George Allen Miller One Geek's take on all things SciFi

Im sure everyone has heard in recent months that the war of the eBook is about to explode in 2010. First came the Kindle. All eInky with the promise of ditching that aging book shelf and going totally digtal and earning your geekdom credit. Now, like many things started in the land of the technophile, the ebook/eink race is headed to the mainstream. What does that mean for us early adopters? In my opinion, it means nothing.

Ok, so you bought a Kindle, put 100 books on it, downloaded Kindle for the iPhone and Kindle for the PC, and can now read your book while on the train, in a plane, in your home, on the phone and eating some rather putrid looking green eggs and ham. But all of a sudden futurist guru Ray Kurzweil claims to be making his own eBook and you get frustrated that your purchases can’t come off the kindle and onto the Nook, Blio, Sony or one of the other small time players out there. If this is you, let me point something out. Whaddya care?

An eBook has one simple purpose. To read books. Lots of books. To no longer need to store books to collect dust and be a royal pain in the arse when it comes time to move. eInk is eInk is eInk. Everyone of these eBook readers do the exact same thing. Sure some have a neat dual screen with one in color, some will have other neato features as well. But honestly, that’s just makup on a pig. All you need the damn thing to do is display a page from a book without a backlit screen so you don’t go blind and have to get a stem cell treatment to fix them. That’s it. Nothing more.

I read somewhere on the interwebs where someone cried and moaned about not being able to move his books to the Nook. Dude. Get a life. Think about what you are asking to have done. “I want to move all my eBooks from the Kindle to the Nook so I can go into a barnes and noble store and read and get free wifi”. Idiot.

Point is, don’t complicate your life. If you have the Kindle, keep it, buy books on it. Amazon will upgrade the thing eventually to be a close competitor to all the other models out there. This isn’t an Apple versus PC fight. The Nook, Sony, Blio, Kindle, all serve one purpose and one purpose only. To show you a page of eInk. Do you really care of one is soaked in DRM? Or one has a neat dual screen? Or one is made by a guy that’s going to remove his brain and put it in an Alienware 2030 gaming box? I don’t know about you but getting with a bunch friends to swap books from a Kindle to a Nook sounds kinda gay (Author is not homophobic).

And don’t even try to suggest ‘tablet’ vs an eBook. Kindle has already stolen that thunder by introducing software versions that can be loaded to a PC, phone, Mac, and I heard a version for blackberry is coming soon. This really is a genius move as they have seperated themselves from their device.  You don’t even need a Kindle, the actual hardware, to buy Kindle books and read them.  So if the iSlate, iTablet or whatever Apple is going to call it does come out, it will not be a Kindle killer because Amazon will happily allow you to install their app and read all your books. Remember, Amazon is making money on books sales here, not Kindle sales.

The next big game changer in this industry is a tablet that can switch between eInk and a standard color screen. But, quite frankly, i’m not still not all that interested. A kindle/nook/blio is perfectly sized to be the size of a page of a book. They are super light, can stow easily, have very low battery requirements and just plain work right. I don’t want a tablet that is an oversized eBook. There’s a simple rule in life, the more complex you make something the more likly it’ll break. A tablet that doubles as an eBook reader sounds awfully complex to me with screen styles switching back and forth. Wait for v3 at least on that one.

So, if you have a Kindle, don’t sweat it. Just ignore all the marketing blitz and enjoy your device. If you haven’t made the plunge yet, don’t worry either. Sony, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, who cares. You can buy books from all of them and all of a decent eBook reader. At the end of the day that’s all you really want to do, read books. Find a reader that you like the most and get it. But just because you do doesn’t give you any geekcred at this late stage. Sorry.