[chadcmulligan]

> They made a fairly useful gadget that sold well.

Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time. I remember buying one (a DX) from Malyasia, (because they weren't available in Australia), through a reseller (some company who bought stacks of them and resold them around the world). It was a talking point for a long time - people would ask me about it on the train etc. I still have it and still marvel at its amazingness occasionally.

Edit: remembered some more - laptops at the time had awful battery life, this thing could carry thousands of books and last weeks from one charge. I could download any book (mostly) instantly, before that I'd order books from the states, they'd take weeks to arrive and cost a fortune. It was an amazing thing.

[simias]

>Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time.

I bought the first kindle and I thought it was great but "amazing" is a bit much. E-readers already existed, Amazon's main selling point was their catalog and aggressive pricing. I mean the Sony Reader predates the Kindle and is technically fairly similar AFAIK: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Sony_Rea...

On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically. Paper books are also going nowhere. So the impact of the Kindle is negligible when compared to something like the iPhone, that completely changed the standard for a mobile phone.

[ghaff]

>On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically.

Yeah. I like my Paperwhite well enough for certain uses but I'm not even sure I would replace it if it broke tomorrow. And I'm a little surprised at the degree to which people have stuck with physical books even when it's just flowing text. I'm at the point where a new book means a book I have needs to be donated. I'd much rather books that are just text are digital. But then, in normal times, I'm traveling most of the time.

E-books really haven't ended up being that much of a revolution and certainly dedicated readers are not.

[esperent]

Somebody would have created an ebook if not for Amazon. They were just well placed to do so, but they didn't invent any of the technology or concepts.

Much like Apple and touchscreen phones, or Tesla and electric cars. The might have advanced the tech by a couple of years but they were profiting off the inevitable.

[yomly]

IIRC from the Everything Store there was some conjecture that the Amazon "read the first chapter" feature paved the way to mass digitalization of books. So they were well positioned to launch with decent selection and ramp up faster than if they relied on the pace of distributors. If any amazonians from around that time could confirm that would be cool...

There is art in execution too.

[chadcmulligan]

Could be, there were other ebook readers around at the time, but it was Amazon that integrated it with the business of buying books and made them cheap. So, yes, eventually some one would have done it, but by then the iPad may have been around, would a kindle have been viable, after the iPad? hard to say.