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The KND-Kindle Chronicles Interview: Reading Books and Feeding Minds, One Kindle at a Time – WorldReader’s Million eBooks Movement Comes to Sub-Saharan Africa

October 27, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews David Risher,
CEO and Co-founder of Worldreader.org

By LEN EDGERLY
Contributing Editor

It is difficult to imagine how much an eReader like the Kindle can change the life of a student in sub-Saharan Africa.

I know that the Kindle has improved the way I read in deep and satisfying ways, adding convenience and a more intimate engagement with an author’s words. But I and most of you reading this are transitioning to eBooks from a rich prior relationship with traditional books.

Risher David Risher (photo at right), a former Amazon executive who co-founded Worldreader.org in late 2009 to distribute eReaders and eBooks throughout the world, has seen a more profound transition.

“We see kids, for example, go from three books in their lives before our program up to 200 on average on their Kindles,” Risher told me in this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast interview on October 23rd.

“It’s almost one of those things that blows your mind,” he said.

Imagine if you had grown up in a home with one Bible and one other book. Now as a student you are given a device containing hundreds of books—everything from African writers to Nancy Drew mysteries to Roald Dahl classics such as James and the Giant Peach.

Worldreader has offered approximately 3,000 kids this mind-bending experience through projects in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. The nonprofit organization has distributed about 1,000 Kindles and has plans to triple that number by the end of January, 2013. (Click on the image to make a donation, or click here to see the Worldreader.org website.)

You can get an idea of how highly Worldreader’s efforts are valued by asking yourself how many of the 500 Kindles in Ghana over an 18-month period do you think were lost due to theft.

The answer is three. The number is even lower in Uganda and Kenya.

“The teachers understand from a very early stage that this is an important part of the education process,” Risher said. “One of the girls told us in Ghana years ago that thieves really don’t steal education, and we found that to be the case.”

If you are reading on a Kindle, I am sure you have friends or family who are attached to print books and opposed to eBooks. In developing nations where print books are woefully scarce, there is little resistance of this nature.

“The hardest thing for us,” Risher said of Worldreader, “has turned out to be easy, and that is getting people to change their behavior, getting kids to read more. That’s almost automatic.”

The reason, Risher believes, is that people everywhere are curious.

“People want to improve their lives,” he said. “People want to become doctors, or lawyers or football players, or just be curious about the world. And that fundamental curiosity is so strong, that it serves as a pull.”

Which is not to say that Worldreader has taken on an easy challenge. Yes, there is nearly infinite demand for eBooks in places where traditional books are scarce. But it is a daunting mission to increase the number of eBooks distributed from the current level of about 220,000 to a million, and to increase the number of participating kids from a thousand to a million.

“These are big numbers,” Risher admitted. “When you’re thinking about numbers like that, the biggest challenge is execution.”

You’d have to say that, so far, the execution of Worldreader’s mission is going very well.

When I last spoke to Risher in March of 2010, the organization had four full-time employees and was just starting a pilot project in one country, Ghana. Today the employee count around the world has reached 25. And within two weeks, Tanzania, the fifth country hosting Worldreader sites, will come on line.

If you are not familiar with the Worldreader story, a great place to experience the scale and humanity of the effort is their web site, worldreader.org. You will find compelling videos of students using Kindles, evaluation data on field projects, and lots of excellent photos.

You can support the mission a number of ways, including donations at the web site. As little as five dollars gets an eBook to a child, and you can click here to make it happen.

Risher hopes to have in place next year an innovative tool with which you will be able to select from specific books needed in Worldreader projects and know that your donation will make it possible for them to be wirelessly delivered to student’s Kindles within 60 seconds.

With his Amazon connections, Risher works closely with the company on efforts such as the one that recently went public, Whispercast for Kindle, which is a free, online management system for schools and businesses managing “fleets” of eReaders.

“We’re like a particularly intense customer that gives them an enormous amount of feedback,” Risher said of Amazon. In effect, Worldreader helped the company develop Whispercast over a period of 18 months before it was announced on October 17th.

Risher in his comments on the video describing Worldreader’s “Million E-Books Movement” states, “We are creating a culture of reading in a part of the world where it’s never been able to take hold before.”

If Worldreader manages to scale its success so far, it is not difficult to imagine an extraordinary impact decades hence.

“Twenty years from now we’re going to have an entire generation of kids who have been able to read any book they want or need,” Risher said, “and we will really have made a bit of a dent in the universe in that way.”

