Kindle’s selling well…
UPDATE: Well, it continues to roll along in the #1 spot on Amazon electronics. Its new available date is Dec 17th. Curious, I strolled through a few pages of the close to 700 reviews to see what people thought. It seemed that overwhelmingly the 1 star posts were by people who don’t actually have one. Most of the posts by people with a Kindle seemed at least fairly positive. I wish that Amazon would allow you to sort by people who have actually purchased the thing they are reviewing, that’d be great for some of these more controversial items…
If I said I wasn’t going to post any more Kindle stuff for awhile, but then I post it in the middle of Thanksgiving weekend when no one’s really reading it… did I really post anything? That’s one for the ages, eh?
First things first… not really indicative of anything, but certainly at least mildly promising for the Kindle is the fact that it seems to be sold out on Amazon. On it’s product page it now shows a little blurb:
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out. Because we ship Kindles on a first-come, first-served basis, please ORDER NOW to reserve your place in line. See availability messaging above for estimated in-stock date.
The estimated in stock date is December 6, 2007. Also it is currently the bestselling device in Electronics, topping out even the much vaunted iPods! Which is, on the one hand, a feat for a $400 device and on the other hand not too surprising given the prominence of it’s promotion on the Amazon site.
Also I came across this other post with a very thoughtful and specific critique of the physical design of the Kindle (via). It brings up a lot of interesting points and I agree with many of them. I think overall it has an amateurish industrial design about it. Things seem to be done just because and there’s a lot of elements on what should be, overall, a very simple device.
The critique is very detailed and well reasoned. I think it’s primary failing is that it discusses ergonomics of the device never having actually held one. It’s only reference is how he holds a book and despite the Kindle’s goal of replacing the book it doesn’t mean it has to replicate 100% the look and feel of those dead trees. I believe he makes too many assumptions about how it will feel without knowing.
Other than that he has a very interesting perspective. While it’s well established that I think that having a next page button easily accessed no matter which hand happens to be holding the device (I don’t know about apparently everyone on the internet but I’m a righty and I mostly hold books and magazines with my left hand but not even nearly exclusively - the book travels from hand to hand over the course of any reading session of reasonable length), I think he’s right when he points out that there’s simply too many distractions to the eye all over the place. There’s a lot of lines and buttons and text around the device which could be distracting (although, I suspect once you’ve used it for a few minutes they stop distracting you). He makes what I believe to be a common mistake in not understanding the screen redraw capabilities of e-ink and the difference between the e-ink display and the LCD indicator bar.
In general, I think his approach is very design theory oriented - which the Kindle could certainly use some of - but it has divorced itself too much from the real world. His suggestions are interesting and often very good and insightful but the bottom line for me is that it needs to do 2 things well display pages (which it’s e-ink screen should do by default) and let me turn the page as easily as possible which large next buttons on both sides of the screen help me with. Those are the functions it’s going to be doing 99.9% of the time and that’s what it needs to be optimized for, everything else is the .1% case.
