Thursday 31 March 2011

Kindle - IT companies take note

So as per my previous blog entries show, I'm a major personal fan of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. It's really improved my reading experience and consumption.

So why do I think Kindle is important to IT companies? Well to put it simply it's a great cross-platform framework for information delivery and consumption! I can seamlessly access & synchronise the same eBook content on an iPhone, Android phone, PC, iPad & Kindle ereader.

Yes Kindle can read & display existing Adobe PDF files, but they are nowhere near as usable & visually readable as eBook format documents.

There are also some other interesting advantages :-

* built in secure channels for charged, or less public, content

* ability to automatically push & receive updated document versions

* the annotations & highlighting capabilities allow peers to share 'user feedback & content' associated with the document & topic

So Gartner, when will you deliver your reports & papers via Kindle's secure subscription channels?

So EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, Cisco, Netapp, Oracle et al - when are you going to deliver your whitepapers, product manuals and documentation in eBook format?

From a marketing aspect, just bundle a kindle (or iPad running kindle) with your enterprise data-centre products - stock it full if your documentation and watch your happy customers...

3 comments:

  1. I don't like the Kindle or any of its supporting software. I prefer ePub files that can be read on even more platforms than the current Kindle software.

    I would rather see ePub formats of documentation that would even better handle the open nature of the distribution and not the Kindle format. PDF isn't a bad second step from their. But very opposed to Kindle format because of the restriction it places on publishers and customers alike.

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  2. I've tried reading PDFs on my Kindle and it can be a painful experience. I'd very much like to see product documentation that was readable on a Kindle particularly as I also make use of the Kindle reader across my phone and a netbook. Bring back reference cards - ideal for a phone form factor.

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  3. Buy a Kindle DX from the US and get on with your life.

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