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Amazon is battling a two-pronged enemy to uphold the reign of its e-reader, the Kindle. It is constantly fighting to hold off pressure from lower-end yet competent e-readers such as the Nook from Barnes and Nobles, the Reader from Sony and the Kobo from Borders. If this were not enough, it faces competition from an unlikely rival, the Apple iPad. It certainly costs a lot more than the Kindle, but, on the same note, the iPad can do so much more than the Kindle, too!
Amazon eased off some of the stress on the financial front, and doled out a price cut for the Kindle, trying to eliminate the price wars with its cheaper rivals. Gadget watchers expect Bezos to muscle-up the Kindle with a whole host of new features and the obligatory cosmetic upgrade – color.
But, Amazon has taken a bold, and unusual step towards the future- it has introduced Kindle titles that incorporate audio and video clips; these are accessible on the iPad,
iPhone and the iPod Touch, but obviously not on the Kindle itself.
As long as customers are buying e-books from the Amazon store, it shouldn’t matter too much if they read them on the Kindle or on any other rival device. But, Jeff Bezos might be on shaky ground when he custom-creates content for a rival device, highlighting its superior features.
Amazon offers just 13 such titles with the said extra fittings right now, five of them are guidebooks from Rick Steves. The guides do give you an inkling of how useful embedding audio with books can be – you can choose to read what he has to say about Paris, or listen to him talk about it. Video, on the other hand, is not much to talk about, with most of the offerings being glorified slide shows.
The book industry is going to take some time to wrap its head around providing video that truly enhances the reading experience. Hopefully, when that happens, the Kindle would have caught up.
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