Sounds More Like ‘the Zune of Reading’ to Me
If Jeff Bezos truly hopes to create “the iPod of reading,” observers say he’s going to have to do a hell of a lot better than Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader. Because though Kindle, with its paperback-sized form factor and an electronic display that reportedly looks and reads like real paper, might project an aura of bookishness, it doesn’t project much of a value proposition.
Amazon has priced Kindle at $399. It’s offering digitally rendered books for download over the device’s wireless Whispernet service for an average price of $9.99 a book. And it’s peddling subscriptions to newspapers like the New York Times for up to $14.99 per month and blogs such as the Onion at 99 cents per month. This, despite the presumably vast disparity between the manufacturing costs of dead-tree publications and digital ones. Apparently to Amazon, economies of digital distribution don’t translate into lower prices for the consumer, but greater revenues for the company.
“This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” Bezos told Newsweek. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.” Change the way people read? Seems doubtful–at this point at least. Especially when Apple could easily develop an e-book reader for the iPhone or the multitouch tablet it’s allegedly prepping for market, launch it in concert with an iTunes bookstore or a partnership with Google Book Search and, ba-da-bing, turn the Kindle into the Zune of e-book readers.
“Google’s Book Search project has already pumped much of the world’s printed matter into Google’s servers,” writes Forbes’ Brian Caulfield. “Downloads of classic titles, such as ‘Bleak House,’ can already be had for free. Mix Apple’s iTunes content distribution smarts with Google’s vast storehouse of content, and you’ll have an instant competitor to Kindle–one with a touch interface and the ability to play movies and music, too.”
Course, if the primary market Amazon’s gunning for here doesn’t quite pan out, there may be another worth targeting: the textbook market. Says Good Morning Silicon Valley’s John Murrell: “No more crushing backpack-load of tomes, no frustrating trips to the bookstore trying to find what you need in stock, and, for the publishers, no need to hold off updating until there’s enough to make a new edition. If the textbook industry could get together on an open standard format, if schools and/or the industry subsidized the hardware, if the electronic bookstore would allow for sale or rental, if the device allowed for things like automatic handling of citations and bibliography … well, that’s a lot of ifs, but I think there’s something there.”
Comments
There are two interesting experiments in the Kindle launch.
1. Selling ebooks as a service — without exposing the underlying delivery mechanism. There is no independent charge for the wireless delivery, not even a mention of whose EV-DO network it is delivered on. This is quite bold and should be watched carefully, especially by Google as they ponder the economic realities of an “open” national broadband network.
2. The price point of fresh digital content. The actual prices should be debated, but the issue isn’t about if consumers prefer the free, old, public domain content that Google has cataloged over first run books. As far as Apple and Google swooping in, isn’t it a bit naive to assume that Amazon’s existing relationships with publishers can’t give it some advantage over free internet content? The Kindle device may be expensive but the content is waaaay cheaper than audiobooks.
I do agree that the delivery experience will be critical to the success. It’s what made the iPod great. Should be fun to watch to see if untethered/mobile access is worth the premium to the consumer.
Posted by Rob Chandhok at November 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pmI agree the device doesn’t look like much, but here’s a prediction : book writers will soon join musicians and film authors in the “the Net killed my income” band wagon.
As soon as more similar devices appear, and get hackable, it will make books a much more attractive file-sharing item. ebooks are available on p2p networks, but aren’t in great demand. The reason is that extensive reading on a computer screen is tedious, ebooks still lack a really good device to read them. That could be it.
Posted by Guillaume Laurent at November 19th, 2007 at 2:08 pm“The Zune of Reading”…
Best.
Comparison.
Ever.
Posted by Bruce Evans at November 20th, 2007 at 11:35 amThe Kindle might just work. Think of all of that time in planes or on subways.
Do the WSJ and NY Times include access to their “membership” only web sites with the monthly “subscription”? (I didn’t see it mentioned in the WSJ.. )
Posted by Robert Randall at November 20th, 2007 at 12:06 pm