On the reaction to Amazon’s Kindle
Ok, so it’s official, the internets hate the Kindle. I guess it isn’t surprising, but it got me thinking about their arguments and why I, on the other hand, was kind of excited by it.
The most common argument is that we already have laptops and iPhones why the hell do we need yet another form factor to tote around? The first half is easy - laptops? Is there any significant portion of society who is reading books on their computers? Bringing their laptop to the beach for some light reading? Pulling out their laptop while they’re in a line to finish reading that last chapter? Busting it out on the subway to catch up on the latest, while looking like a complete tool and mugging target? The answer, my friend is no. The laptop argument is just silly.
The iPhone argument is less silly. It’s a pretty darn good reader and perfect for filling in idle moments with the latest blogs. On the other hand, the screen is small (320×480 compared with the Kindle’s 600×800 - and if you’re suggesting reading on a palmos or winmob device with even smaller screens, um… ok…) and it projects light directly into your eyes (as opposed to the Kindles passive, paperlike e-ink screen). I would not relish reading anything particularly long on the iPhone and I do read a lot on my iPhone. It starts to get annoying when I’m reading a long page of text (say the-isb) or if I want to hold the iPhone further away from my face. The Kindle with it’s larger screen and adjustable font size is, simply, a better form factor for reading books and magazines.
Sure it’s a drag to have another device with you when you’ve got one that maybe gets you most of the way there. But I just don’t see myself enjoying reading anything more than a few grafs long on my iPhone. The Kindle is the size of a trade paperback and weighing a hair over half a pound, isn’t really that onerous to toss into the ol’ bag and it seems like Amazon built in a bit of durability. So on this front, I don’t believe that iPhones and laptops fit the bill to replace the portability and convenience of books, newspapers and magazines. The Kindle may - it at least comes much closer to it than anything right now.
Another problem I see a lot is pricing. The easy one is charging $1.99 for blogs. Simply put, I completely agree. It is crazy. I guess, since some RSS feeds are partial if Amazon’s providing you the full monty that they need to pay the feed provider for the loss in ad revenue. Whatever, it is completely nutty and I’d have skipped any special blog attention rather than try and charge for it and build up the ill will of the internet.
On the other hand, charging $14.99/month for the NY Times or $9.99 for the WSJ? What could possibly be the problem with that. I would rather read my newspaper on a convenient nice form factor than have to hone my origami skills folding and unfolding the paper to get it into some manageable size all the while not getting my fingers all smudgy and nasty. Plus, I believe, although could be wrong on this front, there are no ads so the newspapers lose advertising dollars and while they save printing and distribution costs someone has to make up the difference. In a newspaper world of an ageing readership, making it easier to get the newspaper experience may not save them, but it certainly can’t hurt to try. I know the blogging world thinks everyone’s a journalist now and there’s no difference between me and an NY Times reporter, but some people still enjoy that distinction.
And what’s wrong with $9.99 for new books currently only out in hardcover? That’s like half off and you get it instantly. Seeing how I’m paying close to $8 to buy mass market paperbacks and it’s taking 2 or 3 days to get to me (not to mention the year I have to wait from the emergence of a hardback to it’s re-emergence as a paperback) I’d gladly pay the $10. Sure the price could probably drop and everyone’d still make a tidy profit, but even at this price I still see a benefit to me (lower cost, faster delivery) and I am ok with cheaper and faster.
There’s also all the crazy suggestions. Like Seth Godin coming up with a remarkable twist on give away the razor sell the blades. Urr… Sell the razor, give away the blades? He thinks Amazon should keep the kindle at $399 but give away all the books for free. Yes, sure that’d be great. Why stop with the books, why not also give the Kindle away for free? Why not pay me to read?? I’d also like a unicorn, please. Yeah, imagine, Amazon didn’t listen to him when he suggested that…
And then I accidentally read Mark Pilgrim’s post where he tries to make 6 ambiguous (but definitely terrible seeming) assertions by the simple act of quoting various things. His first one is, admittedly awesome, and then the rest are mostly just innuendo that actually say nothing but certainly hint at something evil and malignant. I need to have some kind of Firefox plugin that makes it impossible for me to read his site.
Or, I could probably stop reading Daring Fireball since that’s mostly where I stumble across the links. The problem is that DF is really good. He presents what is, in my opinion, the biggest problem with the Kindle - it’s DRMiness. The problem here is not so much the .azm file format that Amazon’s selling all it’s books with (although it is a problem for Amazon - people will be leery of buying books in a format that only Amazon has with no way of reading it except through the good graces of Amazon). The real problem is that it doesn’t accept enough kinds of open content. Amazon has positioned themselves as the one and only gatekeeper to content on the Kindle, going so far as to charge you for things you want to put on it (like word docs and images).
This is a big mistake. The more content there is the more compelling the device is and especially in these early days, sure there’s a good amount of content but it’s all part of the fat head not the long tail. Apple pioneered this idea with the iTunes - sure they (used to) only sell DRM tracks, but they made it really easy to get your other songs into your library. Really easy. So there was instantly a ton of content and look at Apple now with the keys to all the kingdoms.
Bestsellers are great, but e-publishing could give a gigantic, meganormous boost to the small and self publishers of the world. Give them the opportunity to easily get their content on this device and I suspect they’d jump on it. If they could also sell through Amazon, I’m sure many of them would, but some would like to give it away free and open. If Amazon boosted these efforts by providing self-publishing tools to get content on to the site where authors could choose the pricing (all the way down to free) that’d jump start the content machine. For example they could take their publish-on-demand service and offer an alternate Kindle version.
The other problem is that the Kindle is just plain ugly. Shocking to find a consumer product like this in a post iPod, iPhone world. Sigh. Hopefully all the net mockery will have Amazon scrambling to find some good industrial designers to give v2 a makeover.
Anyhow, given that the internet is likely to be the early adopters the prognosis doesn’t seem particularly wonderful for the Kindle. Still it’s possible that reviews could come in by people, you know, who have actually held and used the device for some period of time that confirm or dispel all these myths - and if it’s dispelling could ignite a little love for the guy. Cause honestly, I wouldn’t mind all the tech books I read in a small, always by my desk and searchable/bookmarkable format. Would you?