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len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles, where you can hear his interview with David Risher at 23:58 in Episode 221.

The Kindle Chronicles Interview:
In Amazon’s World of Gadgets, It’s Really All About the 4 C’s of the Kindle “Service:”
Catalog, Customer Base, Connectivity, and Convenience

October 13, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews Stephen Windwalker,
Creator of Kindle Nation Daily

By LEN EDGERLY
Contributing Editor

When Stephen Windwalker and I get together, at least one of us usually brings a new gadget.

As creator of Kindle Nation Daily, Steve is on top of all things Kindle, but when he stopped by the Kindle Chronicles studio here in Cambridge this week, he had a tiny and very cool gadget that was not a Kindle.

fitbit It’s called Fitbit. It weighs 1.6 ounces, and it tells Steve (among other things) how many steps he has taken on his relatively new daily walking regimen of 10,000 steps, along with sleep information via a wristband that he can wear at night. It uses 3D motion-sensing and altimeter technology, and synchs up constantly to a pretty cool dashboard on his computer.

I want one!

Like me, Stephen Windwalker owns an arsenal of gadgets that he has amassed over the years we have been covering eReaders and, more recently, tablets. On the shelf behind me are, from right to left, a Sony PRS-T2 eReader, a Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, Nexus 7, iPad 3, and six Kindles.

The reason that I probably won’t pony up $77.74 for a Fitbit is that I’m saving money—which I assure my wife is earmarked for Kindle Chronicles research and development projects—for an iPad Mini, not to mention the Kindle HD 8.9” that I have on order and maybe even a Microsoft Surface.

I suspect that many of you reading this share a love of new gadgets, especially when they help you to read in a better way. So you might share my surprise in hearing that gadget lover Stephen Windwalker made a convincing case to me this week that—gasp—it’s not really about the gadgets any more.

“When you look at all these devices that are out, the air is kind of coming out of the balloon in terms of the competition between devices,” he told me after putting the Fitbit away.

He praised the iPad 3, the iPhone, the new Kindle Fire HDs, the Kindle Paperwhite, and even the new Nook tablets, which look very sharp as hardware.

“But,” he said, “the idea that people are any longer at the point where when a new device comes out they’re going to throw the old one away and grab the new one—I’m just not convinced of that any more.”

Steve emphasized the importance of focusing on what people actually do on these devices, “rather than some proposition that 11 left-handed redheads might use.”

Within a range of, say, five percent in terms of functionality for what people actually do on devices, customer motivation is not centered on hardware features, he said.

“What’s really important,” Steve said, “is the delivery of content.”

He offered a good analogy in suggesting that you don’t decide where to buy a washer/dryer by how nice and modern the store looks. What matters is the value proposition, price, and how good the washer/dryer is.

“What we get now is that none of these companies are going to dominate the marketplace based on hardware alone, if they’re all within spitting distance of each other,” Steve said. What enables a competitor like Amazon to dominate a market are catalog, customer base, connectivity, and convenience —“The Four C’s” as he has referred to them.

Steve’s view of gadgets echoes what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the September 6 press conference when the new Kindles were introduced.

“People don’t want gadgets anymore,” Bezos asserted. “They want services. They want services that improve over time. They want services that get better every day, every week, and every month, year after year.”

I nodded my head when I heard Bezos make that statement, and I nodded again when Steve extended the idea in our conversation this week. It seems eminently sensible when you see it that way.

Why then, am I such a sucker for the next new gadget? It’s about a boy and his toys, I suppose, a direct line back to childhood infatuation with shiny new things that make noise and scare the family dog.

What matters in the business of technology, though, is which gadgets become products we really use. I am sometimes surprised by the ones that have the most staying power.

For Stephen Windwalker, the venerable Kindle DX—the 9.7-inch eReader introduced in 2009—is still his E Ink reader of choice, because of its great readability, audio, and 3G. Steve listens to a lot of text-to-speech and Audible.com titles, so even though he purchased a Kindle Paperwhite and admires its beautiful display, the DX still rules.

“It’s right on my desk,” he said of the Paperwhite, “and I almost never use it.” He is, however, using a Kindle HD 7” and is even surprised at how much better it is for use in sunlight, compared with the iPads and iPhones he has owned.

As for me, I sold my Kindle DX on eBay a couple of years ago, and I’ve become a heavy user of the Paperwhite and the Kindle HD 7”. I’m planning on selling my iPad 3 to make way for the Kindle HD 8.9”.

