Even if you’re as dubious as I am about the new Apple iPad competing seriously with the Kindle for the e-Reader spotlight, there’s little questioning that their share of the market stands to fall off a bit in the coming months and years. The sheer number of new devices available now is bound to dilute their dominance, especially when people start trying to make the apples to oranges comparison of a catch-all tablet PC with a dedicated e-Reader.
Amazon is a big company full of smart folks though, so they’re not going to take this lying down. Probably the most obvious response is the “If you can’t beat em, join em” tactic. The rumors of a new Kindle Touch seem to imply that they’re steering in that direction, at least in part. Releasing a new, premium Kindle with a bunch of fancy bells and whistles just makes sense. After all, it was our No. 1 Kindle prediction for 2010.
There is another angle to it that hasn’t been explored, and that’s offering a lower-budget version of the Kindle to get people hooked on buying eBooks. According to reports by TechCrunch, however, Amazon is prepared to take it even farther than that. Apparently, long-time Amazon customers and bibliophiles started getting promotional emails back in January, just before Apple’s big flop of an event, offering them a money-back guarantee for those who ordered a new Kindle 2 and didn’t like it. If they purchased the device and reported that they weren’t satisfied, Amazon was prepared to let them keep the Kindle for free.
While it seemed like a good one-off deal at the time meant to sway people who might be intrigued by the iPad, TechCrunch is now citing a source that says free Kindles could be the way of the future. The report says that they’re trying to find a way to cut costs to the point where they can offer a free Kindle to every Amazon Prime subscriber.
For those not in the know, Amazon Prime is a subscription service offered by Amazon where you pay a yearly fee of $79 and in exchange get free two-day shipping for the whole year as well as overnight shipping for the heavily-discounted price of $3.99. It’s a brilliant sell, because once you have that free two-day shipping going, it becomes difficult to buy products online anywhere else. Consequently, Amazon Prime subscribers become some of their most loyal customers. Give these people a few Kindles, the thinking goes, and they’re bound to happily spend away, more than making up for the cost of the device in word-of-mouth advertising and the sheer volume of books purchased.
Of course, this all hinges on Amazon being able to reduce their costs to the point where they’re not taking huge losses by giving Kindles away. I suspect, and this is purely conjecture at this point, that this is going to come to fruition at the same time as the launch of the rumored Kindle Touch. Amazon can start handing out the Kindle 2 for free to Amazon Prime subscribers and avoid cannibalizing their own market share by releasing a fancier touch-enabled Kindle to fill its place in the premium-priced niche. Everybody wins, from the budget-conscious to the gadget freaks.
The question remains: should you hold off buying a Kindle now so you can get in on this sweet deal? I don’t think we’re quite at that point yet. This is still all shrouded in rumor, and the earliest something like this is liable to happen is the holiday season at the end of the year. The degree to which the Kindle can improve your reading habits today more than justifies the cost. And would you really deny yourself that satisfaction? I wouldn’t either.
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Despite the fact that Apple’s iPad has been met with near-universal criticism since it was announced at the end of January, it would seem that Apple has still managed to at least change the dialogue in the e-Reader sphere and cast doubt on the viability of Amazon’s current stable of readers. The iPad might not be able to multitask, or display flash, or have any use at all out in the sun, but it’s raised the expectations amongst those who would prefer to see e-Readers move to full-color touch screen displays.
The prospect of an Amazon e-Reader with such a display is actually much closer than I think many of us were led to believe. The New York Times recently reported that Amazon has acquired a small New York-based startup by the name of Touchco, whose specialty it seems is developing touch screens that are significantly cheaper than the ones used by Apple. No sooner was the company purchased than they were rolled into Amazon’s Kindle division and disappeared from sight.
Interestingly, Prime View International (PVI), which currently produces the Kindle displays, has come out and said that they too will be releasing technology for a color multi-touch display this year that will feature support for animation. It’s unclear at this point whether Amazon intends to implement ideas from both companies or whether PVI is going to get the boot in favor of Touchco.
It’s no secret that Amazon has been active about trying to figure out ways to eat Apple’s lunch. They’ve already enlisted developers to start coming up with games for their platform, which makes much more sense if they’re developing a color touchscreen display than with the Kindle’s currently unwieldy e-Ink technology. And we’ve been talking about the possibility of a Kindle App store since last December.
