All entries from February 2008

Back in November of 2007, Amazon released Kindle, a new portable reading gadget. It’s about the size of a book, with a high-res black & white “e-ink” display.

We used to call these things e-books, but Amazon is trying to get away from that term, and for good reason. First, “e-book” sounds sorta boring – like it’s just a book on a screen. Rather, Kindle is a new sort of information consumption device.

Unlike the iPod approach where the device needs to be synced to a computer, the Kindle doesn’t need a computer at all. Instead, it wirelessly communicates with Amazon via the same 3G cell networks used by modern cell phones. This connectivity allows users to instantly purchase and read books, newspapers, magazines and many blog feeds. There are no service plans or monthly fees. Amazon delivers this connectivity free of charge.

Unlike the first e-book devices, Kindle makes it easy to both acquire and consume information. Kindle combines basic e-book functionality with dead-simple wireless access to the Amazon library of content.

I have been following Kindle since its release in November. It has been interesting to observe the reaction. Some are excited by the new gadget and the way it works. Others are openly hostile toward a technology designed to replace the production and consumption of dead-tree-books.

Chip Kidd on the Kindle:

What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.

and:

The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.

Jon Stokes for Ars Technica:

In short, electronic “books” are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the “book,” then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.

Both make good points about Kindle being unable to replicate or replace the book experience, but I don’t think that’s the point. Rather, I think the Kindle is significant in that it offers a new way of acquiring and delivering information. In the same way that the iPod squeezes an entire record collection into your pocket, the Kindle turns a single book-sized object into potentially all books by wirelessly tapping into Amazon’s staggering library of content.

Sure, the initial Kindle is sorta gross looking. It has only one typeface. It’s black & white. The interface is clunky. It’s relatively expensive ($399). But the thing is beaming libraries of content through the air into your hands. To me, that is what seems the point, and something I find interesting.

Jon Gruber on Kindle:

After chewing it over all day, I’ve concluded that Amazon’s Kindle is going to flop.

Gruber makes great points about Kindle. It has a lot of things working against it: content DRM, device lock-in, etc.

I’m not sure if Kindle will be a success or not, but I don’t think it matters much. Eventually a device + service will come along that gets people psyched. It will be high-res, full-color, look rad, sport some hot-doggin multi-touch interface, and it will all be coupled with a content delivery service that makes it so easy to acquire content that visiting a physical bookstore will seem cumbersome.

This doesn’t seem so far off to me. Consider how quickly the iTunes store made traditional brick & mortar record stores obsolete, or how an individual’s iTunes library has replaced the physical CD collection.

Steve Jobs’ comments on Kindle from this NYTimes article:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Perhaps it’s not the sort of business Apple wants to get knee deep in, but people still read. While we’re reading less traditional books, we are reading more and more websites, blogs, etc. Again, the Kindle isn’t simply an e-book — it can push the NYTimes and blogs just as easily as Harry Potter. By offering the various types of content that people are interested in reading in a single device, Kindle can appeal to a significant audience.

It seems many people are interested in the new reading device — just take a look at the demand for the product. Since its release, Amazon has struggled to manufacture Kindles fast enough. They are currently sold out.

Books won’t be replaced anytime soon

Unlike relatively short-lived audio technologies like vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs, books have been around a while — we’re talking about a few hundred years of established specialness to destroy. It will be a very long time before any technology replaces books. Though, with that said, I think it’s only a matter of time before devices+services like Kindle+Amazon begin capturing the attention of readers and reducing the consumption of dead-tree-books.

This past September we relaunched the Dangerbird Records website. Since then the site has experienced a massive increase in traffic, with the new videos section being particularly popular. In addition to regular web traffic, we’re noticing a significant number of users embedding Dangerbird videos on MySpace/blogs/etc. As a result, site bandwidth has been growing exponentially — a good problem, but a problem nonetheless.

Here’s an example video:

That’s a 27MB video file. If ten thousand people check it out, that’s roughly 270GB of bandwidth.

Here’s another example:

At 17 minutes in length, this video is a whopping 124MB. If 10k visitors consume it, we’re way up to 1.2TB of bandwidth. With high-performance bandwidth costing about $1/GB, you can see how costs can quickly get out of control for a popular website.

Fortunately, we can move this high-demand content elsewhere. The services meeting this type of demand are generally referred to as content delivery networks.

Traditionally, CDN’s were designed for performance and marketed to the enterprise crowd. For example, Apple uses Akamai to serve up images and videos for apple.com. Akamai hosts copies of Apple’s assets on high-performance servers all around the globe. When a user requests a file, they receive the file from whatever server is closest to their geographic location. Akamai helps Apple maintain global performance at web-scale demand, but it’s not exactly cheap.

There haven’t always been a lot of options in economy content delivery. (You might try to exploit Dreamhost’s ridiculous 5TB/month @ $6/month plan, but Dreamhost isn’t exactly performance hosting.) However, in the last few years we’ve seen a lot of activity in the economy content delivery space as web sites/hosts have struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for content such as videos/images. Surprisingly, what appears to be the best offering in this market comes from Amazon — best known as the world’s largest online retailer, not web infrastructure provider.

In March 2006, Amazon launched S3, or Simple Storage Service. S3 is a web service providing websites with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. You simply pay for you what you use and at minimal cost (Storage: $0.15/GB/month, Bandwidth/transfer: $0.10/GB).

S3 is both an online storage service and content delivery network economy hosting/bandwidth provider. You could use S3 to backup your entire computer, or you could use S3 to deliver fifty-eleven-gazillion copies of a single animated GIF. Both tasks fall outside the scope of capability of a normal web host. Meaning, you can generally only host so much data, and any single server will eventually choke upon receiving too many concurrent requests.

A few example use-cases for you:

• An individual might use S3 to maintain a private, off-site backup of important documents, using minimal storage, and near-zero bandwidth, costing pennies per month.
• Dangerbird Records can use S3 to deliver an infinite amount of video content at minimal cost.

• A gigantic site like SmugMug (a photo site similar to Flickr) could use S3 to store a staggering amount user image data (in fact, SmugMug does use S3, saving them roughly $1M/year, crazy!)

It’s all a very interesting application of the distributed, on-demand, grid/cloud-computing, redundant, failure-tolerant, scalable (and many other words) systems architecture that we’ve arrived at in the post-Google world. Amazon sorted out the fundamentals of S3 in developing their own infrastructure for amazon.com. Now in true software-culture form, they have opened up their otherwise proprietary infrastructure to the world at minimal cost.

Since moving all video content to S3, we’ve seen Dangerbird’s normal bandwidth stabilize. Also, requests and transfer of video content will no longer being tying up server resources; now the server can focus on rendering page requests. And Dangerbird will save money.

Getting started with S3

If you can use FTP software, you can handle S3. It’s quite simple. First, set up an account. Then connect to S3 using some sort of client. The latest version of Transmit now provides support for S3, and there’s even a Firefox plug-in interface. Also, you might want to look into JungleDisk if you’re interested in off-site backup.