Amazon's Kindle obsession: Bury the printed book

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos loves to talk about the Kindle e-book reader. He's even got media mogul Oprah Winfrey pitching the device: "I'm telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world," she recently said.

The Oprah endorsement is just the latest marketing scheme Bezos has applied to making the Kindle the next iPod. He has been relentless in promoting the Kindle at the expense of maximizing Amazon.com revenue on the virtual storefront.

Every time I go to Amazon I am greeted with a huge Kindle ad that takes up most of the screen space. Amazon's computers know that I have seen this ad hundreds of times but they persist in showing it to me instead of products that are based on my viewing and purchase history and would have a higher probability of getting me to spend money.

At the same time, Amazon refuses to talk about the number of Kindles sold, but willingly discloses that the wireless device provides instant access to more than 185,000 books, blogs, newspapers, and magazines.

Apple, on the other hand, is happy to let the world know that 6.9 million iPhones and 11 million iPods were sold in the last quarter, and the iTunes catalog has 8.5 million titles.

One can only presume that Bezos worries that the sales numbers are not sufficiently stellar to share with the world. Disclosure of what could be perceived as lackluster Kindle or e-book sales would heap a lot of negativity on the fledgling device on Amazon, which pulled in $4.26 billion in its last quarter.

For Bezos, the Kindle is a second revolution. He started Amazon more than a decade ago as an online bookstore, and gradually added other product lines. As iTunes and Netflix took off, Bezos moved into digital music and movie delivery, and with the Kindle he is laying the groundwork to empty Amazon's warehouses of physical books.

During the Q3 earnings call, Bezos downplayed any cannibalization of print book sales by the Kindle: "Kindle's effect is additive to physical book units. Post the purchase of a Kindle, owners buy 1.6 times as many book titles and the same amount of physical books."

Reading his statement, it's apparent that Kindle buyers are already book lovers, and haven't yet weaned themselves off of print. But Bezos is very patient, and clearly willing to invest long term in his Google-like vision--digitize the world's information and sell it through Amazon.

Perhaps with Oprah's help and a new and improved version due next year, the Kindle will achieve escape velocity and Amazon can stop showing me the annoying Kindle ad and disclose how many units have been sold.

As for eliminating physical books from the warehouses, books are lagging music and video. The end of print is not near, but the writing is on the virtual wall. The economics of the Internet, as well as technology innovations such as improved virtual paper, instant translation, and always on, fast connections to a universe of knowledge indicate that Bezos is on the right track, just as he was in creating a virtual shopping mall for physical goods in 1994. And, he will have lots of company, or competition, as the digital age gets into full swing.

[The_Decider]

Amazon is kidding themselves is they think that the terribly named Kindle is going to take over printed books. The only benefit it has is that it is easier to carry then a bunch of books.

Great for students and professional people, but that same box is a hindrance to marking text.

No way anyone is going to "curl up with a Kindle" instead of a small paperback.

It is a niche product serving a very niche market that will not expand.

[Kesteral]

I disagree. While I don't own a kindle, I do have an extensive library of e-books, both work and school related as well as fiction for personal enjoyment. I really like the idea of being able to have something more portable and readable than a laptop (too bulky) or cellphone (too small of a screen). My problem with the kindle is the price. What I would like to see is a e-reader that is subsidized by the publishing companies, who then will charge a little more for their e-books... perhaps about what it would have cost to print them on paper. I don't have a problem with paying a few bucks more for an e-book, if they can make the experience worth it.

As far as comfort while reading, I suspect a kindle would be about as easy to 'curl up' with as any other rectangular object.

[The_Decider]

Kesteral,

I only named a few issues, but missed the big one: DRM.

You can't resell it, loan it out, give it away, etc.

The Kindle exists for several purposes:

1. Destroy the used book market.
2. Save printing costs without passing the savings to the consumer
3. Force everyone who wants to read it to buy a copy instead of checking it out from the library or borrowing it from a friend.

