Here comes another one

How many "Kindle-killers" have been announced or released in the past two years? I've lost count. Yet despite the flood of killers on the market, the Kindle is still doing quite well, thank you. As you've no doubt heard, Amazon announced that for the first time ever, Kindle book sales surpassed physical book sales on Christmas sales.

Of course the rallying cry of Kindle scoffers has been "B-B-B-But just wait until Apple comes out with an e-book reader!"

It would appear that very day is near. January 26, to be precise. That is the date that Apple has (allegedly) reserved at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where they will (allegedly) introduce the long-anticipated iSlate(tm), the mega-super-mondo-all-in-one tablet device. The rumored feature list grows everyday, and includes everything from gesture-based page turning to video playback to mammography screening.

One thing that everyone is certain about, however, is that it spells doom for the Kindle.*

In a recent blog post -- re-published by the Huffington Post -- tech blogger J.S. McDougall gushes over the possibilities.

I'm not going to reveal any names, but I have it on very good authority, for example, that--unlike the Kindle--the new Apple tablet will, indeed, have a color screen. Might it also ... play video?! (Please pardon the sarcasm.)

It's amusing to consider the evolving criticism of the Kindle. First it was "It will never replace the physical book!" Now with Apple's digital marvel on the way, the Kindle criticism has turned into "The Kindle is too much like a real book! All it does is display text!"

"Digital books should include author interviews, instructional videos, pop-up definitions of esoteric terms, instant foreign translations, optional soundtracks, links to helpful web sites, and anything else publishers and authors can dream up to increase the value and effectiveness of their content," asserts McDougall.

Really? Do we want our books to do all that? In an age when we're constantly surrounded and bombarded by audio/video stimulus, don't we just want to sit down and relish the written word on a plain page occasionally? One of the great things about the Kindle is that it does not get between the reader and author. As Stephen King pointed out back in 2008, after a while the device simply becomes invisible, allowing the reader to become fully absorbed in the story. Also, the Kindle offers no distractions to get in the way of reading (Sure there's a web browser, but it's so bad we're never tempted to actually stop reading and use it.). I see that as a positive.

Aside from that, the Kindle's two biggest strengths are e-ink and wireless access to Amazon's vast selection of e-books -- neither of which the iSlate will have (allegedly).

So why might Apple's Kindle-killer succeed? The same reason the iPod became the number one MP3 player despite that fact that it was neither the first nor the best of its kind: it's made by Apple. Say what you want about Apple products, but the brand carries a hipness and smugness that outweigh any consideration of features and price.

There's no doubt the iSlate will sell big, regardless of what features it does or doesn't have. That's the power of Apple marketing (warning: contains some NSFW language). But after the strongest holiday season ever for the Kindle, and with Amazon's on-demand e-book selection growing every day, is the Kindle really in danger of losing its core audience of people who just like to read? After all, despite what Steve Jobs has said, there are obviously still quite of a few of us around.

A glimpse of the future?

At the end of the film 2010, Dr. Heywood Floyd looks up at the new sun that had been created in our solar system and observes, "You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that they were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a warning from the landlord."

Amazon's recent Orwell (and Orwellian) debacle served as a similar wake up call for me as a Kindle user.

People are still debating over whether Amazon handled the situation properly.  Some, including our own Joe Wikert, have offered suggestions on how Amazon could have handled it better.

But what bothers me is not whether Amazon was right or wrong in removing books from our Kindles -- it's the fact that they had (and still have) the technology to do it at all.

In a recent Slate column titled "Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four," Farhad Manjoo warns that we've just glimpsed the future of book banning.  Sure it sounds alarmist now, but consider the possibilities.  As Manjoo observes, Amazon's mass deletion "sets up a terrible precedent.  Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely."

Unthinkable?  Perhaps.  But now we've been shown that it is technically possible.

Manjoo's suggestion? 

Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.

I'm not quite ready to go that far, but I do think we need to keep the pressure on Amazon.  And the incident has made me think twice about purchasing Kindle editions of books.

I'm sure Amazon didn't intend to send a message when they deleted those files from our Kindles, but a message was sent nonetheless.

It was a reminder that we do not really own the e-books we purchase from Amazon. 

It was a reminder that when we abandon physical media for digital we give up a lot of rights.

And it was a reminder that the media giants who sell us that digital content wield an ever-increasing amount of power.

We Kindle users just got a warning from the landlord.    For the future's sake we better pay attention.

Has the incident made you think differently about the Kindle or the future of ebooks?

Paul

Follow me on Twitter @phigginbotham
What I'm reading now on my Kindle:  Nothing.  I'm reading a dead-tree edition of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury by Kevin Phillips.

How do you spell "shortsighted?"

S-o-u-r-c-e-b-o-o-k-s. As in Sourcebooks, Inc., an independent book publisher that recently announced it is thumbing its nose at e-book readers.

