I love my Kindle. It really is a great machine. The Kindle 2 made all the right changes to the original Kindle, which is why I forked out a hefty $359 for it. It contains literally thousands of books – which has completely changed my reading habits (more reading, less lugging around of books). It is glorious and if you are a serious book reader you should invest in it.

Not so sure at the moment though about a new Kindle that Amazon just announced – the Kindle DX. It’s the same as the Kindle 2 but with a much bigger screen – just a little smaller than a magazine. I get the logic straight away – a bigger screen is much, much better for reading on. Particularly if you are reading PDF documents or magazines. It doesn’t matter with books – you want something you can shove in your bag and pull out.

But clearly Amazon has found out that alot of people are using their Kindle to read documents – probably work documents – on a device that doesn’t have a backlit screen and which doesn’t require you booting up a computer. I can see the logic, although I’ve not go into this habit yet.

Waiting for a colour screen

However, coming in at $489, that is asking a hell of a lot. And it’s still a black and white screen. I think the Kindle DX may be what the original Kindle was to the Kindle 2 – a terrific prototype demonstrating its value and worth. I’m not going to get one – but I see why people might.

Now if the DX had a colour screen… Well, when that day comes – and it surely will – then I may well find I have a travelling Kindle and a home Kindle. I have got so used to reading on an electronic device that I think I would find it pretty easier to dump the physical magazine for a large, colour Kindle.

You have to love Amazon for this. They really are doing great work at making ebooks not only a reality but a very attractive alternative.

As predicted yesterday, Amazon has just announced the second version of its Kindle e-book in New York this morning. You can read the official announcement here.

It will cost $359 – still very expensive – and will be available from 24 February. If you are based in the United States, you can pre-order one now. I just have.

This is the catchline being pushed by Amazon: “Thinner, faster, crisper, with longer battery life”. Here’s the corporate launch video. More actual details below.

So, picking up from my post yesterday.

Memory
I thought they’d go for between 1GB and 4GB and kill the external SD card slots. Yep. The Kindle now has 2 GB internal memory – which it points out will holds over 1,500 books. This still leaves the issue of running out of space for big Kindle users who download large numbers of books as well as newspapers.

To deal with this issue, Amazon is currently pointing at its online interface saying that “because Amazon automatically backs up a copy of every Kindle book purchased, customers can wirelessly re-download titles in their library at any time”. It’s a bit of a cop-out but it will hold up until Kindle version 3.

Buttons/Scroller

It’s thinner and slightly lighter than the original, plus “new buttons make it easy to turn the page from any holding position” – a positive way of saying that the company has fixed the problem of accidentally hitting buttons when handling it and having to stretch over the device to do things. So, an incremental step forward.

The one big advance is a move from the clickable scroll well to a “new 5-way controller”. This does precisely what I thought it would – allow you to move across the screen, rather than have to pick entire lines of text.

This controller will also make it easy to jump between articles and sections of newspapers – which is another sign that Amazon has been listening to customer feedback, because navigating a newspaper on the Kindle requires alot of back and forth and currently just doesn’t feel quite right. They’ve also come up with a better charger – the last one is oddly shaped and can be a pain to push into a power socket.

Battery

Lasts 25 percent longer, according to Amazon. Which it says equates to four to five days on one charge with the wireless on and for over two weeks with the wireless turned off. We shall see if it has fixed the problem with multiple subscriptions causing an incremental use of battery power i.e. the more things you are subscribed to, the faster the battery is drained due to the constant checking for new material.

Speakers

CEO Jeff Bezos appear to believe that the new audio speakers are a big differentiator. It’s even got a branded name, the “Read-To-Me Feature”. This is “experimental” the company says – which means they’re not sure it’s worth it but if it causes sales they’ll stick with it and improve it in the next version. I can only assume that Amazon has found there is a small but important market in partially-sighted book readers. Very possibly the senior citizen market.

So the feature speaks the words on the page and pages turn automatically while a book is being read so you can listen hands-free. There are male or female voices and you can set the speed it is read at. According to one journalist at the press conference though, the sound is a little robotic. Which is precisely what I was concerned about when reviewing this yesterday – if the sound isn’t warm and doesn’t have human-voice resonances, it will quickly irritate listener-readers. We’ll see if this feature survives the next Kindle iteration.

Screen

As predicted, there is a better screen. Same size but with 16 shades of grey, rather than the four previously. This means “crisp text, and sharper images and photos”. So that’s good. The pages will also turn faster with the Kindle 2 – also a nice incremental change.

No mention of the colour screen yet. It will take more battery power and another two Kindles to get there is my prediction.

