On Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:30:53 AM UTC-4, cwpreston wrote: > > Because Jobs said it was a bad idea and everyone wants to prove him wrong. > > Seriously, it is a noticeable product differentiator. Something visibly > "not ipad". For the Kindle it might be ok due to the primary purpose- > reading. It mimics the dimensions of a hardcover or magazine better than a > 10 inch screen. >
I'm not sure what magazines you read (Readers Digest? Video Watchdog? Old 1990s issues of Asimov and Skeptical Enquirer?), but a 7" screen is significantly smaller than 99% of what you'll find on a news rack. Even the 10" screen of the iPad is about 80% the size of a single page of a standard comic book (or a standard hardcover), and comic books are smaller than most magazines. I'm more than a little perplexed by Amazon's decision to push the Fire as a magazine and comic reader because it is clearly not going to be a good device for that purpose, even for magazines with tablet versions like Wired. Remember, the measurement of diagonal screen size is not proportional to the screen area, which is what really counts. When it comes to screen area a 7" tablet is not 70% as big as a 10" one, it's about 50% as big as one. The Fire's screen is going to be about 30% the size of a standard magazine, if my back-of-an-envelope math is right. That's why I find DC's announcement doubly perplexing. What format are those collections going to be in? Not Comixology I assume, because that company is, much to their credit, trying hard to be platform agnostic. So I guess the collections are going to be in the mobi/amazon or epub format, which means you'll be displaying one page at a time, and that page will be quite a bit less than 50% the size of the print version! Maybe they'll have some sort of magnification function (currently mobi doesn't support that, but I guess Amazon can change it), but no matter how you cut it, that's going to be a pretty frustrating experience. See that picture of the Fire on DC's announcement? That's bigger than life size by quite a bit, and they've zoomed into the page!<http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/09/29/dc-entertainment-digital-graphic-novels-available-exclusively-on-the-newly-announced-kindle-fire/> What about double page spreads? In landscape mode a double page spread is barely readable on an iPad, so it will be completely unreadable (3.5 inches tall!) on the Fire. (I also assume that saying that Batman: Arkham City is available for the first time digitally is a typo, because that's been day-and-date since issue #1 on Comixology. I guess they meant to say Batman: Arkham Asylum, but three days later they still haven't corrected the blog post. Also, what's the collection "The Joker" supposed to be? I wonder if this whole deal with the Fire wasn't hacked together at the last minute, because no part of it appears to have been thought out well, including the announcement itself.) Please note, I'm not saying the Fire will be a failure. I think it's going to do quite well. It's going to be a pretty damned good Kindle, with some tablet functionality on the side. It will do video as well, even if the image will be on the small side. Amazon is clearly trying to carve out a piece at the low end of the market, where they won't be competing directly with the iPad. But when it comes to magazines and comics Amazon seems to be really overselling the device's capabilities. Some pundits are predicting that means Amazon will eventually release a 10" tablet of their own (a Fire DX?), but that's not really an excuse to give people a crappy experience now. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Unique Geek" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/theuniquegeek/-/KeMj9tzBOg4J. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en.