I’d like to figure out a reason to get one of those Fitbit gadgets, but for two years I have monitored my sleep with Zeo tracking gadgets, and I prefer cross-trainers, bikes, and rowing shells to walking 10,000 steps a day on my unreliable knees.

As Steve said, just because there’s a new gadget in town doesn’t mean I have to buy it and throw away the old one. I believe that. I really do.

I wonder which color I would get—the blue or the plum?

Photo credits:

Steve Windwalker, photo by Betty Scharf at Fenway Park, September 26, 2012
Fitbit, Amazon customer image by Amer

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len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles, where you can hear his interview with Stephen Windwalker in Episode 219.

The Kindle Chronicles Interview: How a Tiny Boston Start-Up, Amazon (and Authors) Are Plotting to Change the World of Serialized Fiction on Kindle

October 6, 2012 by KND

Welcome to the Third Layer of Publishing:

How a Tiny Boston Start-Up, Amazon (and Authors) Are Plotting to Change the World of Serialized Fiction on Kindle

Len Edgerly Interviews Yael Goldstein Love, Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Plympton

By LEN EDGERLY
Contributing Editor

Welcome to the Third Layer of Publishing.

That his how Jennifer 8. Lee, Co-Founder and President of Plympton, a literary startup creating serial fiction for digital readers, refers to the emerging alternative to major publishers and uncurated online markets.

Yael Photo I learned more about the third layer from Lee’s co-founder, Yael Goldstein Love (photo at right), who also serves as Plympton’s Editorial Director and was my guest this week on The Kindle Chronicles podcast.

“It’s not something that people are talking about very much, this third layer,” Love told me.

Not many people were talking about Plympton, either, before the morning of September 6th this year. That was when three of the Boston startup’s titles were featured among the first eight Kindle Serials announced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in Santa Monica.

Plympton was founded in 2011 and was approached this year by Amazon to participate in the Kindle Serials project.

Amazon did not invent serial fiction, of course, but the technological capabilities of the Kindle platform make some very interesting updates to the genre possible.

For one thing, you can offer readers a one-price up-front purchase of a serial, so that subsequent installments arrive at no charge on their Kindles or Kindle apps. You can even preserve notes and highlights that a reader has made on the earlier installments, when the serial is updated. As an introductory price, Amazon is offering the eight Kindle Serials at $1.99 each.

Plympton’s titles are Hacker Mom by Austen Rachlis, Love is Strong as Death by Carolyn Nash, and The Many Lives of Lilith Lane by E.V. Anderson.

I remember several years ago, when the Kindle was first taking hold, someone—I can’t remember who–predicted that eReaders and eBooks would enable the rise of completely new players in publishing. Somewhere in a coffee shop, two literary entrepreneurs would hatch an idea that would upend the entire business.

I remember thinking, “I can’t wait to meet them.”

I didn’t think of those coffee-shop innovators as the Third Layer. But it’s as good a name as any. And now we know some of their names. In addition to the team at Plympton, they include two other startups–Byliner and The Atavist.

Yael Goldstein Love offered a helpful analogy for how this Third Layer will change traditional publishing and the Wild West of digital self-publishing.

“When you think back to when blogs were starting to become a thing,” she said, “there was this big distinction between blogs and journalism. We thought one is professional and one isn’t, and then we saw the professionalization of blogs. Not only did it change how we think about blogging, it very much changed how we think about journalism.”

She suggested that something similar may be happening in the Third Layer. In this view, Plympton and similar startups represent the professionalization of online publishing.

Love’s own background shows what literary professionalism can bring to the party. An honors graduate in philosophy from Harvard in 2000, she wrote a novel titled Overture that was published by Doubleday in 2007. The New York Times Book Review wrote that her work showed “signs of brooding genius” and described Love as “a writer of great emotional precocity.”

She has taught fiction at Grub Street, a Boston center for creative writing, and served as a publishing assistant at The Paris Review.

This is good experience to bring to “a new literary studio devoted to reinventing the way people experience literature by combining serialized fiction and digital platforms,” which is how Plympton describes its vision.

Readers are looking for good things to read, but it’s not easy to figure out what that looks like. When I asked Love what she’s looking for in Plympton serials, she offered a convincing set of guidelines, beginning with the obvious requirements that they be well-written and offer characters that fascinate.

“What’s really different with a serial than with a more traditionally told novel is that you need that through line, the plot, to be so crystal clear,” she added. “It can never fall by the wayside.”