In an article titled "Publisher Delays E-Book Amid Debate on Pricing" from the July 13 Wall Street Journal (I'd link to it but WSJ are stingy with their online articles and the link would expire in a week), the chief executive of Sourcebooks says they are delaying the e-book release of the latest in their Brian Hambric series* for as much as six months after the dead-tree version hits shelves.

* I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's pretty popular with the Harry Potter crowd?

"It doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99," said Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks, which issues 250 to 300 new titles annually. "The argument is that the cheaper the book is, the more people will buy it. But hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it." An e-book for "Bran Hambric" will become available in the spring, she said.

Let's break that down a bit, shall we?

First, "It doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99." Um, it doesn't make sense to whom? Wiser folk than I have repeatedly done a great job at breaking down the various costs involved with publishing and shipping dead-tree books. Sometimes those costs even include being forced to accept unsold merchandise.

When you take away those costs and replace them with a digital product that by nature is in unlimited supply and costs you nothing to distribute how much larger is your profit margin?

Consumers are savvy. They understand these things. No one, especially Kindle owners who cherish reading, wants to cheat publishers or authors out of hard-earned money. But no one wants to be gouged either. Like it or not, the market has settled on a $9.99 price point for new novels. As a publisher you either embrace it or risk alienating a growing percentage of your readers.

Second, "But hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it." Maybe you can help me with this one because it just baffles me. Are the profit margins for publishers that much higher for hardcover books than for e-books? If so you're doing something wrong. And if not, why does it matter in what format your fans read your works?

Is it a sentimental clinging to the venerable printed word? Is it a growing fear that as the e-book market grows and the dead-tree format shrinks there will be less of a need for publishers at all?

After watching the music industry completely fail at accepting and embracing digital technology and seeing the resulting consequences, it's almost unfathomable that any other major media industry would make the same mistakes. But the publishing industry is heading in that direction.

Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. and Geoffrey A. Fowler. "Publisher Delays E-Book Amid Debate on Pricing". Wall Street Journal. 13 July 2009.

Paul

Follow me on Twitter @phigginbotham
What I'm reading on my Kindle: Nothing! I'm reading a dead-tree edition of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.

The Lion That Squeaked?

Look out, Amazon! Google is getting into the e-book market! Or as the New York Times puts it, Google is "throwing down the gauntlet."

Sayeth the Times,

In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device.

Google boasts that unlike Amazon e-books which require the proprietary Kindle, their e-books will be accessible on multiple devices, including phones and PCs.

And publishers are giddy because Google plans to let them have more of a say about e-book prices, giving them more control over their commodities than Amazon does.

Anyone would be foolish to underestimate Google's impact on a market once they set their sights on it, but am I the only one who sees the flaws in their plan?

First, attacking the Kindle by making e-books available on multiple devices is a nice concept, but has Google considered that one of the keys to the Kindle's success is that people don't want to read to books on computer or cell phone screens? To paraphrase an old political attack, "It's the e-ink, stupid."

It bothers me not one bit that I can't read my Kindle e-books on other devices because I have no desire to.

Second, giving publishers more control over pricing will certainly bring plenty of them running to the table to do business with Google, but have they been paying attention to the virtual revolution that Kindle users have initiated over pricing? One of the biggest and most active threads in the official Kindle discussion forum is titled "Boycott anything over $9.99."

Publishers: "Hurray! We can raise the price of our e-books and increase our profits!"

Consumers: "Uh, yeah. About that..."

E-book adoption has been slow enough. Do the publishers think raising prices will help? Perhaps they think that multi-device access will make readers more willing to loosen their purse strings? Or are they just so scared of what Amazon means to the future of publishing that they're anxious to back any other contender?

Again, I wouldn't dare dismiss Google's venture into e-books -- or any market -- as folly. They'll undoubtedly make an impact. I'm just not sure they quite have their finger on the pulse of the consumer in this case.

Paul

Follow me on Twitter: @phigginbotham
What I'm reading now on my Kindle: Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Juilan Barnes

Some Kindle pundits have caught Whine Flu

As you've no doubt heard by now, Amazon recently announced that they will finally begin charging a fee for sending personal documents to your Kindle wirelessly (after giving it away for two years).  Instead of charging by the document, as they had originally planned, they will by the megabyte -- 15 cents per MB rounded up to the nearest megabyte.

Of course Kindle critics see this as one more sign of the Kindle's future downfall. 

One blogger asks "Does this increase lessen the value of the Kindle?", and proceeds to express his displeasure at the pricing change.

My favorite headline so far comes from C-Net:  "Amazon's Kindle: Your fat personal docs aren't cheap." 

Exactly how "fat" do your personal documents have to be before transferring them wirelessly is no longer cheap?

