Kindle 2

Amazon has announced that there are now over 230,000 titles available for the Kindle. My count today yielded 31 newspapers, 22 magazines, and 237,694 books. In books, Meyer's Twilight series still holds the top three bestseller slots, followed by Young's religious fiction, The Shack, in slots four and five.

The announcement was coupled with the news that the second generation Kindle is available for preorder on Amazon.com.

The form factor of the Kindle 2 has grown slimmer and lighter than its predecessor. Battery life is 25% longer (I do occasionally run out of juice while reading), page turns are 20% faster (although I'm totally used to the Kindle's current page turn speed), and of course it has more memory and can hold more titles. The most significant new features, in my opinion, are the 16 shade gray scale and the text-to-speech capability.

As I noted in my review of The Graveyard Book, art display quality- even on gray scale sketches- wasn't quite up to snuff on the Kindle 1. I'd be interested to see what a gray scale graphic novel looked like on the Kindle 2. Several years ago I had my hands on a Sony eBook reader at a Barnes and Nobles in Manhattan- and was shocked by how beautifully it displayed the art.

Now to discuss the text-to-speech feature. Text-to-speech takes the printed word and reads it aloud as audio. Readers can choose between male or female narrators, and can dial up and down how fast the narrator reads. The brief text-to-speech sample on Amazon's video demo reminded me of Hal from 2001- although, to be fair, the voice was a little less fluid than Hal, and a little less creepy. I'd be curious to hear how well the computerized narrator pronounces proper nouns and foreign words.

Beyond the quality of the narrator, I was wondering who, under the age of five, would want their print book read out loud to them? Then I realized text-to-speech is probably fantastic for commuters. If you're reading on the train, then want to continue your story driving from the park and ride back home- you can do so with no interruption of continuity, no searching for your place- and no second book to buy in audio format. All my life I've had the avid reader's nightmare illness- extreme car sickness whenever I attempt to read in motion. So I can definitely see the value of text-to-speech. On the other hand, I never buy an audio book without first listening to a sample of the narrator. The narrator can make or break the reading experience. So I'll be interested to see whether or not Kindle 2 readers actually use the text-to-speech feature.

F&SF goes bimonthly

This morning on Slashdot I read that the March 2009 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction will be the last monthly issue published. From now on, the magazine will be a little longer, and will only come out every two months.

You can read Gordon Van Gelder's explanation for the change in format here.

But the Slashdot article I read, titled Difficult Times for SF Magazines, was actually announcing that Realms of Fantasy has folded.

It's no news that speculative fiction genre magazines haven't been selling well. I've seen theories for the decline from editors and fans blaming everything from the economy to the short attention span of the TV-internet generation. But I think an even bigger problem is that many magazines have misunderstood their audience.

Spec fiction fans are usually technophiles. They're excited about the future, the latest technologies, the coolest new ways of reading books, watching movies, and experiencing their favorite fictional worlds.

Mass market genre fiction magazines seem to think, for some reason, that their readers want to walk into a brick and mortar store, pick up a dead tree magazine off a rack, and purchase it. Or that they possibly want to wait for their magazine to show up in their mailbox, slightly dirty and dog-eared- and often after it is already available for sale in bookstores. Old-fashioned distribution is simply not cool enough for people with their eyes on the future!

Asimov's Science Fiction isn't folding or going bimonthly. Their homepage offers me a free podcast of a story read by the author. Their special e-Asimov page lets me know that I can get their magazine as a Fictionwise eBook, or on the Kindle. Oh, and the free podcast pointed out that their favorite authors have plenty of short story content on audible.com that I can enjoy on my iPod.

F&SF had to go bimonthly. F&SF is not available on the Kindle. There are links to eReader, Fictionwise, and Audible on the F&SF home page- but the links are at the very bottom of the page, and I didn't even see that the links existed until I got a comment on this post from the magazine's editor pointing out my error. Maybe it was just me who missed those links, but there's no doubt the Asimov's webpage draws more attention to their electronic formats at the top of their page.

The folding Realms of Fantasy isn't even on Fictionwise- at least, when I searched for the magazine on Fictionwise, the results yielded nothing but an erotica novel. Realms of Fantasy is not available on Kindle.

Perhaps the problem of folding and shrinking magazines isn't the state of the economy or an unwillingness of spec fiction fans to read. Perhaps magazines are offering content in an outdated format inappropriate to their audience, and could do a better job marketing toward their technophile target fans.