She tells writers that she loves “the meandering meditation on first love” as much as the next person, but “we cannot have that in a serial—that does not work.”

There has to be a compelling plot line strong enough to pull the reader from episode to episode. This might sound like a drag if you are a literary type, but Love makes it sound freeing, and you can see how her writer’s sensibility will help her to guide the creative process of potential Plympton authors.

“I think in a way it’s a constraint that’s very freeing, especially for more literary writers who have in some ways gotten away from plot,” she said. “To have the excuse to focus on a really fun, wild, compelling plot can be a very freeing experience, I think.”

“We’ll see,” she adds.

As for the reader-feedback aspect of Kindle Serials, which Amazon Publishing VP Jeff Belle has emphasized in describing the new genre, Love said she is curious what role such feedback might play in helping authors shape their writing.

Amazon is making it easy for Kindle Serials readers to post comments and questions for authors at each serial’s discussion forum. So far, the number of comments has been modest.

“It could become a big element,” she said of reader feedback. “It would be sort of exciting if it did. I’m not surprised that it hasn’t picked up yet. It’s something readers are going to have to get used to.”

She pointed out that even Charles Dickens benefited from the reaction of readers, after serialization of The Pickwick Papers had gotten off to a weak start.

“It was not until the fourth installment, where he introduced the character of Sam Weller, the very charming manservant, and people loved it,” she said. “All of a sudden everyone was loving The Pickwick Papers, and he noticed that and he changed things to have this character be more active. So he very much was influenced by reader feedback.”

Whether Kindle Serials authors will have similar experiences is just one of the plots that make the Third Layer of Publishing a story that I will be very interested to follow in the months and years ahead.

Meanwhile, if you hurry you can play a role yourself in Plympton’s future by making a pledge to their Kickstarter project to raise money for ongoing expenses, like paying the writers and editors. Supporters have already blown past the initial goal of $30,000 but the funding doesn’t end until Tuesday, October 9 at 10:15 p.m. ET.

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len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles, where you can hear his interview with Yael Goldstein Love in Episode 218.

The Kindle Chronicles Interview: Fire Fight: Could New Kindle Fire HD Models Ignite Real Attack on iPad’s Share of Tablet Market?

September 30, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews James McQuivey,
vice president and principal analyst, Forrester Research

By LEN EDGERLY
Contributing Editor

Let’s try a multiple-choice quiz as we wait for the Kindle Paperwhite to begin shipping this week, followed by the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” in November.

Which of the following will have their business disrupted the most by Amazon’s new generation of Kindles and Fires?

The “Big 6” book publishers
Wal-Mart
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Dunkin’ Donuts

james-mcquivey If you chose c) Apple, go to the head of the class, where you will find James McQuivey in his usual chair, making insightful comments about the latest in digital disruption.
McQuivey (photo at right), who is a frequent guest on The Kindle Chronicles podcast, has been analyzing digital media for more than a decade. In our conversation on September 24th, he began by suggesting that the new Amazon devices are designed to attack in multiple directions at once.

For publishers, the E Ink Kindles and Kindle Fires further entrench Amazon in the publishing business. This is not a game-changing development, McQuivey suggested, but more a continued building of the company’s strength in the book industry.
Instead, it is Apple that is being disrupted by Amazon’s latest offerings, especially the almost-iPad-sized Kindle Fire HD 8.9”. But McQuivey does not expect Apple to run scared.

“They have a better device,” he stated. “They also have a much more expensive device, so Amazon knows that they at least can start picking some of the lower fruit on that tablet tree.”

“That is going to be disruptive,” he continued, “mostly because now Apple has to stop pretending that there’s only one size of tablet in the world, and that price points can be whatever Apple decides they should be.”

This might remind Cupertino of the first time a credible challenge arose to the iPod from SanDisk and others, whose competing devices never amounted to anything, but did force big changes in the iPod lineup. That challenge is why there are now multiple iPod models, at better prices, and the competitive pressure eventually led to creation of the iPod Touch and even the iPhone, in McQuivey’s view.

“Amazon is going to push Apple out of just thinking of themselves as a tablet provider,” he said. “The biggest challenge to Apple is that Apple is now left holding only its devices—they don’t have a more comprehensive customer relationship to try to attach, which of course is what Amazon has.”

Amazon wants to sell us Dockers—I’ve bought two pair in the past month—a good book to read, some video games, and just about anything else you can imagine buying. A new toilet seat, perhaps, or, in McQuivey’s case, the Italian cocoa powder that he had ordered the morning I spoke with him.