Just for a frame of reference, I visited Project Gutenberg and looked up War and Peace.  Any guess on how much that "fat" txt file will cost to transfer under the new pricing structure?  60 cents.  That still seems like a bargain for document conversion and wireless delivery, especially considering we're paying no monthly fee for wireless service.

Of course PDFs are much larger than text files, but given the dodgy quality of PDF conversions for Kindle I doubt too many Kindle users will be concerned about PDF pricing.

I don't know about you, but I don't have too many Tolstoy-sized personal documents sitting around that I need to transfer to my Kindle.  But if you do, fortunately there's always the free solution of transferring documents to your Kindle manually via USB cable, either after converting them yourself using a program such as Calibre (which we introduced you to earlier), or by using your @free.kindle.com email address.

I'm certainly no Amazon apologist, but the whole thing seems to be much ado about nothing.  I strongly doubt it will affect future purchase decisions or send any current Kindle users scrambling to eBay to list their device.  Not until Apple unleashes their "Kindle Killer," that is (yawn).  But that's another column.

Paul

Currently reading on my Kindle:  Nothing!  I'm reading a real paper book from my local library.  Ugh.  Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-zinn.

Follow me on Twitter @phigginbotham.

But I could buy a netbook for that!

A few weeks ago my old television died. I decided to finally take the plunge into the world of high definition television. I shopped around and found an HDTV that suited me perfectly.

But then it hit me. For the same amount of money, or less, I could have bought so much more. I paid good money for something that does only one thing -- display video -- when I could have spent a little less and had a machine that not only displays video but also plays DVDs and VHS tapes! What was I thinking?! Surely the machine that does it all is much better.

That's the mentality that pervades many who scoff at the Kindle's steep price tag and uni-tasking nature. Read an internet forum about the Kindle and without fail some naysayer will eventually bring up netbooks as a better alternative. After all, the Kindle only does one thing well: display e-books. Why wouldn't you prefer a netbook for the same money since it can do so many other things in addition to that?

The problem is, we avid readers don't want another device that does all those things. We want something designed specifically for reading books. Period. And while netbooks can certainly do the job, the quality of the screen, the battery life, and the ease of purchasing new reading material can't begin to compare to the Kindle.

Dan Ackerman of C-Net's "The Download Blog" discovered just that recently when he pitted an Acer Aspire One against the Kindle as an e-book reader.

"In the end, our Netbook was not a perfect substitute for the $359 Amazon Kindle 2. The Acer Aspire was heavier and harder to hold onto, and while the screen was bigger, unlike the Kindle's muted grey-on-grey, the bright glow of the LCD is tiring to the eyes after a while."

Ackerman still views netbooks as a suitable alternative, especially given the price of the Kindle, but as a pure e-book reader he admits that the Kindle wins.

Don't get me wrong. I like netbooks and would love to have one someday. But not for reading.

Multi-purpose devices are handy, but sometimes you want something that just does one thing -- and does it better than anything else.

---

Currently reading on my Kindle: Silas Marner by George Eliot.
Follow me on Twitter @phigginbotham.

All are welcome. All are welcome. Come into the light.

We Kindle owners are a happy bunch.  We delight in looking at our Home screen and seeing the long list of books at our fingertips everywhere we go.  We love finding a new book on the Kindle store and clicking that "Buy now" button, knowing that in a minute or less we're going to be reading that book.

But we also know that not everyone is ready to join us on the e-book bandwagon.  We've discussed the objections that publishers and authors have over e-books, but there are also many readers who don't look too kindly upon e-books.  The recent announcement of Kindle 2 has spurred a flurry of "Why I don't like the Kindle" op-ed pieces.  Many of them have one thing in common:  fear.

Specifically, many bibliophiles are glancing longingly at their grand collection of books amassed over their lifetime and getting misty at the thought of a life without them.

"Will Amazon’s Kindle 2 Make Our Library Obsolete?" ponders Bloomberg's David Pauley.  Pauley brags about the library he had built in his new house and describes "the serenity I find when surrounded by real books."

Pauley writes "Today, I’m worried that technology will make books obsolete."

Mike Rau, a columnist for Dailypress.com, echoes the same type of worry in a recent essay titled  "Technology can't replace paperbacks."

"So, to my friends at Amazon (and Sony), I can tell you that I'm impressed with your device. It's a wonderful technological gadget.
But I cannot now nor ever support anything that might so directly contribute to the demise of the printed word."

If you aren't ready to embrace the Kindle or e-books in general, fair enough.  Old habits are hard to break.  And some people will always prefer the look and feel of real paper to an electronic screen.  But I don't understand the fear.  Why do some feel that it's either/or when it comes to e-books and physical books?

And the term "obsolete" bugs me.  When I think "obsolete" I think of 8-track tapes. 

