Being the technology type, I had been looking at the Kindle 2 since it was announced and found it very intriguing. Most everyone that looks at the Kindle, 1st or 2nd generation, balks at the price of the device but being a photographer and traditionally having to spend $1,000′s on one single lens, spending $360 on a device that will save me money on the price of books didn’t seem like that much to try it out.
Not that $360 isn’t a lot to spend on the Kindle 2, but I just sold a few lenses out of my camera bag that weren’t used to much and a few days later the Kindle 2 arrived. After using the Kindle 2 for a while I felt like a review of this new piece of technology would be appropriate, but it didn’t end the way I had anticipated.
I will say right off, it is the best, most sophisticated ebook reader (that displays eink as it’s called) and theoretically it can digitize your book collection or library much like the iPod has done for music. If you just want the conclusion, scan down to that section and I will sum it all up for you. Some of you may know that I have a Kindle Screen that was damaged (see Damaged or Defective Kindle 2 Screen) so this was after the replacement had been sent by Amazon.
The Kindle 2 Graded
If you want the short of it, here are my grades for the Kindle 2 on different variables in no particular order.
- Price – [B]
- Size, Weight, Shape – [B]
- Screen – [C-]
- Keyboard – [D]
- Software – [C-]
- Ease of Reading [A-]
- Ease of Searching books [D]
- Availability of Books for the Kindle [B+]
- Price of Books [B-]
- Price of Periodicals [C-]
- Durability [C-]
- Customer Support [A]
- Portability [A]
- Practicality [C]
- Internet Browser / Browsing [F]
- Multi-use Portable Technology Device, i.e. it is a reader, only [D-]
- Highlighting and Taking Notes [C-]
- Compared to Other eBook Devices [A]
- Saving Trees [A+]
- Creating a Digital Library [A]
- Ability to Mimic Reading a Paper Book [D-]
All the point above are not weighted equally of course, but overall, I give the Kindle 2 (not having ever used the Kindle 1 but having used most modern portable decives on the market) a total grade of a “C”.
1. Price at $359 – About Right to Me
This is one of the biggest complaints of the Kindle 2. It costs $359 and since it is only sold by Amazon you can’t really find it for less than that anywhere. You can find a few used on eBay, but none of the Kindle 2 and Amazon only has a few Kindle 1 in the new/used category.
To me, the price is about right for what it does and the competition it has right now. When the iPod first came out it was (and still is) about that price and people couldn’t buy them fast enough. Of course the difference is the Kindle 2 requires that you actually read something. The iPod since it deals with music has a much larger appeal to the 18-28 age range, and they will usually plunk down $350 for just about anything if they want it bad enough.
I would not or do not expect Amazon to lower the price any time soon until the Kindle 3 comes out, and why should they. Amazon is probably making bundles on these Kindles with them priced at $359, and I think the price is about right.
2. Overall Size & Weight – OK, But Could be Bigger
The new Kindle 2 is light years ahead of the Kindle 1 in size and weight. It is about the size in total of a paper back book (not the screen size, the entire device). It is light and thin, but if I was wanting to ready a long book I could have used the Kindle 2 even larger than it is. The thickness is about right but I would love to see one about the size of a piece of paper.
3. The Screen – Can You Say, Touch, Color, and Backlit?
The screen is a 16 color grayscale, matte screen. To me, this was one of the bigger disappointments of the Kindle 2. The screen was to small, it was not in color, it was not a touch screen, and the biggest for me, the screen is not backlit.
Although the font size can be changed, the screen was too small to really be able to read a full page (on paper) on the Kindle 2. I would like to see one page on the Kindle equal one page on the corresponding paper book. Maybe I am jaded by using an iPhone for more than a year now. I want to be able to touch the screen and have it do what I want, not move some cursor around like I’m in DOS and in the same respect, a color screen is pretty much standard on everything today and it just looked old school. The last biggie on the screen was the fact that it wasn’t backlit. I would have preferred to be able to sit in a dark room and read without the need for a reading light.
One last bit on the screen. All of the images are all converted to gray, which in itself is fine, but it lost detail and did not show what I am use to in a high res screen that shows great detail in black and white.