“That’s where they’re going to make their money in the long run, and Apple just doesn’t have that,” McQuivey said. “Apple doesn’t need it, as long as no one else is making competitively priced devices at least half as good as theirs.”

“Well that day just came,” he added, referring to the new Kindle Fire HD.

So in this round of moves by Seattle, Apple is being disrupted more than the publishing world. One change that is taking place in publishing, though, and not just because of the new Kindles, is a diminished role for Apple’s iBooks platform.

McQuivey said the Department of Justice action against Apple and five publishers charged with eBook price-fixing put an end to “Apple’s hope for ever becoming an alternative refuge for publishers to run to” and “certainly made it clear that Apple is not going to be a contender in the publishing world—at least not given current circumstances, devices and customer relationships.”

If you chose b) Wal-Mart as the player most disrupted by Amazon, you might be in line for a VP of Strategy position in Bentonville, Arkansas. That’s because Wally World finally figured out that Amazon is taking direct aim at its business, which led to last week’s announcement that Kindles and Fires will no longer be sold in Wal-Mart stores.

McQuivey expects that this decision will benefit Barnes & Noble, whose new Nooks will still be available at Wal-Mart.

“Wal-Mart still needs to present a credible list of devices,” he said, “and that’s going to have to include a lineup of nice Nooks.”

We have now covered all the possible answers to the quiz, except for one.
If you chose f) Dunkin’ Donuts, I like your style, and I’ll meet you at the Fresh Pond store for a glazed and a coffee, black, so we can discuss your theory further!

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles, where you can hear his interview with James McQuivey in Episode 217.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: Not Just Another Jeff B – Amazon Publishing VP Jeff Belle on Kindle Serials and the “Virtual Water Cooler”

September 22, 2012 by KND

(Ed. Note: Longtime Kindle Nation readers may remember Jeff Belle as one of the first sponsors of Kindle Nation Daily way back in September 2010 with his debut novella, ‘Carlos The Impossible’ — “a ‘Ferdinand’ for grown-ups … a sort of love story: part tall tale, part sad, sly amusement, and part subtle, comic fable – all rolled together in the narrowing distance between a man and a bull.” But we’re thrilled to welcome him back in his day-job capacity with Amazon Publishing in this week’s column by contributing editor Len Edgerly.)

By Len Edgerly

Contributing Editor

Amazon Publishing this month introduced an amazing new gadget called the Virtual Water Cooler.

You can buy it with 16 GB of memory or 32, with or without Special Offers… Just kidding. It’s free, and it’s not really a gadget. It’s a feature of Amazon’s new Kindle Serials—“Great Reads, One Episode at a Time.”

The feature, Customer Discussions Forums, exists for other Amazon products, but when applied to Kindle Serials it offers an innovative way for authors and readers to connect before the author completes the writing of his or her story.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Kindle Serials on September 6th at a press conference dominated by news of new E Ink Kindles and Kindle Fires. I thought at the time that Kindle Serials might well turn out to be one of the most important innovations revealed in the Barker Hangar, perhaps comparable in impact to Amazon’s huge success with mid-length Kindle Singles.

Jeff Belle There are eight Kindle Serials for sale at Amazon.com, costing $1.99 each. For that price, you will receive the entire Serial, not just the first episode. All of the subsequent ones will arrive automatically to your Kindle device at no extra charge.

Jeff Belle (right), vice president of Amazon Publishing, told me in this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview that the new venture is off to a strong start with authors and readers.

“We have received dozens of submissions over the last couple of weeks since launch,” he said, “and they’re selling well. We’ve sold about 10,000 in the first week, and we certainly expect that number to keep climbing.”

Serials are not a new idea, of course. Charles Dickens at age 25 published The Pickwick Papers in monthly installments, beginning with the first episode in March of 1836.

His publishers printed 1,000 copies of that first installment, and by the time the serial was concluded in October, 1837, they were printing 40,000 copies of each episode.

As an homage to Dickens, Amazon is introducing its first Kindle Serials alongside free, serialized versions of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. A nice touch.

Though Amazon did not invent serials, it is applying digital technology to the concept in two ways.

First, the Kindle makes it possible for readers to purchase a serial just once and have future episodes appear automatically on their devices, with highlights and notes they make in earlier versions preserved in the new ones. That’s something Dickens couldn’t do.

The second update is the virtual water cooler, a.k.a. Customer Discussions Forums.