The publishers that get it right are those that also offer a PDF copy for free or discount to those who bought the book.

I am a graduate student studying in a field that works pretty much the same in the "real" world(computer science-more specifically network/application/web programming and security research). A digital copy is nice, but pales in comparison to having a physical copy.

[crazyate]

"No way anyone is going to "curl up with a Kindle" instead of a small paperback."

Riiiight....

I personally have purchased 14 books since I received my Kindle in April, 10 of those were books I would have bought in paperback if I didn't have a Kindle. I don't even know at the moment how many free/public domain books I've read from Feedbooks or Project Gutenberg, but I'd guess that it's somewhere between 10-15. It was far easier and more enjoyable to read The Count of Monte Cristo on my Kindle, being able to look up words instantly as I came across them and highlighting and saving pages as I pleased, than the first time I tried to get through the book I borrowed from the library.

It is a niche market, but I disagree that it won't expand. The popularity of the Stanza app for the iPhone is a good indicator that people are interested in reading ebooks. The Kindle, and similar devices, may not be right for everyone at the moment, but it's just the beginning.

[lacykemp]

The thing about this is, I like books because they're cheap entertainment and they're easy to give away when you're finished. The funny thing about this is I buy all of my books either used from Amazon for ~ $1.00 or get them at garage sales. I can't see myself ever spending $359 on this. That's A LOT of books..

[book_geek]

Until ebooks can be "rented" from the public library, I will not even consider a device like the Kindle or Sony Reader (which I like better anyway). About half the reading I do is from the library.

[Fission25]

I "curl" up with the Kindle on many a night. The only thing stopping it from being every night is the lack of books available. Though the selection has improved since launch. Even with that little problem I'm still impressed with the Kindle overall, and I've had it since early-February. It's actually much easier for me to read than a normal book- much clearer and cleaner text.

As for it being a small niche market, perhaps. But then again, the home computer was an incredibly small niche market when it started. The same could be said for mp3 players as well. Now, I don't imagine ebooks will ever see their popularity - unfortunately people just don't read very many books anymore, regardless of medium - I am, however, hopeful that with Amazon and Sony marketing these devices, that electronic books will be here to stay.

There are 5 Kindle owners just within my family, another 14 with friends and co-workers I personally know, and at least 10 more when including friends from the internet. I've also started seeing people with the Kindle at Panera and other little eateries around town fairly often. I can only hope that Oprah's support will help bring more publishers and books towards it.

[kroh13]

I have owned my kindle since February, and may I say that its plenty easy to curl up with. I never leave home without it. Beside the obvious benefit of storing many books in one small device and being able to take them all with you, what about the benefits to the environment? I beleive as more people become aware of devices like the Kindle it will become commonplace as other things like cell phones and ipods have. Most libraries in major cities do have lending programs for e-books now, and that will also become more common.
With my Kindle I find that I read faster and with less physical discomfort as you can increase typeface size and turn pages with a button push. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it!

[spinoza2]

In terms of selling an idea, the Kindle and the iPod are a study in contrasts. Apple took an already well-established but floundering idea--digital music--and showed the world what was possible when realizing (and marketing) the idea as an iconic device. Digital books, in spite of the naysayers, has the same potential as digital music, but amazon (and Sony with its e-Reader) has not been able to execute nearly as well as Apple in creating an iconic buzz around its device.

What does amazon need to do? In terms of functional design, elegance, and ergonomics, the Kindle is not a digital iPod by any stretch of the imagination. It's good, but it needs a lot of work. Amazon should admit this by aggressively improving the device, and by creating more than one model. Next, in spite of amazon's ridiculously inflated numbers for available ebooks, the availability of ebooks needs to be significantly increased. The vast majority of new books I would like to buy that have appeared over the past year have not been available as Kindle books (I've been carefully monitoring this). Amazon needs to be much more pro-actively assertive in getting the (conservative) publishers to include e-book versions of their books. Also, the supposed $9.95 price of e-books in the Kindle Store is a chimera, a soundbite that appears to be rarely followed by the publishers. Steve Jobs was much more successful in developing the iTunes Store in the first couple of years than amazon with its Kindle Store.