I understand all those things go to battery life, but I would sacrifice a 2 week battery for one that lasts a few days for the above changes on the screen.
4. Keyboard – Needs Some Help
I know I keep going back to the iPhone, but that I the current device I am use to using. The keyboard on the Kindle 2 is a full keyboard, but it works like the crackberry qwerty keyboard’s of old. This is because the keys are very small. I would have liked to see them closer together and much much larger than the small round dots. They were hard for me to use, but it was a full-ish keyboard. All special characters were like a comma, or punctuation, were all on the shift end, which was a pain.
I did like the fact that you could type out comments and notes, but they were hard to get right and easy to mess up.
5. Software Interface – Good, But Not Very Sophisticated
The interface where you actually read the books is good for what it is intended for, but it lacks much of the functionality of today’s handheld devices. It has wireless through Sprint’s 3G network, and I seemed to get a signal everywhere, even where I don’t on my iPhone (which isn’t really saying much). Books downloaded quickly and the newspaper subscriptions were always on the Kindle 2 the next morning when I went to read them (I did the trial for the USA Today).
Reading on the eyes is good, probably because of the grayscale I didn’t like, and you can change the font size so it suits your needs. Taking notes and highlighting on the Kindle 2 is ok, but no where close to perfect. It saves all the notes into one .txt file and to extract the information you have to parse through all the different notes from the other books. It doesn’t separate out notes for specific books but puts everything all in one file. I would have much preferred the file attach to the actual piece I was reading.
Flipping from book to book is a little slow but works well. If you are trying to get back to a specific place in a book it is a little hard to do unless you bookmark the spot. Moving around in the books from place to place is much harder than flipping through the book.
Conclusion
In the title I said the “not-so-normal” review, because in the end, I returned my Kindle to Amazon, twice. I have never been accused of being old school. I will embrace technology and new developments before they are even released, but I still buy all my music on physical CD’s (to burn to my iPhone, iTunes, iPod etc) because there is something you can’t get from a download, the art the artist put into the album. The design of the artwork, the stories they still include in the booklet, silk screening on the CD itself, back cover artwork, and of course the ability to burn without digital rights management crap.
After using the Kindle 2 for about a week, I took it on a trip to South Carolina and while I was on the trip, the screen became damaged or something, but it wasn’t working correctly (see Damaged or Defective Kindle 2 Screen // Photos). After receiving a new one from Amazon, I continued to use the Kindle for a while and finally came to the conclusion that I did not like the Kindle 2 enough to actually keep it.
In the end, it came down to something I totally didn’t expect. I found out that you can not (at least not easily) replicate the actual reading of a book on paper. You smell the pages, you can flip through pages, write in the margins, underline passages and as you do so, you become part of the book. Each book is different. The covers are different, the font size changes, the thickness of the paper, all which is very hard to duplicate in the electronic world and you end up reading all these different books and they all look and feel the same.
As a friend would tell me, it’s not art. The art of reading, and a lot of the time, it is the art of reading in the way the author intended. This says nothing about the Kindle 2 device because it can’t replicate the actual flipping of the pages like you can when you physically hold that book.
If you want to read a book straight through from beginning to end, page after page, the Kindle may be right for you. I want to get lost in time, lost in the pages of paper, ink, and verse, and at least for now, I will stick with the printed book.
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Last week I traded in a few pieces of camera equipment for the new Kindle to really see if I could just whip through books at lightning speed and to my surprise, after about 2 days of use, I managed to mess up the screen. I am in the middle of doing an in depth review of the Kindle 2 that I will post at a later date, but after having the Kindle 2 for about 2 days, I seems that the screen on the Kindle 2 was damaged beyond a simple fix. The reason for this post was really to show what the customer service representative at Amazon did to fix the problem.
For those who don’t know, I really missed my calling in life to be a product tester. No matter what the product, I can an uncanny way of being able to break the unbreakable and find problems or issues that manufactures somehow seem to miss. I was told that the Kindle 2 was tested for durability and could withstand a drop from a two story building, but 2 days in my backpack managed to screw up the top of the screen.