The problem as I see it is that Amazon can’t hit Apple where it hurts without compromising the integrity of their current e-Reader technology. Try going outside with your Kindle and an iPhone with the Kindle app and tell me which one is easier to read with all that ambient glare. The Times reporter was saying that Touchco’s technology is intended for use with LCD technology, but that’s not a direction Amazon can go without sacrificing both readability and battery life.
Of course, this is a distinction that so-called “experts” and industry analysts seem to miss in this equation. For somebody just looking at this scenario from the point of Amazon’s stock price, going after the same market as an industry-leader is the only aggressive move one can make. But as people who actually read books on our e-Readers, an increasingly novel concept, the future seems much murkier.
Color displays and touch screens could greatly improve the vibrance and intuitive user interface of the Kindle, but they’re just not necessary for reading. We can just hope that Amazon doesn’t lose sight of that in the coming months, and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on any future mentions of a Kindle Touch.
It always used to baffle me when people would vehemently oppose the government’s ability to look up records of books you’d taken out at the local library. What could they possibly glean from such mundane information, I worried, and how could reading anything you find at your local library be used to implicate you? It’s not as though they have diagrams on how to build pipe bombs sitting right next to the children’s section, right?
As I’ve grown older, however, and our world has grown increasingly digital, I’ve started to notice the ways in which these minor infringements of our privacy can have detrimental side effects. As a general rule, I still don’t much worry about the government knowing that I’m actually reading indulgent fantasy novels, even though I tell everybody who asks that I’m working on Tolstoy. (If they were going to rat me out, I imagine they’d have done it by now.) No, my concern is more than that this information can find its way into the hands of advertisers, who, recognizing me as a member of that illustrious 18-35 middle class male demographic, will pursue me to the ends of the earth hawking products that I don’t need. In-Kindle ads sound far-fetched now, but there are some warning signs that it’s coming.
That’s why I was a bit distressed when a friend forwarded along a link to the E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. By combing through the privacy policies of the market’s major e-Readers, they’ve come up with a helpful side by side comparison for those of us nursing nascent tin foil hats. It’s worrying to note that, from a privacy perspective, Amazon fails on nearly every one of their criteria. Everything from the books you search for to the pages you viewed to how long you viewed them is recorded and attached to your Amazon profile, and are thus accessible to law enforcement, civil courts, and within Amazon itself. What’s worse, they don’t give you the option to opt out of these tracking systems or delete them from your profile. Once they’re there, you’re stuck.
Of course, any reasonable person has to acknowledge that most of this tracking is done in the name of consumer convenience, not the out-stretched arm of Big Brother. How else are you supposed to re-download titles you’ve bought unless Amazon keeps a record of them? And how else are they supposed to recommend you new titles without knowing which ones you’re currently engaged in?
And while people like me don’t have much concern for our privacy because we’re not subject to terribly much scrutiny, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who would rather remain anonymous for legitimate reasons. What if you’re a Chinese ex-pat concerned about whether your old government is tracking your dissident reading habits? Or a candidate for political office worried that reading socialist literature out of curiosity could cost her an election? These are valid concerns.
I think the middle ground for Amazon is aggregating this data in a way in which consumer privacy is preserved while also providing the necessary information for their algorithms in a quasi-anonymous way. Making explicit their commitment to preserving the privacy of their customers would also be a significant step. Amazon has already shown a willingness to push back against subpoenas, but you really have to dig to find this kind of information.
Of course, there’s always the option of just going to the old-fashioned book store and buying something in print with case. But where’s the fun in that?
What better time of year to address the state of the Kindle than in the wake of the President’s State of the Union address? Amazon recently announced their earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2009, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Is that success sustainable?
According to their statements, fourth-quarter profits were up 71 percent over this period last year. While much of that growth comes as a result of Amazon’s aggressive retail practices, it’s hard to overlook the influence that the Kindle has had on their bottom line. They have reported six Kindle books sold for every 10 print books during that period, indicating that the content attach rate is starting to work its way up to a critical mass. What’s more, gadget blog TechCrunch is citing a source close to Amazon that pegs the current number of Kindle’s sold worldwide at 3 million, as of December. Not a bad number when you consider they were only expected to sell 2.5 million by the end of 2010!
But while the state of the Kindle is stronger than it has ever been, the announcement of Apple’s iPad on Wednesday is a reminder that the e-Reader market is a constantly changing beast, and the current state of affairs should not be taken for granted. Of course, this is not an Apple blog, so if you want a full rundown on all that the iPad has to offer, check out Gizmodo or any one of the myriad of sites that have full coverage.