Other bits and bobs

The company is sticking with its cell-phone network approach for downloads – a wise choice. The new Kindle also “comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary and its 250,000 word definitions built-in” (I’m pretty sure it was on my current Kindle when I received it), and definitions will appear instantly at the bottom of the page – which is good because currently the definition takes over the screen and that’s just so slightly annoying.

You can view all of Amazon’s launch material – videos, spec-list, news about Stephen King’s new novel and so on – on its Kindle webpage here.

Conclusion

All in all, an intelligent and useful update and redesign to the Kindle. There is nothing revolutionary about it – but then the Kindle itself remains a revolutionary force. It has completely changed my book habits and it has made the e-book a practical possibility. This is a good, smart move by Amazon.

The difficulty for the company will come in 12 months’ time when it will need to make sure it has something more than an incremental update in the Kindle 3. This is ideally what that version will have:

• A lower price. It needs to hit $200 or less as soon as possible.
• Either open-source software/hardware or a simple API – so people can start building useful applications for it. Amazon will think it won’t need to do this while it is the only decent product in the market. But all the time it doesn’t do this, it leaves the door open to a competitor (Sony? Apple? Barnes and Noble?)
• More memory.
• More processing power. The Kindle deals with just text and so has a tiny processor and that works fine. But it is inevitable that it will need more processing power soon if the Kindle is to stay ahead of the game.
• A colour screen. This will be the mainstream breakthrough for the Kindle. But it has all sorts of engineering challenges associated with it.
• Persuade the newspaper companies to charge less for their papers. At the moment, newspaper publishers are wary of the Kindle and charge the same as for a full printed version. Amazon needs to do what Apple did with the music companies and pressure the companies into cutting the price of their product.

  To do this, Amazon needs the numbers – and it is rapidly getting there. Newspaper publishers have to feel that they’ve got more to gain from shifting to e-publications and from getting into bed with Amazon. This shouldn’t be too hard for Amazon – pushing its purchasing power is exactly what got the company to the position it is in now – but it does need to work on this fast and have big deals ready for this time next year.

Anyway, bravo Amazon. I look forward to receiving and enjoying my new Kindle. As a Kindle 1 user apparently I get pushed to the front of the queue if I pre-order in the next 24 hours. Why is that? Because Amazon has some manufacturing issues at the moment and it needs its early adopters and loyal customers. Manfacturing is always the number one nightmare with innovative products so it is encouraging to see that Amazon at least recognises the value of keeping its existing customers sweet.

One thing I’ve always disliked about US tech journalism is the willingness to get drawn into corporate hype to the extent that even the possible news of a new product is deemed worthy of news articles.

But that said, it does look as though tomorrow in New York, Amazon will announce a new version of its ebook reader, the Kindle. And, I have to say, I am looking forward to it for the simple reason that the Kindle is what will finally break the ebook barrier to mainstream use and that will bring with it a fantastic revolution in book and information consumption.

A press conference is being held at the Morgan Library and Museum (although I haven’t been able to find an official press announcement of it), and in the past week pictures of a new Kindle have leaked out onto the Net (which is hardly surprising as to do such a big launch of a new product, the images would have had to have gone through at least one PR agency and have a wide distribution internally). I’ve grabbed the pictures and posted them below.

According to online reports, the expected launch date is 24 February.

Update: And yes it did launch. Read my post here for a full rundown.

And what do you the pictures show? Well, alot of design improvements – which anyone could have expected. The Kindle is a fantastic entry product but it is clunky and 80s looking. The new look take a few leaves out the Apple design book – rounder edges, shiny sheet-metal back. The SD card slot appears to have disappeared leading to logical speculation that Amazon has upped the internal memory. Problems with the buttons and the scroller appear to have been fixed (Amazon has been listening to its customers), and the rest will just have to wait until Amazon provides the specs.

Amazon is clearly excited about the success of the product – which was only launched a little over a year ago – 19 November 2007 to be exact. Its CEO Jeff Bezos was also glowing about it at the company’s recent fourth-quarter results. And according to a press release: “The Kindle Store contains the largest collection of e-books available anywhere in the world. Selection increased by 45,000 titles in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to 230,000 titles. One hundred three out of 112 current New York Times bestsellers are available and, along with most new releases, are priced at $9.99 or less.”

Here is quick rundown of the changes:

Memory

There should be much more internal memory – I would hazard a guess at between 1GB and 4GB. This is vital for the Kindle as the current small internal memory but with external swappable memory cards doesn’t work very well at the moment. Once you have filled up the internal memory, it flows over onto the card but this causes problems with adding notes and locating files (especially if you are subscribed to a newspaper which updates with each new issue every day). You often get irritating error messages. So if appears from the pictures that Amazon has done away with this approach and gone for the iPod idea of a large internal memory (which probably accounts for the metal backing).