Once I went through the normal troubleshooting that I knew how to do, I called the customer service number for the Kindle. She walked me through a few other tests, had me “reboot” the system (you can hold the power slider over for 20 seconds and that will initiate a reboot on the Kindle 2). After that (all of which took about 2 minutes total) Amazon told me they would just ship me a new one overnight. No questions asked, they just shipped me a new one. They paid for the shipping to return the old one, and I transferred all my book from the old kindle to the new kindle. It was easy as it possibly could have been.
As for what I did to the Kindle, I have no idea. I did put it in my backpack (in its own case) and perhaps to much pressure what applied to the top of the screen somewhere. I am not sure about the 2 story drop, didn’t try that, but I will be a little more careful with it in the future regardless. I was totally and completely thrilled with Amazon’s customer service on the kindle.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with the practicalities of the Kindle, that will come later, but as far as their customer service goes, it was great. Having also sold on Amazon for years, I can say that all of Amazon’s customers service is geared towards their buying customers (as opposed to their sellers) and they will bend over backwards to provide the best service they can.
You can see the screen issue on the photos below. It covers about an inch from the top with a blank line of gray going across the screen with a slash in the upper left corner. The last two shots are what the screen shot from the damaged kindle looks like (so it is seeing everything correctly under the screen issue) and what the new one looked like when it arrived.
Update May 21, 2010
I thought I would update this post with a few comments since it is still one of the most read posts on my blog. As some have suggested, my Kindle was NOT dropped. I simply put it in my backpack, which also wasn’t dropped, and took it out an hour later and it showed up with the damaged screen.
I did get a free replacement from Amazon, but I returned the replacement within a week for a refund (see my review A Not-So-Normal Kindle 2 Review for my reasons), but one major reason was I knew the “free screen replacement” was only going to last a short time, and it was a one time shot. Amazon did replace the damaged screen, but they said they weren’t going to do it again. Looking back now, more than a year later, it was the best decision and I am not super happy with my iPad.
Update February 12, 2011
As this post still gets heavy traffic and questions, I will say after using and testing the Apple iPad since it came out, I have never had a better ebook reader than the iPad and I am looking forward to seeing the new iPad 2 some time around April. The Kindle App for the iPad is one of the ebook reader apps I use, and although not my favorite, I do use it frequently.
The problem I still have with the Kindle is you basically can’t do anything else with it other than read a book. I can type out notes and highlights in my Kindle app on the iPad and it works great. The one great thing Amazon has done for the Kindle is continue to lower it’s price, but if you have an iPad I’m not sure what use one would have for the Kindle.
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It’s official, we are no longer selling books on Amazon. For those of you who didn’t know, we have been selling books on Amazon in the Amazon Marketplace (those are the used and new books you see when Amazon is sold out or when you just want to buy the same book Amazon sells for $39.99 for $.01) for years. Yesterday we sold all our remaining inventory, some 4,000 used/new books in one large bulk sale to a buyer in Texas. For Deb and I, the books had become (as Andy Stanley put it last week) the old sofa that no one wants to get rid of because it has always been there.
We started selling book on Amazon at the same time we were full time eBay sellers (eBay lost out as a viable place to sell as a business long long before Amazon) back in 2005, and sold full time on Amazon in 2006-2008, and it was some of the hardest work, most laborious, and in the end least profit making work I can ever recall doing in my life. It came at a time when Deb and I needed to work from home, needed and wanted to work together, and many blessings came our way over those years of selling books online.
Over our selling life on Amazon, we sold over 9,000 books at a retail price of $65,000 (that’s not as much as it sounds when you divide by 3 years and then start thinking profit margins), kept a high feedback rating, and learned a lot about hard work and to appreciate what we were given. Not much different than what we gained and learned from our previous businesses we started and ran together, except that this particular one took over our entire house top to bottom.
After running several small businesses over the past 10-12 years I have come to understand that each business or product has a defined life cycle, especially when you are running very small self made businesses. Products come in and out, jobs, customers, and life in general, has a lifespan or timeframe where some things work well. The key is to know when it is time to move on and get rid of the old sofa. For the books, yesterday was that day, and we were both thrilled. There were many many reasons, but knowing it was indeed the right time to let it go was a good feeling.
