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.

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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Amazon Kindle Bows to Idiotic Author’s Guild on Text-to-Speech

Sure, the Kindle 2 eBook reader from Amazon is over-priced and the eBooks themselves are over-priced but its a device who’s time has come and one that will be with us in some form or another well into the future – or at least until our eyeballs become part of a hard-wired internal computing service…

Much like you can do on your own Mac or PC pretty simply, the Kindle 2 offered the option of having a rather digitized and un-emotive voice “read” to you.  This caused a flare-up from some authors who felt this was stepping on their ancillary audiobook rights.  It sounded so absurd that I never imagined Amazon would actually back down.  I was wrong:

The only significant change to the experimental section in the Kindle 2 was the addition of a text-to-speech capability that allowed the Kindle to read content to its users in one of two synthesized voices. Following an extended outcry from some in the publishing business, however, Amazon has backed down and will allow publishers to retain control over whether to expose their texts to this capability.

While there is nothing especially wrong with letting publishers opt out of this feature, none of their logic makes much sense.  First, these synthisized voices are far from what one gets with a true audiobook read by a trained professional.  it’s the difference between hearing a symphony recording of Ode to Joy or listening to a synthisized ringtone version.

They would argue that the voices might not be “real” yet but they could be someday.  They’re right but it still doesn’t justify their complaints.  The truth is that the authors will never stop this process and they are better off understanding that the abilty to listen to a book I bought presumably to read is an added value that can increase sales overall.

I wish Amazon had stood up to the author’s guild but it’s just a matter of time before technology settles the matter for all parties.

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• Authors Guild successfully kills Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature, it’s now optional for publishers (crunchgear.com)

Two Great Examples of Free Content Boosting Bottomline

Two stories caught my attention, both of which add evidence to the idea that giving your content away for free can actually increase your overall potential for montization – or as I like to say, Cashification.

First, Mashable has some follow-up to Monty Python’s innovative approach to combatting pirated clips on YouTube – they made their own YouTube channel where they posted everything they’d ever done for free.  They also provided links to the actual DVDs and CDs for sales at Amazon and iTunes.  Can you guess what happened next?

Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Still not convinced.  How about this from TechDirt in their story about idpendent musician Coery Smith, who both offers his music for download free on his own site and for money via iTunes:

However, as an experiment, they took down the free tracks from Corey’s website for a period of time last summer… and sales on iTunes went down. Once again, this proves how ridiculous the claim is that free songs somehow cannibalize sales.

The fact that there are so many stories like these makes it ever more difficult to accept the current business practices of the major music labels and studios.  While they spend more time and money on hunting down and prosecuting their one-time customers their current customers are running our of patience and will jump ship, too.

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Pirates Fire Warning Shot Over Amazon’s Bows

I am just tickled pink by this Firefox add-on that gives you a “free” option while shopping at Amazon:

“The timing of the ‘Pirates of the Amazon‘ launch could not have been more (un)fortunate. At the busiest time of the year for on- and offline retailers, this Firefox browser add-on offers users a download link to pirated copies of products that can normally be found in the Amazon online store.” (via)

In other words, if you look up “Pirates of the Caribbean” this is what you see:

Clicking on “Download for Free” takes you to The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent site, where you can, should you wish to take the legal risk, in fact download a copy of the movie for free.

What does this really all mean?  Well, it certainly isn’t a legitimate threat to Amazon’s bottomline – yet.  It is, however, a warning to all producers of things that can be freely copied and distributed that they had better make sure the paid version is worth the price.

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.

The Future of Reading! (or maybe just books…)

I’ve been having lots of interesting conversations about the future of publishing and books and reading.  Often, I find, these topics get mixed up in ways that aren’t always helpful, but they are clearly locked together in many intrinsic ways.

One friend of mine is working with a company developing a print-on-demand system for books that would exist at point of purchase – basically a book vending machine that will give you any title you can think of (as long as they’ve secured the license to sell it to you).  Pretty cool.  Though, as we discussed, it isn’t exactly changing the basic paradigm of the book itself.

What might do that is some evolution of the eBook, of which Amazon’s Kindle is the most visible at the moment. Writer Ezra Klein spent one month with a Kindle and has written a great account of his experiences for the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Compared to this [paper books], electronic text is a GPS system. You tell it where you want to go, it finds the route. The whole book is searchable. So, for that matter, are your notes, which can all be stored. Favored passages can be clipped and saved in a separate file to facilitate more rapid review. When text ceases to be fixed, when margins swell to an infinite expanse, when every word can be sorted and searched, the failings of our brains are hardly noticeable. Your bookshelf becomes your mind’s external hard drive. It’s a shiny new e-brain, a Google that searches your personal intellectual universe.”

This is a great read that raises a ton of potent questions for anyone in the world of writing or publishing books.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

I have been arguing for some time that the Music Industry has been like a canary in the coal mine as far the film/TV industry should be concerned but so far it doesn’t seem like they’ve learned anything at all.

Wired has a sort of open letter to the industry addressing some of these issues:

” To succeed in the digital realm, Hollywood needs to offer total convenience, almost infinite choice, and the freedom to watch any way we want. Instead, we have iTunes, which delivers video you can’t watch on any portable device that wasn’t made by Apple, and Amazon Unbox and Netflix’s Watch Instantly, which feature downloads you can’t watch on any device that was made by Apple.”

This is something covered heavily in “The Pirate’s Dilemma” and elsewhere.