Free WiFi and Barnes and Noble and Beyond…

Word is that Barnes and Noble is now offering free WiFi.  This is cool simply for the fact that the more business that offer free WiFi, the more pressure will be other businesses to do the same.

Speculation is that the free WiFi in Barnes and Noble has happened in part to allow users of their new, forthcoming eBook reader to download books while in the store.  I wonder if this could threaten the underlying brick-and-mortar sales?  Probably not, at least until a much greater number of people are using an eBook reader.  Right now, I still consider the spotting of a Kindle in the wild as a special occurrence.

I’m surprised the struggling Starbucks hasn’t extended their free WiFi beyond iPhone users and Starbucks cardholders.  This would help to keep them distinguished from competitors like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds.  Actually, I have seen free WiFi offered in a number of McDonalds so the competitive edge might be lost already.

The larger question is whether or not we will ever see the dream of free WiFi anywhere we roam. For a while, there was free WiFi in a number of NYC’s parks and all of Philadelphia was nearly given free WiFi before plans fell apart.  One has to suspect the biggest obstacle to providing free WiFi is the existing internet service providers who do not want to see their core business eroded.

Still, it seems like a strong tide is rolling in and it will not be long before we are all logging on for free, at least for slow-speed connections.

Kindle Actions Explain Popularity of Piracy

While the major publishers, studios and labels bitch and moan about how piracy is destroying their business they continue to make decisions that only reinforce the reason people resort to piracy in the first place – and no, it’s not all about price.

Take this for example:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.      LINK

Now, Amazon has backtracked slightly, claiming these titles had been released without proper authorization but that doesn’t change the underlying issue.  In the good ol’ Industrial Age, if you went to a store and bought a book and took that book home than that book was yours forever.  No matter what some publisher decides later, nobody could come into your home and take back that book without being charged for theft, even if they left a few bucks on the shelf.

In a similar manner, when I acquire a song or film or ebook via a file-sharing service and I download that file to my iPhone or laptop, that file is mine and, without a fair amount of hacking, nobody can take that file away from me.  I can move it around, copy it and even share it with other friends because it is mine.

With a Kindle, the fact is your never OWN anything.  All you really are buying is an extremely limited license to read the book on your Kindle unless Amazon decides otherwise.  This is not the same thing as buying a book.

Unless the major content distributors of the world figure out the difference they will continue to lose to the gray market that allows people to truly own their content.

Blogs on Kindle a Failure or Just Overpriced?

Piers Fawkes of PSFK has not been a fan of the Kindle and I can’t blame him.

Recently, their rather popular blog became available on the Kindle with a 14-day free trial and then the standard Kindle blog subscription rate of $1.99/month.  Here’s what happened:

During the first two week period of sales we added a button advertising the service to all our newsletters, website pages and RSS feeds – approximately 250,000 impressions. As some of you may remember, I penned the opinion piece ‘Kindle’s Not Working‘ last week and these sales figures surely prove statistically that Amazon’s technology is a failure when it comes to blog publishing and readership. It’s crazy to read that the tech media continues to be deluded about Kindle’s success when even with a 14 day free trial and massive awareness among our readership we can’t muster more than one $1.99 a month subscription.    LINK

Now, it isn’t really all that surprising that so few people decided to subscribe to the PSFK blog but I wonder if it has more to do with the $1.99/month pricetag combined Kindle’s failure as a rich media device – and it is a failure with no pictures, no video, etc.

Think about it.  If you are anything like me, you read a fair number of blogs.  In fact, I would say that I currently have over 50 blogs subscribed to in my GoogleReader.  If I wanted to even come close to replicating that experience on the Kindle it would cost me around $100/month or $1200/year just to read blogs that completely free online or via my iPhone.  On top of that, the Kindle is a completely inferior blog reader due to the aforementioned lack of rich media capabilities (or color, for that matter!).

So, while I am sad to hear that the Kindle will not be a revenue-generator for blogs, I think it was foolish for anyone to think otherwise given the overall picture.