Anyone that wants to know the inner workings of selling on eBay or Amazon feel free to drop me an email. Combined I think we have about 12-15 years experience selling on both platforms and we lived and breathed eBay and Amazon, so we do know our way around. We certainly know how to get in trouble with big brother, and how to survive when the rules get changed (and they always do).
Our online selling life was great, and really is always something we think about no matter what we are working on or doing. In those years, we managed to:
- work together 24/7, netting 20,800 more hours spent together
- fought off fraud
- and copyright infringement issues
- fended off domain landsharks
- had $300,000 in sales without making a profit
- sold alongside corrupt competition
- continually fought customer theft
- avoided a few lawsuits
- didn’t sue a few times when we could have
- were falsely accused of anything and everything
- Witnessed to many (I hope)
- were praised and awarded
- ridiculed
- made some great friendships
- ate at a huge unknown number of restaurants
- filed for our own patents and trademarks
- never clocked in once
- travel to every state in the country
- live in a bus, apartment, house, tent, campground
- lived in Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Alabama (and many others)
- filled approximately 250,000 orders
- counted approximately 2 million crystals
- imported products from Austria
- invented our own products
- worked for a competitor
- took 50,000 product images
- went through about 30 computers
- used miles and miles of tape, boxes, and packaging
- cried, laughed, bled, and cherished every second
Thankfully for us, now, we have both moved on to a new chapter in our lives together and it doesn’t look like there will be much online selling involved, and that’s a good thing, because I am exahusted.
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This morning Amazon released the new Kindle iPhone App, or an iPhone eBook reader. Since I do not yet (but probably will soon) have a Kindle the news of the Kindle iPhone app was really intriguing, but I started wondering if the app was putting the horse before the cart. The very first reaction on the Internet was people saying they were disappointed they bought the Kindle and now they can get this on their iPhone. Totally wrong way to look at it altogether. What Amazon did by making an iPhone app for the Kindle was make their product more relevant and more useful than it was last week.
I won’t go through a comparison between the two, there is a great review over on CNET, see Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle’s iPhone app, but one of the great features is being able to read a book between the two devices. It doesn’t come quite as close as Seth Godin’s request in Reinventing the Kindle (part II) to share books between Kindle users, but it comes closer. If Amazon keeps going down this road they will really make the Kindle a breakthrough device.
Breakthrough in the same way the iPod was for music, the Kindle can potentially be for books. Everyone grumbled about the price of the iPod, and it took until the 2nd generation for me to plunk down the money for one, but after a while, people realized that the iPod revolutionized the way we listen to music. There will always be people who want to read on paper, but for many, paper is a hassle, uses trees, and culturally is on the same track and path as Kodak 400 speed print film, but it’s more than just that. Don’t blink, traditional media is going fast, and in some cases pretty much gone.
- Photography – Print Film —> Digital (almost totally complete at this point)
- Music – Vinyl –> Tapes –> CD –> Digital (niche markets for anything non-digital)
- Movies – Film –> Tape –> DVD –> Download (slower but almost there)
- TV – Tube –> Cable –> Satellite –> Streaming Live (computer only is coming)
- Books – Paper –> eBooks / Digital (the slowest of the 4, but catching up)
- Magazines / Newspapers –> Paper –> Digital (totally dying media in paper form)
My wife is currently working on her Master’s degree and last semester she spent something like $300-$400 on books. After the Kindle 2 came out, I started looking at which books she bought were available on the Kindle. About 30-40% of them are currently available, at $9.99-$15. She paid $40-$50 for some of these books which can now be downloaded on the Kindle for $10. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the savings potential for College students all over the world, and seeing that Amazon is working on things like iPhone Apps is only going to make the Kindle more and more relevant in our society’s future.
Sometimes we go kicking and screaming into the future, and change comes with a fight. The Kindle / iPhone app is a great example of a transition of all forms of media to digital, it’s just a question of how long will we hold on to the past print mediums because that is what we are use to today.