The aspect of the iPad that does interest me is, of course, the iBooks application that represents Apple’s first foray into the word of eBooks. Their presentation was slick, as has become customary for Apple, but I’m as dubious about the prospect of reading books on the device as I was when it was still being referred to as the iSlate. Reading on a backlit device with extremely limited battery power and no defense against glare just does not sound like an attractive prospect to me, touch screen or no.
Whether the device is ideal for reading eBooks doesn’t seem to have fazed the publishers who have already signed on to publish books on the platform. Apple is much more flexible with their pricing structure, and early indications peg their normal price point between $12.99 and $14.99, a not insignificant jump up from Amazon’s $9.99 standard. We’ve reported in past months how unhappy publishers are with Amazon’s discount model, and it appears that Apple is positioning themselves as a competitive outlet for those frustrations. The New York Times is even reporting that Amazon has pulled all books by Macmillan, one of the publishers who have officially thrown their lot in with Apple, from their site over these pricing disputes. Could it be the beginning of a trend?
Strong consumer enthusiasm for the Kindle is going to be their biggest buffer against the impending iBooks threat. Even if they’re unhappy with their chunk of the profits, it’s going to be difficult for more publishers to turn their backs on 3 million dedicated literophiles who snap up books at a much greater rate than the general population. What’s more, an increase in competition historically has downward pressure on the price of goods, so I highly doubt Apple’s effort to assuage publishers is going to influence Amazon’s pricing structure in a significant way.
The state of the Kindle is strong. We can never be totally sure what the future holds (though we do have an idea), but it seems as good a time as any to be Kindle owner. Why not jump on the bandwagon?
With the January 27th debut of Apple’s long-rumored tablet PC right around the corner, I think some people are starting to look back at Amazon’s Kindle and wonder… What’s so special about that? It’s just an e-Reader! Of course, for those of us who purchased our Kindles just for the pleasure of reading books, that seems like a nonsensical statement, but it’s a question that’s asked nonetheless.
We’ve talked in the past about the potential of a Kindle App store, where one might be able to expand the functionality of one’s Kindle in a similar way that Apple does with the App store for the iPhone. As fanciful as that seemed at the time, recent reports have signaled that this may soon become a reality. Amazon announced on Friday that they’ve shipped a Kindle software development kit (SDK) to developers, so they can begin programming for the device.
Interesting as that is, it pales in comparison to the announcement that they’re partnering up with EA Mobile to develop games for the Kindle. That’s right, the same mega-corporation that has brought video gamers titles like Madden and The Sims is developing new content for your lowly book-reading Kindle. Of course, we have to temper any expectations with the knowledge that there are a limited number of things that a developer, extraordinarily creative or not, can do with the Kindle’s grayscale screen and leisurely refresh rate. Still, who wouldn’t like some solitaire?
Some gaming sites have reached out to developers to try and get any idea of what kind of games one can expect to see as a consequence of this. An interview with one such developer confirmed our suspicions. That is, these Kindle games will likely fall under the category of puzzles and simplistic card games – the kind of fair that can still succeed within the confines of the Kindle hardware. Other, more elaborate, bits of media incorporating actual book content may be feasible as well, though perhaps further down the road.
It also remains to be seen how Amazon plans to capitalize on these new developments. Whether they’ll be content to just add them for free to bolster the Kindle’s feature list, or whether they plan to sell them a la carte remains to be seen. So when Apple finally decides to drop their new consumer gadget bomb on us all not long from now, remember that Amazon’s still fighting to entertain us as well!
The Amazon Kindle was once again in headlines this week, and this time, it wasn’t in an especially flattering light. No, instead of any mentions of the latest developments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Kindle was guilty by association in a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind against Arizona State University for discrimination rising from their use of the Kindle DX in the classroom.
Evidently, ASU had started a pilot program to see how useful the Kindle DX would be in a classroom setting. Ever since I first picked one up, that seemed to be the most practical application of e-Reader technology. I’m a few years out of college at this point, but I still get back aches whenever I think about the sheer quantity of paper I was carrying around on a daily basis. The NFB and ACB didn’t object to the convenience, however, so much as the fact that blind students wouldn’t get the same benefits out of the program because the Kindle’s text-to-speech system is inadequate for their needs.