“We really like this idea,” Belle said. “We want to create a forum, a destination where readers of these books after each installment can gather, talk and interact with the author. And hopefully the author will be able to glean some feedback from readers in ways that actually inform the future content of the book.”

Although I love the idea of Kindle Serials, I wonder if reader-author interactions will take place at meaningful levels of activity.

As of September 21, two weeks after launch, the sale of at least 10,000 Kindle Serials has generated only 57 posts in the Customer Discussion Forums for the eight Kindle Serials.

More than half of the posts—28 of them—are in response to Neal Pollack’s Downward-Facing Death, a serial that Bezos mentioned at the press conference. The other seven all have posts in the single digits.

It’s early, of course, but it will be worth watching these forums, to see if the virtual water cooler catches on.

Belle sees engagement in the forums as a key to the success of Kindle Serials. Without it, in my opinion, today’s readers might well lose interest in stories that routinely bring you to the edge of a cliff and then make you wait two weeks or a month before you find out what happens.

I tried the virtual water cooler myself by posting a question for author Neal Pollack. I asked why his episodes appear every month instead of every two weeks, which is the more common cycle for the other Serials.

He responded in the forum exactly two minutes and 50 seconds after my post went live, which was impressive and a little eerie, as if there really was a water cooler and we were hanging out there together.

“Because of my schedule,” Pollack replied, “a month lag time between episodes simply worked best this time around. Maybe if I do another serial, I’ll have a shorter lead time.”

For the virtual water cooler to generate engagement that makes Kindle Serials a success, I think Pollack’s speed of response will need to be the norm. One of the other Serials authors, who will go nameless, has not responded to a question posted by a reader nine days ago.

I think Belle is correct that active engagement will be the key to success of Kindle Serials.

If all that you found at the water cooler was something to drink (or read), what would be the point of going there so often?

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles, where you can hear his interview with Jeff Belle in Episode 216.

Keeping Score on Our Checklist of Desirable Features for the Kindle Fire HD

September 20, 2012 by Steve Windwalker

Our Kindle Fire editor April Hamilton has been doing a splendid job of reviewing the brand new Kindle Fire HD models which are now shipping for $199 from Amazon, so there’s not all that much for me to add here to her posts which have been coming out nearly every day lately on our site. If you haven’t been keeping up April’s posts you may be missing some very thorough and helpful reporting, including:

Yesterday, Sept. 19 – Great News! Text-to-Speech Better than ever, now live on the Kindle Fire HD! Get the details in April Hamilton’s helpful new Video Post: 3 Ways Your Kindle Fire HD Can Read Aloud To You, Including Text To Speech! http://bit.ly/S7JquC

Sept. 18 – Kindle Fire HD vs. Kindle Fire: Software and Functionality – plus, Text to Speech on the Fire! http://bit.ly/PwZO5i

Sept. 17 – “The New Kindle Fire HD vs. the First-Generation Kindle Fire: Our First KND Hardware Review http://bit.ly/FIRE-HD-on-KND-Hardware

Present and future Fire owners can keep up with all of April’s full-court coverage if they make sure to “like” our Kindle Fire at Kindle Nation Daily Facebook page for daily tips and great content at great prices – http://www.facebook.com/KindleFire.at.KindleNationDaily

So as April regroups today I’ll pinch-hit by focusing on the quick checklist that we posted before the launch of features that we felt might be part of a new Kindle Fire tablet that could potentially dominate the table market, and offer a quick appraisal of Amazon’s progress for those keeping score at home. Here’s what we said Amazon had to do, and in each case, here’s what they have done with the new $199 7″ Kindle Fire HD (herein called the KFHD7:

Slim it down – the KFHD is about 11% thinner than the old KF, slimming down from 0.45″ to 0.4″

Lighten it up – the KFHD is about 4% lighter than the old KF, 13.9 ounces compared to 14.6 ounces

Improve screen resolution – the KFHD display boasts 1280×800, up to 720p HD compared to 1024 x 600 pixel resolution for the old KF

Speed up the processor – the KFHD has a Dual-core, 1.2GHz OMAP4460 processor, much faster than the old KF dual-core processor

Improve web functionality with less reliance on truncated “mobile” representations – Early usage indicates much improved web functionality for the KFHD, including the capacity to set desktop rather than mobile mode under settings

Allow an SD Card – Not yet, probably decreasing in importance with improved onboard and cloud storage plus faster streaming

Offer 3G/4G wireless connectivity, possibly free with Amazon Prime – Coming in a very exciting package with the 4G LTE 8.9″ Kindle Fire that will ship Nov. 20 for $499 to $599 with a $50 first-year cost for the data plan

