Kindle Nation Could Be 10 Million Strong. But What Happened to Amazon’s “Save the Newspaper Business” Plan?
by Peter Kafka
Posted on August 13, 2009 at 5:04 AM PT
Have you bought a Kindle? Do you plan on buying a Kindle? If you answered yes to either question, you’re part of a not-that-small group: JP Morgan estimates that some 10 million Americans either own one of Amazon’s e-book readers or plan to get one soon.
That projection comes from a survey of Web users that Internet analyst Imran Khan commissioned last month. Khan’s survey found that 37 percent of respondents were familiar with the Kindle. And of that group, five percent said they already owned one of the devices, and another 15 percent said they expect to buy one within the next year. Extrapolating those results for the U.S. population, Khan figures that Kindle ownership will hit 10 million in the next 12 months. (Click chart to enlarge)
OK. But what if Amazon (AMZN) dropped its proprietary ebook format, a supposed weakness that competitors Sony (SNE) and Plastic Logic are trying to take advantage of by agreeing to use an open, common standard? Won’t matter that much, say Khan’s respondents: Only 15 percent of people who say they don’t plan to buy a Kindle cite format issues as a concern. I’m surprised the number is that high.
On a related note: Whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to work with the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO) to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its jumbo-sized Kindle DX reader?
When Amazon unveiled the DX in May, it briefly mentioned plans to sell the $489 machine at a discount to people who bought subscriptions to the Times, Post or Boston Globe, but didn’t say much more than that. Details were supposed to be released “this summer.”
Now we’re midway through August and we haven’t heard a peep about the program. What gives? I asked Amazon, the Times and the Post, and none of them had anything to say–save for a comment from a Post rep who said that the subscription-plus-discount offer would be “a small experiment.”
Comments
The price of the Kindles has been too high for me, so I just use the iPhone app and download books, something that has worked surprisingly well. The only downside is no newspaper subscriptions, but that is a limit from Amazon.
Posted by David Owens at August 13th, 2009 at 9:16 amI got a Kindle 2 because I couldn’t wait any longer to try “the technology”, but I’m looking forward to the competition and already thinking about getting one of the new Sony readers.
If Amazon is wise, they will get hardware neutral real fast and also abandon the semi-lock-in restrictions on the device.
No, I’m not talking about DRM… that’s a publishers option. I’m talking about small irritants such as the fact that only clippings from Amazon downloaded content can be viewed online and that items, even public domain works downloaded from the Amazon store can’t be deleted from and increasingly unmanageable list of “archived” items.
Why did the native format for the Kindle have to be a new invention rather than one of the many existing standards. HTML works, but you have to name it “TXT”. Bizarre. Why can’t it handle PDF files without conversion?
Etc.
Posted by Mac Beach at August 13th, 2009 at 10:21 amNow that I’ve read the rest of the article
I think a more important demographic to survey are those who have already at least tried a Kindle for an extended period.
All of the newspapers available via Kindle have 3 stars or less out of 5, even when accompanied by a few glowing reviews.
People complain about sections being missing, graphics (even ones the Kindle is capable of displaying) being missing, delivery issues, etc.
It’s still developing technology, and it’s inconceivable that there won’t be problems such as this, all of which will get worked out as long as there is a competitive market for both the hardware and the content.
It would be horrible if Amazon got a lock on this technology, just as it would be if Google, Microsoft or the New York Times did. I’m optimistic that it will be almost impossible for a single company to control this technology, so the sooner they all start engaging in “cooptition” the better.
Every device, and every title that is purchased before some sort of industry standards take hold is likely to be rendered obsolete. That’s what I tell people who ooh and ahh at my Kindle… don’t buy it for the long term.
It appears that many people have already figured that out.
Posted by Mac Beach at August 13th, 2009 at 10:36 amThe growth of ebooks will catch everyone by surprise. According to the AAP, ebooks accounted for under 1/2 of 1% of all book sales in the US in 2008. This widely reported statistic has caused many to take a wait and see attitude on ebooks. More recent data suggests we may already be at 5%, and maybe even that’s conservative. Jeff Bezos thrives on being misunderstood, and by end of year or Q1 2010, it’ll become readily apparent most of us grossly underestimated the potential of digital books.
On the DRM and proprietary format issue, most Kindle customers don’t care because they’re not looking for ebook portability to multiple devices. They’ll start to care, however, if and when they try to switch to other ebook reading devices. And they’ll care more when second generation ebooks come along that act like networked information nodes where various ebooks and other bits of digital content need to interoperate and communicate with one another. This second generation, though, is probably several years out.
Posted by Mark Coker at August 14th, 2009 at 7:47 amThe problem with the Kindle is it pretends that books are black and white when they are not. It replaces a steady stream of paperback novels for some users, but nothing else. The happiest users are romance/mystery/sci-fi novel fans who can read 3 per week on Kindle in a much more practical way than carrying out armloads of paperbacks from their book store. If you were already buying a steady stream of newsprint reading, transferring it over to a Kindle can be very practical.
However, for most of us, to adopt a book reader en masse, the book reader will have to be able to show any arbitrary page of any book every published. It has to match the eye in the way that CD/iPod matches the ear, able to store and reproduce the entire visual range on the book reader so it can reproduce any book ever published.
Children’s books are often books of paintings, art books are paintings and photos, technical books have essential figures and diagrams, fiction has illustrations, even pulp fiction typically has a full-color cover. Even the very earliest books had hand-painted illustrations and sometimes gold leaf painted on the first letter of a chapter. Books about TV and movies have color prints from TV and movies. Magazines are full of color. The Web is full color and universal and necessary, and books about the Web are color. Design books are color. Interior decorating and recipe books are all color. You have to have a color screen to show book content. You have to have at least Web-level interactivity if only so you can make Internet links in books and magazines functional.
Kindle reminds me of the MP3 player I had before the iPod came out. I work in pro audio, so I knew there was something dramatically wrong with a 1999 music player that could store half of the songs from a CD in really bad quality, lower than an old analog cassette tape. I still had one of these proto-iPods because I’m a total audio nerd, like Kindle owners are all book nerds, but I couldn’t even explain to most people why they would want one for themselves. So I think there is an iPod of book readers coming. But it’s going to have to be something that can show all books.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at August 14th, 2009 at 4:30 pmIf Amazon and Barnes and Nobles want people to start reading content on eReader devices, they need to start giving them away for free… with a service contract, much like the cellphone industry.
Posted by Joe Robinson at August 17th, 2009 at 4:08 pmMost people already understand these types of contracts and will feel like they are embarking on a reading plan and not purchasing a device that will become obsolete in a couple of years. This way readers could bundle content and keep it simple. For example you could sign up for a 24 month plan where you pay $20 a month for the right to download one book a month and two magazines or one book and a subscription to a newspaper. This type of Sales model is proven to work well with cell phones I think it would work even better with eReaders. I predict that the first company to adopt this model will become the eBook/eReader Leader.
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