Of course, while the principle motivation behind the text-to-speech feature is that it gives the disabled access to digital content, I’ve found that it’s actually a rather satisfying bonus feature when you figure out how to use it. I fired it up one time when I was on an airplane at night (this was, of course, before I got my m-Edge cover and accompanying e-Luminator2 book light), and I’ve also used it on occasions where reading and walking might get me killed – like walking to the store along a busy road.
I’ve never bought the argument that text-to-speech is a poor man’s replacement for the audiobook, because, frankly, the Kindle’s drab monotone is simply no substitute for an actor reading a part. More practically, the fact that just about every book I buy from the Amazon store has text-to-speech disabled by the publisher renders the feature functionally useless. It’s gotten to the point where I have to make sure I’m reading a public domain book on the side, just so I have something to turn to when a text-to-speech situation arrives.
If Amazon is categorically incapable of getting publishers to use the features of the device they sell and unwilling even to make the menus and Kindle Book Store handicap-accessible, than I think they should just drop the feature entirely. It’s one of the few novelties that they still have over the immediate competition, but it’s meaningless to have if your customers can never use it.
If you’re looking for a silver lining, the settlement agreement in the ASU case included a stipulation that acknowledged how Amazon is making progress in the accessibility of e-Readers for the visually impaired. Hopefully that represents not just empty conjecture, but a statement informed by Amazon itself. We’ll see.
For better or worse, the books you buy for your Kindle via Amazon exist only in places that receive Amazon’s express consent. They utilize digital rights management (DRM) technology to make sure that your Kindle books stay on your Kindle, or at least in the Kindle App on your iPhone or Blackberry. Sites like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, by contrast, offer a plethora of public domain titles that be transmitted from place to place without concern for brand name or publishing rights.
The benefits of the former are plainly obvious from the publisher’s perspective, but as a consumer, it’s a little disconcerting knowing that the books you spent hundreds of dollars on for your Kindle remain in Amazon’s little gated community. What if a non-Amazon e-Reader is the most attractive product on the market when your Kindle eventually bites the dust? You really don’t have any choice except to stay with the brand you’ve chosen.
Or that’s the status quo, anyway. A recent report by the BBC indicates that an Israeli hacker by the name of Labba cracked Amazon’s DRM, allowing users to make PDF versions of all the proprietary AZW files on their Kindles. Subsequent reports seem to indicate that Amazon has already patched out this capability, but the speed of the automatic firmware upgrades is unknown.
This isn’t the first time that an extremely popular DRM file format has been hacked. Anti-copyright measures in DVDs have been circumvented for years, and it was just four years ago that Apple’s proprietary iTunes file format was hacked as well. It’s a classic back and forth battle between big companies and hackers, and it always seems like, given enough time, the hackers prevail.
Demographically, Kindle owners trend towards the northern side of middle age, so it’s probably too much to expect that people are going to be going out there in droves to download an experimental beta of a program to crack the DRM on the latest Robin Cook novel. As the market for the Kindle becomes more mainstream, however, piracy could start to become more of a factor.
I think this just underscores the notion that Amazon’s quest to keep the DRM in place is ultimately a doomed one. Barnes & Noble’s promising, if flawed, lending system is just one baby step in the right direction. It’s really just a matter of time before one of the major e-Reader makers opts to lighten the DRM restrictions to gain a competitive advantage.
The sanest solution to me is to adopt the EPUB standard. It allows publishers to maintain DRM control of their content, while also allowing for portability between devices. The Kindle doesn’t support EPUB at the moment, but the Sony Reader and the Nook do. Unfortunately, Amazon is unlikely to agree to such a standard unless they feel their position is being threatened, which given the holiday they’re having, won’t be any time soon.
So for the time being, we’ll continue to plug along in our little DRM-restricted community while hackers jostle about outside, smashing holes in the fence.
If you’re planning on getting a Kindle for yourself or a loved one this Christmas season, you had better act fast. At the time of this posting, you have just under twelve hours to place your order. If you wait any longer, your Kindle will most likely arrive after Christmas day.
With the year nearing a close, here are our top 5 predictions for the Kindle going into 2010.
5. Smart phone e-reader software becomes more popular
People often bemoan the death of reading without stopping to recognize the types of reading that people actually do engage in. In these modern times of ours, it’s far more likely that you’ll find somebody reading on a screen of some sort. And while e-Readers like the Kindle are perhaps too out there for many would-be readers, smart phones most certainly are not. The tiny screen of a phone will never do for more die-hard readers, but expect to see more and more people reading on their iPhone and Blackberries.
