O'Reilly: Amazon must open the Kindle
O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon's successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.
It's a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.
Indeed, though I'd like O'Reilly to be right on this, I think that the iPhone, which he uses to prove his point, actually demonstrates against it. O'Reilly writes:
(Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.
O'Reilly then explains that the Kindle doesn't provide this same loophole (i.e., allowing open-formatted e-books to be read on the Kindle in the same way that the iPhone enables Web applications to run on the iPhone, and in which the iPod encouraged MP3s and other free formats to flourish on the iPod).
I don't think I agree. On my Kindle, I read a variety of books that I downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, and I suspect that this will only increase as more and more free content is formatted for the Kindle.
O'Reilly's argument is much stronger when denouncing Amazon's "you must buy it from us" mentality, because it by definition limits the size of the market. Some, like Apple, may be able to execute against such a vision, but the odds of getting the world to beat a path to one's door--in the way that Microsoft did for Office and Apple did for the iPod--is difficult, indeed.
O'Reilly is right that Amazon has better odds in going with open standards. Just look at how well Sony has fared in e-books. But that's the risk Amazon is running, and it's one that has the potential to pay off big-time, if the company does it well. I believe that open standards are the right way to go, but Amazon may feel that its up-front investment in creating a device worthy of the e-book market justifies a winner-take-all strategy.
O'Reilly is right to argue this:
Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program. Or, like AOL and MSN, Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host.
But it's easy to see why Amazon might disagree and why maybe, just maybe, it may succeed to the industry's detriment. Open standards do tend to win over a market. What they don't do is guarantee a winner, which is likely why Amazon is content to play its hand rather than the open-standards hand that has yet to win over the market, just as it failed to win the emerging digital-music market.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
All of this said, it isn't going to happen immediately, and Amazon could stand to make a lot of money in while the brain of the publishing dinosaur waits to get the signal that the body is dying.
original post:
http://www.talkingfuture.com/2009/02/martin-short-answer-no-chance-it-costs.html
I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari bookshelf for a long time and used the multitudes of references in the O'Reilly catalog. That said, I found the O'Reilly subscription to be very expensive considering its restrictions and limitations. Subscribers are limited to a small number of publishers and the less popular computer related references were excluded in spite of their potential. My point is that Mr. O'Reilly does not necessarily implement what he preaches for his own sites. I am a new kindle owner and by canceling my O'Reilly subscription, I am able to afford & justify it! Amazon offers many more resources at competitive prices than does O'Reilly at this time.
I don't know whether this is Tim O'Reilly's error or Matt Asay's, but MP3 is not a free format:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
"The reality is that openness is just an attribute -? it?s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It?s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective."
The key point is that all of this is an argument for Amazon platform enabling Kindle more so than an argument for making it open, per se. Read the full post at:
Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
http://gigaom.com/2009/02/22/is-being-%E2%80%9Copen%E2%80%9D-an-absolute-in-mobile/
Cheers,
Mark
- by ss02906 February 24, 2009 12:17 PM PST
- Absolutely I agree with the assessment. I am in the market for ebook readers and since I researched the Kindle, I was essentially put off by the restrictive latch on amazon mentality its based on. I will be buying Sony's ebook reader that can read word docs, pdfs & even txt files instead. What makes Amazon think that I will be buying a dedicated device only for reading books? I might want to do a lot more than that and you trying to restrict what I can do or not do with the item which I paid for is simply retarded and invoke disgust in potential customers I would say. The success of Iphone is partially atributted to the cracks that make it possible to work with any GSM carrier.
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