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Amazon's Kindle surprise

27 November 2007

Amazon's launch of an ebook reader is a smart strategic move: beat the competition by becoming the competition. The company sells most things nowadays, but built its fortune on book retailing and has since used its technology expertise to branch into search engines, distributed processing and micropayments. The company has already built relationships with publishers and has an archive of scanned material, which presumably is ready to publish digitally the moment the copyright holder gives the nod. If anyone can make a go of the ebook, then Amazon can. Kindle reportedly sold out at launch, which shows there are enough gadget freaks to sustain this kind of thing.

People compare Kindle to the iPod. We never knew we'd want to carry all our music everywhere until we could, goes the logic. I have dozens of half-read books around me right now, but I'm not convinced I need to carry them everywhere. The reason they're half-read is that I can't usually be bothered to read them. I read my better books instead. There's a big difference between a song, which you consume in about three minutes, and a book, which you consume in about three weeks. What made the iPod popular was that it was backwards compatible with CDs (and arguably with pirated material). Filling an iPod would cost an absolute fortune if you had to buy all the content again, but that's what you'll have to do with Kindle.

Kindle could emulate the iPod by creating a market for digital content, though. Nobody was fussed about buying digital music (although the options were there) until the iPod made the ownership experience so smooth. Kindle should make it much easier to buy digital content - easier than buying printed content, even. It will also establish a going rate for an ebook. At the moment, non-fiction ebooks are sold on the value of the information, independent of the number of pages. That could all change once Kindle's knocking out virtual paperbacks for a similar price to their paper equivalents. For some authors, Kindle is a threat.

Apparently, Kindle will enable you to subscribe to magazines and newspapers. It's hard to square that with today's information economy, where newspapers are cheap if not free and heavily subsidised by advertising. You don't mind if there's an A5 advert on a page of the Guardian, but you'll certainly mind if there's a (smaller) full screen ad on your Kindle screen. I don't believe people will tolerate advertising on content they've paid for on an ebook reader. For the publishers, Kindle sales are probably a revenue stream that works as marginal income but stops working if everyone reads the digital version instead of the print version. At that point, they can't sell ads any more.

Are we ready to give up the humble paperback? My friend John has written a great analysis of how Kindle's ebooks differ from how we like to use real books. As John writes, you can't lend, give, borrow or sell Kindle ebooks. There are a couple of other things I like to do with books which John hasn't mentioned, including annotating them, cutting them up and scrapbooking excerpts, and reading more than one page at once by flicking between the pages (more for IT and reference books than fiction).

There are more philosophical issues as well: do we really want the printed word to be governed by digital rights management (DRM)? The British Library has already expressed concern about DRM being used to restrict the use of creative works after their copyright protection has expired. Are we sure it's the right thing to do to replace the printed word (which has never been cheaper) with a device that costs two hundred pounds? What legacy will we leave in fifty years' time, when all the Kindles are conked out and nobody can unlock the files any more? Of course, it's not the beginning of the end. Books won't die out any more than speech will, and even if they were going to, we couldn't do much about it without undermining the whole basis of the market economy.

This could be the finest ebook reader that's been released. The wireless buying mechanism is particularly good. But I'd still rather read a real book, for which nobody will mug me on the tube and I won't care too much if it falls in the bath or gets lost/stolen on the beach.

Anything that encourages more people to read and buy books must be a good thing, although I suspect it will just be the same people using a different channel. If Kindle succeeds it will put Amazon in a similar position in the books market to that which Apple has attained in the music market. Amazon already negotiates hard with authors (who are expected to provide wholesale discounts on retail quantities) and publishers. Since there's no backwards compatibility with print books, Amazon does need authors a lot more than Apple needed record labels, though. Maybe we'll see a softening of Amazon's attitude towards content creators following its heavy investment in the Kindle technology and e-commerce infrastructure.

Labels: publishing, technology

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