Summary
The Kindle is only a short-term phenomena for various reasons; long term it's doomed...it will be killed off by ebook-format Netbooks, which provide much more bang for the buck.
Analysis
The following article was originally accepted for publication by Publisher's Weekly over a year ago, though it never saw the light of day. It's old...but the conclusions remain true today.
I'm no ebook skeptic. I work for an ebook-technology company, and have always argued against the shortsighted "people don't want to read on a screen" argument. I believe reading on a screen is not only the future, but that screens are already the primary reading "platform"...in this new, connected world, more hours are spent reading words on screens than reading words on paper.
But I also believe the masses will never buy ebook devices. Rather, they'll purchase devices that do lots of things, including work as reading devices. Thus Amazon’s Kindle is doomed; five or ten years from now it will be gone, or irrelevant, or morphed into what is essentially a laptop.
Spend a little time reading reviews of the Kindle in the press, in blogs, or even on Amazon itself, and you’ll find that you can distill the complaints into this basic statement: "The Kindle's cool, but it's too expensive for an ebook reader...if it just did more...if it had the features of a laptop, now that would be great!"
Here's why the Kindle, along with all other dedicated reading devices, won’t become a significant sales channel for ebooks: the average book buyer simply doesn't buy many books that could be purchased through the Kindle. If you read five or ten books a month, buy a Kindle. But average Americans buy five or ten books a year, and some of those purchases are gifts, or coffee table books, or impulse buys...grabbing a book on the way through an airport, for instance. A Kindle just doesn’t work for such purchases.
Now, if you owned a device you used for other purposes, and that device allowed you to buy a book when the urge took you, well that’s fine. But for most Americans, spending $400 for a device they may use now and then makes as much sense as purchasing skis just in case they decide to take up winter sports one day.
Who exactly is Amazon targeting? Certainly not the most important sector in digital publishing today, academic publishing. Academic publishers need color (sadly lacking on the Kindle), and are beginning to use embedded video, sound, and Flash, built-in self assessments, book-to-server communications for tests, shareable highlights and notes...the Kindle is a world away from this market! In any case, most students are carrying laptops, so PC-based books make more sense…do we expect them to carry another device? (Laptop, cell phone, iPod, Kindle?)
Okay, then, how about book worms? Is that a market for the Kindle? Well, many of these people are diehard paper lovers, the very last people who will give up on traditional books. It looks to me like the Kindle's natural market is a very small demographic—early adopting, book-loving geeks!
I think Amazon probably made the oldest mistake in the technology book… it decided that ebooks were good for business, and that because the optimal device didn’t yet exist it would create it. That never works, you can’t force an idea onto the market before the basic technology is ready; sometimes you have to wait a few years for technology to catch up with your ideas.
So what is the
perfect ebook reader? It’s a device that can do everything the Kindle does, and
everything a laptop does. All the technology exists today; it’s just not ready in
the sense that it’s not yet the right price to market as an ebook reader. You
can’t sell a device like this for $399 right now…but you will be able to do so in two to five years. You can already find
laptops for under $400, after all. There’s absolutely no reason that five years
from now you shouldn’t be able to find a small, light laptop with the “form
factor” of an ebook and the capabilities of a full-blown PC, for the price of a
Kindle.
But remember, millions of laptops are being sold at prices well above that of the Kindle, and these could be modified to look and work like books. Sometime soon someone’s going to build a new type of laptop, one designed with comfortable reading in mind. At that point the Kindle will start to look rather pointless.
