Does the Kindle belong in your business?
September 4, 2009 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Dealers & Channel, New Products, Special Report
E-readers like Amazon’s Kindle have started making a splash in the consumer market. But do they make sense in your business?
Those devices could play a role in a business environment as a replacement for printed documents. Here’s why it might be worth considering:
- Cost – When you factor in the price of paper, ink/toner, equipment wear-and-tear, and the energy used by printers, an e-reader could provide a significant ROI over a long enough time period.
- Environmental impact – We all know how many times a page is printed, read once and thrown straight in the trash. In addition to cost savings, cutting down on that will show employees and customers that you care about being green.
- Productivity – E-readers make it easier for users to stay organized — at least, more organized than stacks of paper sitting on a desk.
- Better communication – Distributing in-house documents could be much easier with an e-reader, instead of sending the job to a printer and waiting to get it back.
Of course, buying a bunch of e-readers isn’t going to make sense everywhere, for everyone. At around $300 each, they probably make the most sense for execs, at least for now.
However, they still don’t quite have the computing features that would allow a road warrior to leave the laptop at home. And they won’t necessarily catch on — there are reasons people print pages instead of reading them on the computer. E-readers do solve some of the problems of that (with their portability, note-taking features, screens that are easier on the eyes, etc.) but there are always those who’ll prefer to hold real paper.
The best recommendation: Wait a little while. Kindle and its competition (including the Sony Reader) are still in their infancy. Apple is rumored to be coming out with its “iTablet” that will, it is said, combine some of the features of the iPhone, Kindle, and a netbook.
While the exact details are unclear, this new product is likely to revolutionize the use of portable computing and deliver a wealth of applications based on the ones developed for the iPhone. Amazon and Sony will have to react to make their devices more useful. Within the next year, the whole notion of a digital reader may become a valuable business tool.
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August 19th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Paper is at least recycable and what do you do with all that toxic circuitry in a ereader.
E-readers are more organized are you on crack!
Talk about energy I wonder how much power it takes to power all those 24 hours a day all year round servers around the world use up?
Lets take it easy with an all digital world.
September 9th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Another issue to consider with the Kindle is security currently there isn’t any, so having corporate materials on the kindle could be a bit of a security issue.