Update March 2011
I have since written an update to this post in light of the iPad, which makes eBooks even more appealing, you can read that posts Printed Books vs iPad or Kindle eBooks and the Future of Books
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Friday was a book moving box lifting day. Today was order day and we processed and packed up all our current orders to ship out. This includes moving all the boxes to the car and then taking a visit to our book warehouse to lift more boxes of books, which is the photo shown here. We usually collect all new books, clean them up, organize, and then stock them on the shelves both here at our business and here. Today was hot, and required a lot of heavy lifting. It is quite a work out to move 50-60 pound boxes every day for a good part of the day, but it also gets very tiring physically.
I took this quick image with my phone on our way out, these will be left for another day. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular blog, one of our Internet businesses is dealing in books. Deborah and I have sold books on Amazon for quite a while now and part of our daily routine is a lot of heavy lifting of boxes and boxes of books. It can be quite exhausting being that both our offices are up one full flight of stairs and each and every single book has to make its way up, then down.
Everything Else
Some new music did arrive today from my trading buddies over at LaLa. On this list for today was Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed (which arrived broken in half), and The Bravery with their self titled album. It was an exhausting day and I am looking forward to the weekend where there should be plenty of grass to cut.
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It finally warmed up a little bit, just in time for me to do some heavy hauling. What I felt like I did all day was carry boxes up and down the stairs, that’s about it. It is a real workout to carry 50-70 pound boxes of books up and down a full flight of stairs all day, but that is what the work requires right now. My legs have grown much stronger (and more tired).
A Day for Boxes and Books
Today was a day for moving boxes and books. We finally picked up our last load of book/boxes and did not have the energy last night to bring them into the house. So, after going through my daily email and minor work items (and some food) it was off to unload the trailer. Probably about 1000 pounds in total, which I brought up our flight of stairs to fill the landing area, the last bare spot in the house.
Boxes and Books and more Boxes
The house is now completely full of boxes of books. Probably over a years worth of boxes to go through and list, sort, sell, shelve, and so on. It was a great blessing to receive such a large supply but also an eye sore that will be with us for a while now. Deb can only go through and list about 50 books in a day, twice a week, it is just a very time consuming thing to do. The other days we have to package and ship said books that have sold. At least as far as inventory goes, we are greatly blessed.
Images Transfer Continues and Blogging
I am still trying to transfer over all my stored images on disc, to my large HDD. I can only do a few a day but I am cranking through them when I have time. I have about 75-100 CD/DVD’s in total, which is I guess about 250 GB’s of images to be moved over. I started working on the blog for my mother in-law, Georgia, which is where this journal blog got its start. I posted the first journal entry, Sunday, June 2, 1991, which should go through 3-4 years of posts, if I can keep up with it. I doing one journal entry per post, when I get a chance. Suddenly I have way more things to do than I have time to do.
A day I was finally able to get in a full walk about. I got in a full hour of walking at about 5 miles (and a little hoops as well). My daily walk, once around the beautiful trees of green now has the view below. I think they are finished clearing this one area, must be, not much left. They are supposed to replant at some point.
There is Work To Do Too
Of course, my daily routine of work items continues each day. This varies from day to day but I finished up some consulting work and hopefully will start to bid on some projects on Elance.
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Do you want to increase your sales, ad revenue, and ultimately your profits in a short period of time? Was your online storefront or website ready last year when the holiday selling season rolled around? The time to prepare for the Christmas holiday season is right now.
Many retailers can sell as much in the few weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years Eve as they sell all year long. Don’t have an online retail store that sells a product? Well, don’t think that eCommerce storefronts are the only websites that see an increase in traffic over the Christmas season. If you run a commercial, non-product based, website (like a blog) you can also take advantage of the increased online traffic that often starts when the weather gets colder and visitors are hunting around for good deals. Don’t be caught unprepared and leave revenue lost between being unprepared, no inventory, and bad customer service.
A recent article on the specifics for your online store from JennyHow titled, 8 Tips To Boost Sales For The Holiday / Christmas Season Immediately, talks about important customer service steps to take during the holiday season. In this article I will take a look at a few other ways to take advantage of the increases in online traffic.