Keep the $199 price point for the new 7” Fire and offer a larger Fire for under $250 – 2 out of 3 with KFHD7 at $199, new KF7 at $159, and 8.9″ KFHD at $299

Allow greater user control of font sizes on the web and in apps – Vast improvement

Allow full input/output functionality for apps such as Google Docs/Google Drive documents – Limited improvement

Enhance curb appeal so that the Fire looks and feels as good as the Nexus 7 – Mission accomplished

Add external volume controls – Mission accomplished, although we’d prefer the volume control and power buttons to be just a tiny bit more discoverable to touch

Provide camera functionality similar to that on the iPhone – Front-facing HD camera only

Provide Siri/Iris Capability that hits the sweet spot both for information and for commerce – Not yet

Add a microphone – Built in microphone, which I will admit I have not used or tested yet

Add Text-to-Speech – Mission accomplished in an amazing array of improved TTS plus Whispersync with Audible.com

Place the power switch (and an external volume control) on the upper right edge – Upper middle edge, could be just a tiny bit more discoverable to touch

Allow greater user personalization and customization – We’ll get back to you on this

Add full-featured GPS for a 3G or 4G model – We’ll get back to you on this

Add maximum Android platform compatibility – Not yet

Add access to Google’s Android Market – Not yet

Seize every available opportunity to make the Fire a replacement for netbooks and notebook computers – Definitely some progress here, but the 8.9″ Kindle Fire HD will be the real test.

All in all? It’s not just a home run. It’s a grand slam.

And the good news is that, of course, Amazon added all kinds of things that were not even on our checklist, like Bluetooth for audio and a keyboard (yes! but it’s just sitting dormant on the device for now, without a keyboard offering that we know of … yet), Dolby audio; dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi (and 10-band wifi coming on the 8.9″ Kindle Fire HD); anti-glare technology; Kindle FreeTime personalization for kids (and other family members!) and much more!

Categories commentary, KINDLE FIRE, Kindle Fire HD Tags kindle fire, kindle fire hd

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: Going Back to the Roots and Forward to the Future of the eBook Revolution – Len Edgerly Interviews Sri Peruvemba, chief marketing officer, E Ink Holdings

September 16, 2012 by KND

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

Most of the big news in eBooks these days comes out Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, but the eBook Revolution actually started right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Prof. Joseph M. Jacobson of the M.I.T. Media Lab and one of his students, Barrett Comiskey, filed the original patent on October 25, 1996 for “Nonemissive displays and piezoelectric supplies therefor.” In layman’s terms, they invented the electronic paper that made the Kindle and similar eReaders feasible for the mass market.

Jacobson and Comiskey, along with three other partners, in 1997 founded a company based on their invention. They named it E Ink Corporation, and they located it in Cambridge, just five miles down the road from the Media Lab. It took 10 years and $200 million in investment before they had a product ready to sell.

My first visit to E Ink was in November of 2008. The Kindle was still in its first of now five generations. I wanted to understand the technology behind the Kindle, so I made an appointment to interview Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing.

Since then, the price of a Kindle has fallen from $399 to $69, and E Ink’s workforce in Massachusetts has grown from 75 employees to about 300.

The company in 2009 was purchased by one of its business partners, Prime View Int’l Co. Ltd (PVI), based in Taiwan. PVI since then has changed its name to E Ink Holdings, and its U.S. headquarters is still here in Cambridge.

Peruvemba is now based in California but happened to be in Cambridge this week, so I was able to schedule another in-person interview. As we started, he remembered back to what life at E Ink was like in the early days.

“We were probably losing about a million dollars a month,” he recalled. “We were perfecting a product that didn’t quite exist, and we were going after a market that didn’t quite exist.”

When the market for eReaders developed, E Ink’s displays became the default standard for the new industry.

More than half of E Ink’s employees in the U.S. are in research and development, and the company continues to draw heavily from local universities, especially M.I.T.
It’s a great American and New England success story. I particularly love the fact that E Ink makes 100 percent of its electronic displays 90 minutes away in South Hadley, Mass..

To explain E Ink’s technology, Peruvemba has come up with an effective teaching tool. It’s a clear plastic ball about the size of a golf ball, and it contains white and black spheres floating in a clear liquid.

“When we started, our aim was to replace printed paper,” he begins. The E Ink process makes tiny pigment particles out of the same materials used to make paper white and ink black. The particles are charged and encased in slightly larger capsules.

