-cost e-reader. Or the question could be posed, “If you build it, will they read?”
The Kindle first announced a version of it’s popular e-book reader for the iPhone back in March. Now it seems that new e-reader devices are being announced weekly from Barnes and Noble and others.
Om Malik and mobile analytics company Flurry also noticed a surge in e-book related applications for the iPhone. These applications have surged from 10 percent of application releases to nearly 20 percent since July.
This lead Malik to wonder if the iPhone could gobble up market share from other devices that were specifically intended as e-book readers. However the problem is that while you can launch a reader for iPhone owners, it’s not going to make them read.
While the Kindle App for the iPhone does a decent job of interfacing with the Amazon store and a passable job of presenting the pages, it’s just not sufficient for reading long passages of text.
The first reason is the iPhone’s tiny screen size. This means that any large text will require double the page-flipping, a constant interruption to the flow of a book.
Another reason is the iPhone’s relatively short battery life. What good is an e-book reader that requires you to be at home, attached to an outlet in order to work for long periods?
Last, but certainly not least, is the contrast on the iPhone. E-book readers use high-contrast ink to reduce eye strain and allow readers to use the device in bright lights or outdoors.
Now these limitations of the iPhone don’t make it impossible to imagine an all-in-one communications, entertainment and e-reader device. It just means that an all-in-one device is going to need a bigger screen and longer battery life to be a really good experience, much like, say, a touch tablet PC.
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November 2nd, 2009
If you’re looking at this from a Kindle-centric perspective, the iPhone won’t replace the Kindle–the hard-core cadre of Kindle users will not see sufficient capabilities in the iPhone to cause them to put their Kindles away. However, this is something of a minority perspective, as there are tens of millions of iPhones/iPod Touches out there and a fraction of that number of Kindles, so really the question is whether the Kindle can be successful enough on its own to stay alive. For people who like to read a lot the Kindle appears to be the best choice; unfortunately reading for long periods of time is becoming a forgotten activity in our short-focused society. Kindle is doing reasonably well from what I can see, and perhaps it’s making some money for Amazon. I personally doubt that I will ever buy one, and I have the Kindle app on my iPod Touch which is fine for me. I give the odds of there being a Kindle or similar device around in 3 years at less than 50-50. Amazon will either license its technology into a more general purpose device or it will go the way of so many other “nice ideas” that didn’t make it.