Once I freed it from its cage and it was charged (another unfriendly step), I still can’t use it. It wants an account name and password, but I had no clue of what to enter as I was away from the Internet at the time.

Now I’m on the phone with Barnes and Noble… the very friendly person who answered the phone likes reading regular books and does not feel like spending the money to buy a Nook. She needs to transfer me to “digital support” because she can’t figure out the login problem either. Unfortunately, the extension she’s trying to transfer me to is not working.

Now that I’m near the Internet I was able to log into my B&N account without any trouble, but I still can’t get the Nook to go past the login screen.

Oh well!

In fact, a friend who tried a nook in a B&N store, and tried my nook said “yours is much faster”. Well, mine is running 1.0.0 software. I don’t find the page turning delay much different from the Kindle. (My guess: as the noon gets used without a restart, it might progressively slow down. So restart it if it gets slow might be a short term prescription.)

I can say that the nook has five advantages that I like:

- it has real page numbers (but see disadvantages, below). I tried to use my Kindle in a book group, and people kept loaning me their hardcopy so I could keep up.

- it supports personalized screen savers. I installed the hack in my kindle to do this, and it kept me from getting updates.

- it has wi-fi. I didn’t realize how useful that is. too bad it doesn’t have an internet browser!

- the screen and fonts are just a tad better than what the Kindle has. The background of the screen is just a little whiter and better contrasting than my Kindles. Just a touch.

- Google books. rough looking, but they are there!

Downsides:

- the ‘open’ness of the nook is its Achilles heel: the store experience on B&N (or fictionwise, etc.) is poor relative to the Amazon store.

- page numbers. you can’t go to them, you can’t search on them. they might as well not be there.

- the number of newspapers and magazines available is pathetic. sure, it is a new device, but B&N had a long time to work on this.

I didn’t find the packaging a challenge (perhaps because I was warned by Kent’s post). I didn’t find registration a challenge (but I did have to register). I also find that working on two screens for input takes some getting used to, but then with my PC I work with a keyboard and a mouse and I think I have figured that out.

John

I don’t think time or iterations of devices is relevant here either. What’s important is market penetrance. Take a look at iPod sales data. For the first several years, the device was Mac-only, and the iTunes store did not yet exist (it opened in 2003). The iPod was certainly vulnerable for many of these early years, as it was only selling a few million devices a year, at least through 2004. 2005 saw a huge leap to over 20 million sold. By the time the Zune came out in 2006, Apple had already sold more than 30 million iPods and was going to sell 40 million more that year. The sales numbers give a better idea of how established it was, rather than thinking in terms of years or iterations.

The iPod is perhaps a bad comparison, given that the world had already adopted the mp3 format (via Napster) before the iPod was released, whereas the e-book market has no common file format in use, and no way to rip your previous purchases (print books) to a new device. Perhaps a better analogy is the nascent videogame market, where, like e-books, one was locked in to one provider.

But let’s contrast iPod sales data with Kindle sales data. Oops, there are no Kindle sales data. Amazon has clear and obvious reasons for keeping this data secret, as it allows rampant speculation that seems more based on anecdote and sales campaigns than on actual numbers. Forrester estimates (take all estimates with a grain of salt) 3 million total US ebook reader sales in 2009. That’s the total market, not just Amazon. Apple had sales greater than that after two years just on their own and were far from locked in as the dominant player.

It’s important to remember that the e-book market is only a tiny percentage of the book buying market as a whole. Depending on whose numbers you believe, at least 95% of book sales aren’t e-books. That, to me, says that 95% of the market has not chosen a device or a provider, which means the field is wide open for competition. I would argue that stand-alone devices are at best going to be niche devices, and perhaps Kindle has a strong hold on this very small niche, but the fate of the e-book itself is far from determined.

To counter some of your anecdotal evidence, we (CSHL Press) have 6 books available through the Kindle store. We’ve sold only a few Kindle copies of each this year, while the print copies of those same books continue to sell very well. The ratio is closer to one to hundreds than Bezos’ alleged 1 to 2 sales rate. And I’m glad you brought that number up because it’s a good example of Amazon’s cherrypicking and misleading use of statistics. What does that mean, “for books available in e-book and print formats, Amazon sells 48 e-books for every 100 print”? Take a look at Kindle’s current bestsellers. 9 of the top 10 are available for free, and 8 of those books are available in print as well. How does that skew Bezos’ numbers? Amazon has 350,000 plus books in its Kindle store. An impressive number until you realize that nearly 300,000 books were published in the US alone last year, with worldwide estimates being closer to 2.55 million (pdf link). The entire Kindle library represents only a tiny fraction of the total number of books available, so can we really generalize much about the vague sales figures offered? Another classic bit of spin was the claim that the Kindle outsells every other product on Amazon, which was dissected here. Bezos’ and Amazon’s statements must be taken purely as marketing copy, at least until they want to establish some actual credibility by releasing numbers.

Habits are harder to change than technology. The Kindle may be imperfect, but it’s benefiting from the habits people already have around using Amazon, while creating habits and preferences of its own. I’m not as convinced that the window is going to be open for very much longer — at least for affordable, single-purpose, wireless e-reading devices.

And for anything like the rumored Apple tablet, my bet is that there will be heat, weight, and price issues that will make the Apple tablet a very niche device comparatively.

We’ll have to see what happens.

One question: what happens if you order a Kindle for someone else as a gift? Surely Amazon doesn’t invade that person’s privacy by accessing their account information without their permission, and there must be some registration procedure they go through, right?

Also, I’m not sure the iPod/Zune metaphor is apt here. The Kindle is in early days in a nascent market (one that may never take off the way the mp3 player market did). The iPod was released in 2001, the Zune first appeared in 2006, long after the iPod was established as the standard bearer for an accepted mainstream market. Had MS released the Zune a lot earlier (perhaps when the iPod was still Mac-only, just as the Kindle is locked down and Amazon-only), then things might have been different. That window is still very open in this market, and probably will continue to be open for at least a little while longer.