IP Democracy: Why Amazon's Kindle Might Actually Succeed

The entire A-list blogosphere has swarmed onto one topic this morning: Amazon is going to unveil at a press conference today its much-rumored new portable book reading device, which is called Kindle. Newsweek's Steven Levy was given the scoop on the controversial gadget and Amazon snagged the cover story in the process.

What is Kindle? It's a 10.3-ounce, paperback-sized device that will cost $399 and it will be capable of storing 200 books. Kindle will come with its own EV-DO wireless connectivity system called Whispernet that will allow owners to download any of the digitally rendered books on Amazon (currently 88,000 and growing) for an average price of $9.99/book.

Although the business model specifics seem to be garbled in the article, Kindle owners will also be able to subscribe to and read newspapers on the portable reading unit, as well as subscribe to select blogs, weirdly enough on a premium basis, either $.99 or $1.99 per month. (I agree with Mathew Ingram that paying to read blogs is a non-starter of the first order.) Kindle-ites will also be able to conduct Google searches, look things up on Wikipedia and more.

Book purchases are a snap on the Kindle. Owners tap a key and download a book. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book -- not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print -- on this device in less than a minute," Amazon's Jeff Bezos told Levy.

Forget everything else about the Kindle but this simple statement and you'll understand why the Kindle might very well succeed where other ebook devices have, if not failed, then failed to capture the kind of press that Amazon is getting. There's a huge pent-up demand by millions of people to buy books that aren't available at the nearby Barnes and Noble or Borders outlets, which are basically virtually all books ever written.

These and other mass market-oriented brick-and-mortar booksellers have severely limited, low-brow selections and have all but wiped out speciality book stores across the U.S., if not the world. Amazon and other online booksellers have also done their part to wipe out independent booksellers, but they, at least, have deep and varied catalogs. But today's online booksellers can't gratify immediate needs. It takes days or even weeks for books ordered online to arrive.

Tens of millions of people do have immediate needs for books and they're called students. Or the parents of students. From high school on up, students are frequently asked to read or access scholarly or important books not available at Barnes and Noble or even the campus book store or even school libraries. Crises then ensue.

Ask any parent of an eleventh-grader how much pain they've suffered in trying to track down, say, Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1956 play "The Visit" at the last minute for a make-or-break semester project that his child forget to mention, and suddenly $399 seems a small price to pay for handy access to any book ever written. In frantic situations like these, $399 can crazily seem like a small price to pay for the book itself.

The point, however, is that the Kindle could catch on with that most prized group of consumers, young people, who grow up and continue doing what they did when they were students, thereby making innovations permanent. School systems and universities could also get into the act, subsidizing classroom or even student purchases of the thing. Along the way, the price of Kindle will surely drop.

It helps that Kindle doesn't have to be connected to a computer to get the job done. It also helps that Amazon, with its huge catalog and power in the publishing world, is backing this effort. Having a wireless connection is the icing on Kindle's cake. And despite the photos, Kindle isn't, apparently, as fugly as it seems.

I usually think that any kind of media service that requires the upfront purchase of a costly device is DOA because history tells us that this is so. But not, maybe, this time. Kindle, if it functions as well as Newsweek's Levy says, fills a real need and could catch on with the right demographic and slowly become a ubiquitous device that makes the bad-for-the-environment and ridiculous-to-produce printed book seem like a quaint vestige of bygone eras.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 19, 2007 8:18 AM to IP Democracy