If amazon is unwilling or unable to follow through with such strategies, I see the Kindle's momentum in realizing a permanently robust e-book market slowly withering away... until another Apple steps in and shows how it can be done.

[pbg3445]

I ill buy a portable book reader when there's a non-proprietary open source reader available.
But then, when there's a book I'd like to read, , instead of clicking on Amazon, I go to my public library and request it. More often than not, when they don't have the book, they'll buy it. That way my property taxes pay for the book, and after I'm done, the whole community has the use of it.
And when I do buy books, when I'm done with them, I donate them to the library, unless I've spilled salad dressing on them.
If Amazon thinks they're going to replace libraries with a for-profit proprietary system, based on an expensive box that is nothing more than a stunted laptop, they're completely crazy.

[lawrencewinkler]

I purchased 2 books from Amazon a couple of years ago, which were DRM'ed and readable with Adobe Version 7. Though I own these books legally, paying almost the same amount as for the physical version, they are now unreadable. Adobe versions 8 and 9 do not recognize them -- cannot be decoded. And, neither Amazon nor the publisher is willing to make good on giving me new copies (though they both agree I own the copies legally).

Further, I bought the ebooks to easily copy and paste included forms for my own use, which the books explicitly (in writing) gave me the permission to do. However, the DRM encoding did not allow what was explicitly allowed by the author and publisher of the hard-copy version, and further, no portion of these forms could be printed. Funny, if I had owned the books, I could have scanned and OCR'd the forms and been legally and contractually able to use and modify the forms to fit my specific needs.

eBooks. A guaranteed rip-off. The key issue. Real books will be available and readable and browsable for decades if not centuries. Technologies, patents, will render all such eBooks non-existent in very few years. Volumes of data, currently residing on mainframe/mini-based magnetic tapes, are being lost to the "advancement" of technology. Microfiche? -- dead. 8-inch floppies -- dead. 5-inch floppies -- dead. 3 1/2 inch floppies -- dead. 8mm backup tapes -- dead. Name a new media device and encoding and it will be obsoleted. Nothing worth preserving should be archived or published in these new media. The ephemeral, the flotsam and jetsam produced in ever increasing numbers -- certainly they can be published in electronic form as their loss will have no impact.

Go to any library, especially university and large metropolitan public libraries, and state historical libraries, and immerse yourself in materials hundreds of years old -- still relevant and readable. The stuff produced today? -- in a few years, it will be as though they never existed having left no trace.

Maybe that's a good thing!

[keithrt49]

I'm an airline pilot and I own a Kindle and use it every day. But in all my travels since the Kindle was introduced, I've seen only one other person using one. Not a good sign.

[kindlehelper]

I understand th initial boost in sales from the Kindle purchase, but wonder what the long term outcome will be? Will it even be profitable to print a newspaper or book if they are readily available in electronic formats?

[bobkrause]

I'm a big fan of e-books, but I don't believe I'll be buying a dedicated e-reader any time soon. Why should I when there are applications like eReader and Stanza for the Palm and iPhone/iPod Touch? Stanza on my iPod Touch is just as readable as the Kindle and it's free! Additionally, it's easy to download thousands of books free from Project Gutenberg or any number of other sites as long as I'm in range of WiFi (home, work, Panera Bread, etc).

I've never bought a new e-book just as I've never bought an MP3 album...I believe the prices are too high for each. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, I want something for it besides bits and bytes. Bring the prices down to about half of what a physical book or CD costs and I'll be buying like nobody's business.

Bob

[bobkrause]

P.S., both the Palm TX and the iPod Touch cost less than either the Kindle or Sony Reader and they both can do a lot more than just read books!

Bob