Yesterday, I received this press release from Loud Crow Interactive:
On Monday, May 2, renowned writer and illustrator Sandra Boynton will become the world’s first author to sign an eBook app for the general public. This historic signing will take place at 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble’s Upper East Side store, located at 150 E 86th Street at Lexington Avenue, in New York City.
The week before Amazon came out with big news of its own. Here’s how the Los Angeles Times wrote it up:
Amazon.com announced a new effort on Wednesday that will allow Kindle users to check out e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries sometime later this year.
The scope of the two projects are hardly comparable. eBook signings are a nice benefit, perhaps even a bit gimmicky, while lending libraries for eBooks is revolutionary. Why didn’t Barnes & Noble think about this? Wait…
Barnes & Noble bookstores introduced its Nook e-reader in 2009 and since its launch, the Nook has offered library e-book lending.
Now, give Amazon its due. The Kindle was the first eBook to popularize reading off the page. It was clunky and ugly, but it got people used to the idea. Now, it’s a nice machine. It effortlessly links to the Amazon.com store, either through a free 3G connection or wifi for the cheaper model. Its black and white screen is as close to looking like ink on paper as there is in popular technology. You can read it on a sunny beach, which is true of almost no other electronic device. But it is decidedly, almost defiantly, uncool.
The Nook is cool. It’s color. It started sleeker and still looks sharper in general. Color doesn’t matter for most books, but consider Boynton — children’s book author and illustrator. A black and white world for children’s books? How uncool is that? Plus newspapers, magazines look better in color. The Nook has fun apps too, you can shoot pigs with it. That’s cool.
Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos knows color would be cool, but he’s not willing to sacrifice the e-ink to get there. He told Gizmodo:
“I know it’s multiple years. I don’t know how many years but it’s years.” Lame.
Plus, the Kindle’s battery life is really long. I’m going to take a nap now.
How did this happen? How did a stodgy company that started selling paper books in 1917 seize the excitement factor in eBooks over a company that is 16 years old? That’s like your great grandpa out-shredding you on his vintage Gibson. It’s like Cher stealing Russell Brand from Katy Perry. No wait, it’s like Phyllis Diller stealing Brand … she was born in 1917.
Maybe the answer is that e-readers just don’t need to be cool. With the iPad, et al. absorbing much of the cool factor — eBooks being an afterthought for them — Kindle doesn’t need to be any more than a book of many books. But I wonder if the Nook would have ever found a niche in the eBook market if Amazon locked it down with some innovative bells and whistles.
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