4. Publishers fight back
It’s been a story for much of the second half of this year: as reading on e-Readers becomes more popular, companies with a vested interest in print are pushing back. First Rupert Murdoch and some of the other newspapers started engaging in a tug of war, and more recently publishers have started banding together to delay the release of eBooks. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I fully expect content publishers to continue to come together to meet this threat – perhaps even resulting in the release of a new, pro-publisher e-Reader platform. One way or another, the landscape is going to change.
3. Low-cost e-Reader released
Speaking of landscape changes, one thing I’m certain we’re going to see in 2010 is downward pressure on the price of e-Readers. Studies have shown that the optimal price for an e-Reader is somewhere in the area of $100. It’s probably too soon to expect manufacturers to be able to get it down that far in just a year, but with new entrants like Plastic Logic being added to the marketplace, I think the trend is going to be towards more barebones products (without the built-in 3G, presumably) at lower prices, just to get people on-board.
2. A new contender emerges
While publishers and smaller manufacturers do pose a threat to the Kindle, they are minor fights compared to the threats of Barnes & Noble and Sony. I expect that one more major competitor has yet to enter the e-Reader fight next year. The good money at this point is on some sort of Apple tablet, but they have been dubious about being content providers in the area of books before, so the specifics remain to be seen. Don’t rule out Google as a possible competitor as well, though in what capacity and I hesitate even to speculate.
1. New generation of Kindle
One thing is extremely clear – Amazon simply can’t rest on their laurels. While initial reports seem to indicate that the Nook’s hardware is still a little rough, it’s only a matter of time before they get the kinks ironed out of their new e-Reader. That’s going to leave a competitor on the market that not only has all of the features people enjoy with the Kindle, but sports LCD touchscreen navigation for the same price. The way I see it, there are two paths that Amazon can go from here. They can either piggy-back on No. 3 and release a stripped down version of the Kindle for a fraction of the price, or they can go all out and release a feature-rich SKU with touch-screen navigation and color. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they did both. Because while they have the brand name and the market share right now, things are changing rapidly, and it’s going to be difficult for Amazon to stay on top of the pile.
One way or another, we’ll be there to cover it.
The Atlantic, a magazine well known for publishing short fiction, will now be selling short stories in the Kindle Store. Priced at just $3.99 a pop, these stories reportedly fall somewhere in between a magazine-length feature and a full book. Short fiction usually has the dubious honor of being relegated to short story collections, but for the first time, the Kindle will make them commercially available in a sort of a la carte arrangement.
Of course, this is not the first instance of a content provider deciding to publish directly on the Kindle. Stephen King fans might remember earlier this year when Stephen King published his novella Ur exclusively on the Kindle. (Of course, that particular story happened to revolve around a mysterious pink Kindle which delivered menacing extra-dimensional literature to an unsuspecting professor, so it’s hard to say that it doesn’t actually belong there.)
For all the whining the Newspapers are doing about Amazon’s publishing deals being unfair, their burgeoning relationship with short story authors seems quite promising. In addition to an up-front fee, authors will get to split the sales revenue with Amazon and The Atlantic. Publishing exclusively through Amazon does limit their distribution to a certain extent, but this is the kind of literature that often gets buried in obscure journals anyway, so any commercial presence at all is a boon.
While they’re starting small with it, this could turn into a pretty big deal for both Amazon and the authors involved. The publishing industry as it exists today is designed to filter out any written works which aren’t commercially viable enough to commit to the page. It’s inherently exclusionary. When you remove the need to go through the costly process of printing material, it starts to look a lot less risky to publish material which might have seemed too borderline or obscure under the old system.
I think this is a niche which it would behoove Amazon to help expand. Lowering the barrier for aspiring authors to get published, and especially those who work with short fiction, is only going to increase the Kindle’s popularity amongst the world’s most prolific readers.
Personally, I’d like to see some authors experiment with the platform a little bit. Stephen King’s inclusion of the Kindle into his story was done in a sort of ham-handed way to mixed success, but somebody really needs to write a piece of fiction that breaks the fourth wall for Kindle users in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions does for readers of print.
Regardless, these are exciting times. Since Gutenberg first developed the printing press in 1440, the book industry hasn’t really been one to usher in big changes. This might be the start of a process that will finally bring them into the 21st century.