Just take a look at Amazon for example. Right after Halloween was over, they moved to to logo with snow and changed the look of their site for the holiday shopping season. Amazon has Amazon Gift Central, along with great Gift Lists and Wish Lists, Amazon Gift Certificates, and many other great ideas that work. Of course, we all can’t be Amazon with their resources. So what do you need to do to be prepared when the big buying starts?
Ramp Up Your Inventory Levels
One of the criticisms of online retail businesses when the tech boom first started was they did not have the inventory on hand to fulfill the orders they received. They are as many different ways to manage your inventory as their are ways to paint your house, but you can minimize some issues up front and prepare for others.
To state the obvious is to say, have enough inventory on hand to fulfill all your orders between November 21st and December 31st, but that isn’t as easy as it sounds for a small business. You have to carefully plan your cash flow needs to be able to buy additional inventory over the holiday selling time period. Cash flow for small businesses is usually as tight as it can be, so make adjustments as early as you can, before you need the inventory and can’t fill all those orders.
There are other methods for increasing your inventory counts for the holiday season like drop shipping, see How to Make Money Drop Shipping on Amazon or eBay, but you don’t want to risk your good customer service and reputation for a last minute deal with a company you don’t have a previous relationship and can’t guarantee a positive outcome for your business.
Have Quality Articles Ready to Publish
If you are running a blog, you have inventory to keep on hand as well. Make sure you are publishing high quality content (your inventory) for those new visitors you might only see during the holiday season. Make sure you have a good supply of quality articles ready to publish when you don’t have time.
The holiday season can be filled with family and fun (or something like that) but it can also take a lot of time you might normally use to post, do research, and everything else you do to maintain your blog. Trying to do tech writing while your in-laws are visiting can be challenging at best, so be prepared in advance and ramp up your inventory levels.
Use Gift Certificates, Gift Cards, and Coupons
As buyers have become more Internet savvy they have come to expect to find some good coupons or specials, especially around the holiday season. You don’t have to give away the store, but get a few promotional coupons ready to send out to your mailing list, or make them readily available on your website.
In addition to a few different coupons you should create some kind of gift certificate that your visitors can buy to give as a gift for later use on your storefront. You see these gift certificates everywhere because they are guaranteed revenue, cost almost nothing to produce, and each year a certain percentage go unused.
Use a Blog Contest or Door Prizes
The use of contests is rampant among the blogging community for many reasons but there are good ways and not so good ways to generate traffic through blog contests. I could probably do an entire series on the pros and cons of blog contests but you want to make a good first impression to those holiday visitors, so use your blog gift certificates and door prizes in an intelligent manner.
I recently came across a blog contest that I did not enter, AhTim.com 1st Blogging Online Contest, and I almost didn’t make it to the end of the post because the first part of the “contest rules” were so confusing and complicated I wasn’t sure even the owner would know who won. Nothing personal, he is trying to develop his blog and build traffic like the rest of us, I just think a blog contest should be VERY easy to understand. Great site, just a little confusing to me.
If you are going to use a contest that has a limited prize or value (say something under a $500 total value), make it as simple as possible. One rule, one way to win, one prize offered, something that even a casual visitor can follow and become engaged with on your blog.
Provide Good Customer Service
This is probably the most important for customer acquisition or retaining those valued customers for future purchases. The issue of customer service is a standard item among small businesses but it shouldn’t be overlooked. Just plain good customer service can go a long way and much of the time is one of the lessor expenses of the fall season.
Answer your business email as soon as you can, return customer phone calls promptly, ship your products quickly, and offer a clear return policy your customers can understand. These are common issues but can quickly become out of hand when multiplied by a higher volume over the holiday shopping season. You provide customer service with your blog as well. Make a good first impression with new visitors and you can make the holiday visitors regular subscribers long after the holidays are over.
Concluding Thoughts
With a little bit of planning you can have a successful Christmas selling season and still keep some of the increased traffic next year when the hype of the holidays has died down. Get those articles written now if you can, think about what coupons, door prizes, or other promotions you might use over the next few months, and get ready for the traffic to show up at your door.
How is your company preparing for the holiday season? Are you planning for any new promotions over the next few months? If so what are they?