The Kindle is Ripe for Replacement by Superior Products

I’ve never been a fan of the Kindle.  While I have never owned one, due to the fact that Amazon never sent me a trial version, I have played with the Kindle on a number of occasions.

While the eInk screen is nice to look at, the entire experience reminds me more of my Atari 800 than a gadget for the 21st Century.  Even disregarding the obnoxious DRM that means you never truly own your purchases, the whole thing is just limiting.  Aside from being able to carry a few hundred books at once, something we all do now by hand, the device has very little use in today’s society.

PSFK’s Piers Fawkes, who actually does own a Kindle, seems to agree:

Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t fit my reading, sharing and working habits. Over the last five to six years the way I consume text, imagery and other content has changed. Like the most of you I spend time everyday reading content across newspapers, magazines, blogs and other news feeds. I use that news (from 850 sources). I cut extracts, I send links, I copy images, I share it to Twitter and Facebook, I just let stories hang around deep in my open tabs possibly to be looked at before. And I want to do all this in as little time as possible.   LINK

This tells me that whoever can combine the readability of the Kindle with the facility of an iPhone and price the whole thing at $199 will make a bundle.

Kindle DX a Poor Newspaper Replacement

Yesterday, I wrote about why I thought the Kindle DX was a terrible choice as a replacement for the traditional textbook.  I also suspected the Kindle DX would be a terrible choice as a newspaper replacement.

Early word from CNet begins to confirm these suspicions:

Since most of us can’t simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I’m afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.

The issue is that neither the format nor interface of the Kindle DX makes the process of skimming feasible.  With a dead-tree newspaper, it is a quick process to flip through all the content and dig deeper when you catch an article that interests you.  The way the Kindle DX handles the content forces a constant “flipping” from screen to screen at a rate that is slower than physically turning a page.  On top of that, each “page” only holds a fraction of the content one can capture on a page of the newspaper.

And what about the Kindle DX as compared to the iPhone or a laptop?  Not good:

These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it’s really quite easy to flick through the day’s top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede…At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It’s easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each “section,” and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.

So, not only isn’t the Kindle DX superior to a real newspaper, it is a far less capable newsreader than either the iPhone or a laptop.

Did I mention it costs $500 and only displays in greyscale?

Kindle DX an Absurd Textbook Alternative

Amazon has released their oversized and overpriced new eBook reader, the Kindle DX and is claiming that the two greatest things about this device are how it will expand the reach and availability of newspapers and provide and fantastic alternative to dead-tree textbooks.

Sounds great but here are some potential issues.

1) The Kindle DX is currently almost $500.  Even if the price is subsidized and cut in half it is not a cheap device.  The idea of bundling a cheaper version of the device with newspaper subscriptions is only a benefit if the buyer isn’t just paying for a all the subscriptions to newspapers on top of the supposedly lowered price.  In other words, if the Kindle DX is your for $200 if you also sign up for a $100/yr sub to the NYT that’s not a great savings.

2) For all the Kindle DX can do, it is nowhere close to as powerful or useful as, say. a $500 netbook computer.  If you want to replace hardcopy textbooks with digital versions, that’s a great idea but locking those digital copies into a closed system like the Kindle defeats the entire purpose.  Not only is the Kindle stuck in greyscale – a factor that would seriously effect the value of many textbooks – but it is impossible to easily integrate the textbook into a student’s workflow when the data is stuck on another device.  For instance, a digital version of a textbook that a student can read on his computer is great.  He can quickly highlight and search sections online, cut and copy bits for notes or ideas or questions, etc. and have all that stuff in one place when it comes time for test prep and paper writing.  No way the student can do that with a Kindle.

3) It’s yet another device to carry around.  One that is somewhat fragile and now annoyingly large.  It can be folded up or tossed into a pocket.