Unlike most media that is supplanted by newer technology, the book will always survive because it's a self-contained delivery system.  Fifty years from now you'll be able to pick up a book from your shelves and access the content the same way you can today.  Sadly the same can't be said of that box of 5 1/4" floppy disks left over from my Atari 800 days.  Now that's obsolete.

My guess is that even when (or if) the day comes that e-books are overwhelmingly outselling physical books, that won't spell the demise of the printing press.  Perhaps decades from now dead-tree books will become less common -- they may turn into a niche market, much like the vinyl LP market is today (Ever try to convince an vinyl enthusiast that CDs are better?) -- but books will always be around.*

Even those who adopt the e-book as their preferred reading medium will most likely still turn to dead-tree books now and then for special editions or works from their favorite authors.  Some things are simply worth having in physical form.  And there's a big difference between a book you want to read and a book you want to own (And as long as DRM is around there will always be a large distinction between the two.).

So fear not, Kindle naysayers.  Your libraries are safe.  Books and e-books can live in harmony.  Join us.  We'll be here to welcome you with open arms when you're ready.

Kindleville readers, do you have any additional words of comfort for those who fear the death of print?  Or do you think there's a ring of truth to their worries?

* Newspapers might be a different story, but that's another column.

---

Follow me on Twitter: @phigginbotham
What I'm reading on my Kindle right now:  American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Will Kindle users buy fewer books?

That's what Peter Smith at IT World thinks.

In his article "Amazon Kindle's impact on book sales?", Smith suggests that Kindles may have a negative impact on book sales. Why?

Smith offers two reasons:

1) The easy availability of free public domain books at places such as Feedbooks.com.

2) A change in browsing/shopping habits. Smith claims that having instant access to almost any book you want makes stocking up on books to read in the future unnecessary.

"So it seems to me that owning a Kindle would cut down on the number of books I purchased (but not the number of books I actually read)," Smith says.

My first reaction to Smith's assertion was "Rubbish," but looking at my Kindle reading history I saw that most of my books have in fact come from Feedbooks.

Still, I've bought several books from Amazon too -- definitely more than I would have purchased otherwise. It's tough not to buy books from Amazon via the Kindle given how easy it is. And odds are most of those public domain books I've downloaded for free are books I probably would have checked out from my local library rather than pay for anyway, so I don't think Amazon lost any of my money there.

I've heard a lot of Kindle owners say they read more than ever since getting their Kindle, but I've never asked precisely what they are reading.

What say ye, Kindle owners? Are you buying more or fewer books? Does Smith's argument hold water?

Our take on Kindle 2.0

Amazon's announcement today of the Kindle 2 has reignited interest in its groundbreaking e-book platform.


Here's our take on the new features. Add your own thoughts to the comments to share your take on the new version.


1) Smaller form factor. "Thinner than an iPhone" is Amazon's point of comparison for the newer, svelter Kindle. To the degree that a thinner Kindle is a lighter and easier to hold Kindle, then it's slimmer profile is a positive enhancement.


2) Crisper, faster display. Like my hair, the Kindle 2.0 screen is sporting more shades of gray these days. While early reviewers have said that the new screen technology doesn't create a noticeable difference, higher resolution theoretically means e-books that are easier to read and that are closer to the contrast and readability of ink on paper.


3) 2 gigs of on-board memory. You can never have too much money, and gadget owners can never have too much memory. While it's not likely that anyone is likely to fill up 2 gigs of memory out of the gate, having built in memory saves Kindle customers from having to shell out for an optional memory card.





4) Read-to-me feature. Using text-to-speech technology, the new Kindle will read to you in an easy to understand but decidedly computer-generated voice. As I wrote previously, I wish Amazon would have enabled the ability to read a Kindle book while listening to the audio version. Time will tell, but I don't predict that having a Cylon read your novels to you will be very popular.









5) Whispersync will synchronize your progress across multiple Kindles, and, soon, multiple devices. I'm not sure how many Kindle owners have multiple Kindles they read the same book on, so out of the gate this feature doesn't impress me much. The real promise, when viewed in light of the news that Amazon will be making Kindle e-books available on the iPhone, it may be that Amazon will bring Whispersync to other platforms sooner rather than later. This would mean that you could start to read a chapter from a novel on your Kindle in the morning, and pick right up where you left off and read the rest of the chapter at work on your iPhone at lunch. This has the potential to be very convenient and very cool.



6) Exclusive Stephen King novella. UR, written exclusively for the Kindle, will be available for $2.99 near the end of the month. It's great that Amazon is exploring new models such as commissioning content for the Kindle. It's not clear if this represents a commitment to new publishing models or a publicity tactic to mark the launch of the new device.


So, will any of the new features prompt you to purchase a Kindle 2.0?

Take our poll to express your opinion!

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