e-Book Echo: More Kindle Books than Print Versions; Nook and Sony Reader Downloads Overloaded
Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. E-book readers have been the hot ticket for a while, and the holiday season has seen activity in the digital publishing world as never before. Amazon is reporting that Kindle books outsold print books on Christmas day for the first time in the company’s history. The Kindle was a hot holiday seller, and the company is quite happy they are selling e-books like hotcakes.
The high sales volume of readers didn’t come without its price, as both Sony and Barnes & Noble were overloaded trying to pump out e-book downloads to meet demand. Owners of new Nook readers could not download books on Christmas day due to the servers being slammed trying to keep up with demand. Nook book downloads were unavailable until the day after Christmas, when they resumed.
Sony also experienced high sales for the Reader line of devices, and that demand saw its servers equally slammed on Christmas day. New Reader owners were unable to get into the store to download purchased books, due to high volume. The Sony Reader problem was more pronounced that the Nook download problem, as Reader owners needed a software update to access the new and improved Sony store. The update download is believed to have contributed to the server overload. Things should be back to normal currently.
I played with a Kindle 2 this past week and I’m sold (although I think I’ll opt for the larger DX model). Interface was easy to use and fairly spry. Screen was VERY readable. The included cell modem service, while a little pokey, was quite usable. With the 1 week+ battery life, this makes a great emergency internet device.
While the web browsing is primitive and monochrome, it certainly works for searching Google and Wikipedia. In “Advanced Mode” the browser supports cookies and JavaScript, so logging into Gmail and checking email was very doable.
As long as you stick with primarily text-based sites and blogs, or stick to mobile versions of sites, you can get a fair amount done.
It’s spoiled me in one respect though – I cannot even consider the Nook or Sony e-readers as viable, since they do not include any Internet capability outside of downloading books.
Heavy Harmonies, You just wrote my favorite description of the Kindle Web Browser, “a little pokey” – love it.
Yes it is. As you say, text-based mobile-optimized sites are best, and lately they’re not quite as pokey.
It’s good to see people enjoying this feature which, if it were on the Nook, would be praised by the gadget press.
Surprisingly, the regular Engadget site doesn’t do badly on the DX in landscape mode.
At any rate, if anyone with less Kindle web experience than Heavy Harmonies wants a free Kindle file of mobile-optimized site links, ready to click on w/o going through experimental browser menu, try my download described and available at bit.ly/mobiweb
James, I’d heard about the Nook problems on Christmas day but not about the Sony. Didn’t realize so many of them were sold that last week. Thanks for the news on that.
Interesting reader. I like the ability to write notes on the screen page. I hope the price comes down from that heady $400 though, especially w/o ability to go anywhere but to the Sony store.