Kindle Users Learn Difference Between Licensing and Ownership

In the simple days before the internet and digital technology the concept of buying a book was pretty simple.  You went to a bookstore and you gave the bookseller money and he or she gave you a stack of bound paper with words (and sometimes pictures) printed on the pages – a book, if you will.  Once the transaction was complete that book was yours forever.  You could resell it any price the market supported.  You could trade it or loan it or use it as toilet paper.  It didn’t matter.  The book was yours.

Unfortunately, as ArsTech points points out, in the current time of eBooks, the idea of buying a book is not quite so simple:

Amid the general love-fest over the Amazon Kindle, its DRM is beginning to bite some users in the butt as they are getting locked out of their accounts and, subsequently, their e-book purchases. The incidents highlight once again that the customer doesn’t really own the content when it comes to DRM; even when it’s so loose that it’s not apparent day to day, it can still hurt you in the long run.

Whether due to a change in “terms of service” or due to violating exisiting agreements, Kindle-owners have found themselves actually locked out of accessing books they had already purchased.  I like ArsTech’s metaphore:

A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn’t take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.

There is a reason that even iTunes has given up on most DRM for music and it won’t be all that long before book publishers will have to follow suit or find themselves fighting a similar losing battle against “pirates” who think it is unfair for a company to control access to content once the customer has completed their purchase of said content.

LINK

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Should Kindle Fear Literate Pirates?

Some Kindle users are upset over the $10+ cost of eBooks for the device and have begun to tag such books in an effort to convince others to boycott them and somehow drive down the price.

I’m not so sure this particular effort will have the desired effect.  However, the guys at Freakonomics are on the right track:

One of the boycotters’ main complaints: you can’t lend out your e-books to friends. When digital music fans were confronted with this problem, they just made illegal copies.

As we have seen ad nauseum in the music world, once a product is no longer controlled by a physical scarcity (i.e. paper books) but can instead be transimited in a purely digital and thus unlimited manner, it becomes very difficult to convince consumers to pay the same amount they once paid for the hard good.

If the publishing industry isn’t quick to respond it is hard to imagine why there wouldn’t quickly be a pirate market that succeeded in meeting consumer needs instead.

LINK

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Pros and Cons of Kindle on the iPhone

So, the free Kindle app for the iPhone has come out and it raises some interesting questions.

For starters, what do I need a Kindle for now?  At almost $400, the Kindle is way more than an impulse buy.  Sure that eInk screen is pretty and the battery life is great but it can’t call my girlfriend or surf the web.

Another question, explored in detail over on CNet, is whether or not iPhone/iTouch users will be willing to pay the $9.99 price-point for the books.  There are not a lot of ten dollar apps right now and most iPhones I see are loaded with free and cheap apps.  So the idea of paying ten bucks for an eBook on the iPhone might be too much to ask.

Of course, Amazon is a little stuck, here since they can’t offer a book for one price on the iPhone and twice as much for the same book on the Kindle, especially with the sync feature.  I have argued before that eBooks are overpriced but it is going to take a while longer before we see significant drops in the price of popular titles.

It will be interesting to see how book sales go on for Amazon on the iPhone.  The combination of a tight economy and a high pricepoint might be too much for potential readers.

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As E-Book Popularity Grows, So Do Legal Questions

Image by dailylifeofmojo via Flickr

There is a piece in Wired about the growing popularity of reading E-Books on the iPhone.  At the same time sales for Amazon’s Kindle continue to grow rapidly (even though the device itself is far from perfect).

I love so much about E-Books, from their obvious portability to the potential for hyperlinking everything from definitions to other readers comments.  Plus there’s the whole zero-environmental impact as compared to the printing and distribution of an actual paperback.

The biggest problem I have with E-Books is that current DRM-related issues and publishers general terror of the future means that is now almost impossible to read a great E-Book then give it to your friend to read.  My bookshelf has long been a source and resource for friends looking for something great to read and it gives me great joy to share my books.

Now, it appears those days are numbered unless the publishers figure out what the music labels were late in learning – sharing increases sales.