“By applying voltage across the capsule, we can cause the white or black pigment to rise to the surface,” he explains.

We’re talking very small objects in this description. Peruvemba’s golf ball display represents a capsule about the diameter of a human hair.

Five years ago the displays in eReaders like the Kindle had resolution of about 150 dots per inch (DPI). The current generation of displays boasts resolution of 212 DPI.
“A lot of people think one of these microcapsules is a pixel,” he said. “It is not. Under each pixel, we have dozens of microcapsules. So we have a lot more resolution to give in the future, and I think it’s going to keep getting better for a while.”

I’ve heard about the microcapsules before, and I always assumed that they were the delicate part of a Kindle screen. I thought the microcapsules would crater if, for example, you tossed a satellite phone on your Kindle as Eric Loss did by mistake while sailing solo around the world.

Peruvemba explained to me that it’s actually a one-millimeter sheet of glass below the microcapsule layer that can break under impact. This glass does a good job as a conductor of electricity and is used in 95 percent of all LCD screens. On smaller products, plastics are beginning to replace the glass, and when that is available for computer and eReader screens, they won’t be so vulnerable to flying sat phones.
Peruvemba believes we are still in the early days of the revolution sparked by E Ink technology. Although the penetration of eBooks in trade publishing is significant, there is still a great deal of potential growth in the textbook market.

“I believe every single book everywhere in the world will all become electronic,” he said. “Whether it’s E Ink technology or some other is not the point.”

From a technology perspective, there is more resolution to achieve on E Ink screens, as well as increases in speed of display. Animation is already possible, and video speeds will one day be feasible. And there is still work being done on color E Ink screens, so stay tuned for developments there.

My time at E Ink US Headquarters convinced me that the soul of a startup is still driving these inventors to keep improving their technology, which means the revolution is truly just getting started.

Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles.

Categories commentary Tags e-Ink, kindle chronicles, len edgerly, Sri Peruvemba 2 Comments

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The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: Going Back to the Roots and Forward to the Future of the eBook Revolution – Len Edgerly Interviews Sri Peruvemba, chief marketing officer, E Ink Holdings

Most of the big news in eBooks these days comes out Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, but the eBook Revolution actually started right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

My first visit to E Ink was in November of 2008. The Kindle was still in its first of now five generations. I wanted to understand the technology behind the Kindle, so I made an appointment to interview Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing.

Since then, the price of a Kindle has fallen from $399 to $69, and E Ink’s workforce in Massachusetts has grown from 75 employees to about 300.

The company in 2009 was purchased by one of its business partners, Prime View Int’l Co. Ltd (PVI), based in Taiwan. PVI since then has changed its name to E Ink Holdings, and its U.S. headquarters is still here in Cambridge.

Peruvemba is now based in California but happened to be in Cambridge this week, so I was able to schedule another in-person interview. As we started, he remembered back to what life at E Ink was like in the early days.

“We were probably losing about a million dollars a month,” he recalled. “We were perfecting a product that didn’t quite exist, and we were going after a market that didn’t quite exist.”

When the market for eReaders developed, E Ink’s displays became the default standard for the new industry.

To explain E Ink’s technology, Peruvemba has come up with an effective teaching tool. It’s a clear plastic ball about the size of a golf ball, and it contains white and black spheres floating in a clear liquid.

“When we started, our aim was to replace printed paper,” he begins. The E Ink process makes tiny pigment particles out of the same materials used to make paper white and ink black. The particles are charged and encased in slightly larger capsules.

“By applying voltage across the capsule, we can cause the white or black pigment to rise to the surface,” he explains.

We’re talking very small objects in this description. Peruvemba’s golf ball display represents a capsule about the diameter of a human hair.

I’ve heard about the microcapsules before, and I always assumed that they were the delicate part of a Kindle screen. I thought the microcapsules would crater if, for example, you tossed a satellite phone on your Kindle as Eric Loss did by mistake while sailing solo around the world.

“I believe every single book everywhere in the world will all become electronic,” he said. “Whether it’s E Ink technology or some other is not the point.”

From a technology perspective, there is more resolution to achieve on E Ink screens, as well as increases in speed of display. Animation is already possible, and video speeds will one day be feasible. And there is still work being done on color E Ink screens, so stay tuned for developments there.

My time at E Ink US Headquarters convinced me that the soul of a startup is still driving these inventors to keep improving their technology, which means the revolution is truly just getting started.

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