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.

Showtime Offers Kindle Readers Free Nurse Jackie Script

In an interesting, if rather small, attempt to build interest in their new Edie Falco series, “Nurse Jackie,” Showtime is offering free downloads of the a script of the first episode to all Kindle owners.

While this doesn’t make up a very large audience, I like the idea of promoting a show with the actual screenplay as opposed to clips or full episodes.  Sure, it won’t be for everyone but it is a cool insight into the process of how a show goes from script to screen.

Too bad Showtime seems to be limiting this to Kindle owners.  Don’t see why this campaign wouldn’t make sense if it was expanded to, say, all visitors to Amazon.com.

LINK

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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• Kindle E-Books on the Cheap: A Weekly Selection (9 Apr 2009) (kindlereader.blogspot.com)
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• Amazon Learns It Isn’t Easy Being the Kindle’s Keeper (blogs.wsj.com)
• The ebook question (yodiwan.wordpress.com)

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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Kindle vs. iPhone – Is It Even a Contest?

There is a great post over on CNet about the potential for the iPhone to make the Kindle into kindling.

“I’m an avid reader of digital books and for months I had my eye on the Kindle, the digital reader from Amazon, with its high-contrast screen and PC-less book downloads. Then Apple announced that the iPhone 3G goes on sale July 11.

I’m now in second-guess hell.

I know Apple has said nothing about offering an e-reading application for the new iPhone. But what happens if Steve Jobs later surprises us or some developer turns the iPhone into a whiz-bang electronic reader? I’ll tell you what happens, my Kindle ends up on eBay.”

I love the idea of an amazing eReader, but the Kindle just isn’t amazing.  It’s cool but has so many limitations compared to the potential of a fully networked, portable device.

Check out the whole post for a great argument in favor of the iPhone as your next digital reader.

I Love Novels But Do We Need Books?

I’ve been having one discussion after another about the future of books and publishing.

One friend works for a company that will be rolling out print-on-demand paperbacks from a massive digital archive – kind of like an on-site Amazon with no delivery wait or a Barns and Noble that has everything.  Cool idea, though I wonder if it removes us another step from one of the things that makes books cool – their all kinda different.  Look at your bookshelf.  It isn’t a uniform line, is it.  However, this machine will make every book identical really, until you open in.

I argue that books will go the way of LP’s – not gone but specialized and collected.  Less mass market, more unique.  Instead, let’s face it, we’re all going to be doing all of our reading on something digital.  Probably not a Kindle, since that’s first-gen hardware if I’ve ever seen it.

SAI has some thoughts on how to help move us into this brave digital age:

“Hardcover books should cost $25. And publishers should keep printing them–for people who want to buy them. Meanwhile, for everyone else, publishers should publish cheap electronic copies for 20% (or less) of the hardcover price.

$4.99 for a first run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod–or simply readable on the Internet. The retailer keeps $1 or so, the author gets $1 or so, and the publisher takes home about $3. Some of that goes to marketing and some to overhead. And then you’re left with the typical publisher profit of less than $1 (no returns, manufacturing, or distribution costs).”

Now we’re cooking with gas.

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.