Buttons

The huge “Next Page” button on the original, which ran all the way down the right-hand-side, is gone and has been replaced by a much smaller button. I think this is also a good idea and clearly stems from feedback supplied to Amazon by the army of Kindle users. The problem was that if you put the Kindle down anywhere, or you try to do something else, it is very easy to accidentally nudge the next page button, which can be quite annoying.

The other buttons are more logically arranged for using the Kindle – so the menu button is within reach of your thumb – as is the menu scroller – which saves you having to stretch over with your thumb while reading it.

Scroller

The scroller also appears to have become a small, square joystick. I think this is because the scroll wheel has become such entrenched in people’s heads as connected to a mouse that people have issues with it. Absolutely everyone who first uses the Kindle tries to scroll down the page and is confused when it reaches the bottom and the text doesn’t move (you have to click the Next Page button).

Also the scroller is somewhat limited in that it just goes up and down and that restrict what you can do with it. You can’t shift across, or grab text, and you can only work in one plane which meant that when you step away from a plain book, the multi columns of modern layout appear to be too modern and so the Kindle feels a little old-fashioned. With a joystick, Amazon opens the door to future changes in its layout and design.

Speakers

There are speakers on the new Kindle – before it had an audio out. I’m not sure what to make of this. I have never really got into audio books, and I much prefer to read in the quiet, so the idea of having audio files on my Kindle has never made much sense to me. But since there are speakers, I hope they are good and have been designed for the resonances of the human voice. Because it would incredibly annoying to have a tiny voice reading a book. It needs resonance and it needs bass.

Screen

I am sure that Amazon will announce something great about the ebook screen – better resolution or sharper images or the ability to add more fonts or something. You will only be able to tell if it makes any difference when you have one in your hands. What I don’t think we will see until Kindle version 4 is a colour screen.

But, frankly, none of this bothers me as the Kindle screen does exactly what it needs to do – it displays text very clearly, very legibly and while using a minimal amount of battery power.

Battery power

Talking of battery power, I hope Amazon has come up with a bigger, longer lasting battery and I also pray that the company has sorted out a glitch with its download software. If you subscribe to a publication, the Kindle occasionally uses the cell phone network to see if there is a new version out there. However, the more you subscribe to, the more the Kindle checks over the network. The result is that if you are subscribed to more than five publications, the battery runs flat in just over a day.

This is a disaster for Amazon – who want people to subscribe to newspapers, magazines and blogs over its device (it has been massively promoting the newspapers available over the service and clearly sees itself as being able to profit from the massive decline in sales of physical newspapers). The solution should be a fairly simple software upgrade, so let’s hope they have fixed it. And why more battery power? Well, just because it will be mean you have to plug it in less. And it will begin to open the door to a colour screen.

Conclusion

All in all, this is exactly the sort of update I hoped Amazon would do. The devil is in the details of course. And it will be interesting to see whether the company has been able to get the price down – something that will be vital to it becoming the iPod equivalent for ebooks.

We shall see. And I am pretty sure I will buy one and hand my existing Kindle to a very lucky soul.

I’m quite excited about the fact that Amazon has brought out a new ebook reader that it calls the Kindle. I haven’t seen one in the real world but I am assuming with the effort they’ve put behind it that the screen technology is what it claims to be – easy to read without straining your eyes.

I believe ebooks are the inevitable future. It’s just another step along the digital revolution. But – and what a but – have you seen the state of the “Kindle”? It looks like a prototype. A prototype designed by 18-year-old students back in the 1980s. Here is good technology and big demand with crappy design – i.e. the perfect opportunity for Apple.

The problem is that if Apple gets to it fast then the control-freak company will insist in tying in content providers into its new format, will do deals with big bookshops and newspapers and will screw up the huge leap that a quality ebook reader will provide society.

Amazon’s Kindle downloads content over wireless – which is terrific – another example of why wireless networks are changing the way we function as a society, It is too pricey at the moment – $399 – and the content is too expensive. But all that will change if this takes off. And that’s the big question – are people ready for an ebook reader? I would say yes. With better design. Mobile phones are too fiddly; laptops too over-spec’d and slow.

I also like Amazon’s system for people to upload books into its system. It looks easy and appears to work. I have the ebook rights to my Sex.com book so when I get back from a Thanksgiving lunch I am going to in five minutes, I will try to upload my book and see what happens. I also have US rights to my book by the way. My publishers have let me down with that one. As soon as my workload lifts I will spend some time getting the book into the States and pushing it.

It will be a great day when I see my book being read on a well-designed non-Apple ebook reader. I just wonder how long that will be.