How Amazon cocked up Kindle
THE LATEST WORD ON AMAZON'S Kindle is that one is on the way with a much bigger screen, which will mean that it can handle bigger page formats, to help it take a slice of the lucrative newspaper market.
All good stuff, but the problem is the Kindle will likely fail because Amazon is a book company trying to use technology to peddle its products.
All it would take for the Kindle to run world-wide is for it to be able to operate using a conventional 3G SIM that can access the web. It would not need a lock-in deal with any supplier which would probably be happy to have the Kindle as a service.
But for some reason Amazon is fudging this simple transaction and kept the service entirely in the US. In the past, Amazon has claimed to find no one in the UK or EU who will agree to operate the service the way it likes.
In the US, a single deal covers more people than in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined, Amazon said.
But the real spanner in the works is that Kindle runs on a wireless technology called Whispernet which uses EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimised) technology. This only runs on a CDMA network, which is not supported in Europe. This has to be one of the more stupid decisions that any company could have made.
A technology company with an eye on world-wide expansion would not have thought about this.
But even then, we would have thought that making a 3G Kindle would not have been that difficult. But to a non-technology outfit like Amazon it appears impossible.
Last year Amazon UK's managing director, Brian McBride, claimed the legal complications were holding back a Kindle launch in Britain rather than technical ones.
McBride said that if you buy a Kindle in the UK and want to read it on the beach on holiday in Spain, unless there are signed deals with Spain it is not going to work on that beach.
But that is not exactly true. You could still read your book and you could look at all the books you had downloaded, you just could not run Amazon's weird and wonderful Whispernet.
The real problem is that Amazon does not want to sell you the gadget if it can't sell you the books and can't connect to you on a regular basis.
Why does Amazon need this level of control? Surely if you buy your Kindle in the UK, load up with books before your holiday, you can avoid connecting to Amazon for the two weeks you are away, or the few days that you are on a business trip?
While there is no doubt a demand for the service in Europe, Amazon does not seem particularly keen on adapting its policies to get it here.
This is strange because book sales in Europe are stronger than those in the US which is seeing even its flagship book retailers such as Barnes and Noble suffering and book distributors crashing.
So if the Kindle is going to fail because Amazon can't bring it out of the US, it will stop many of the magazines who would dream of using it for worldwide distribution from signing up.
Book publishers are already looking warily at the Kindle model. True, it saves them a fortune in production costs but there is the security risk that books distributed this way could end up being distributed free on the net. Kindle is the most proprietory of all the ebook formats, but its titles have appeared in P2P sites.
To compete against a hard copy, a title also has to sell at a price which is considerably lower than a traditional format. Professional-looking layouts are also a problem as the format requires HTML based systems which are nowhere near printing industry standards.
Amazon hopes to see lots of Kindles sold. But in our opinion that will only happen when an eBook reader is successfully made and distributed by some company that is not a bookseller µ
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If it was not then selling ebooks worldwide probably would put Amazon in a very uncertain legal position. This might explain why it is sticking to one country.
EVDO capacity is probably much cheaper for them to negotiate for in the US; CDMA networks probably have surplus capacity whereas SBC-AT&T has been struggling just to support the iPhone.
Europe is a whole different market for mobile data, where SIM-swapping is common and people will bring their own service. But the Kindle is specifically positioned as a (*the*) just-pay-per-month even-grandma-can-use-it appliance/service for the US, where one "simple" monthly bill keeps the device active.
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The assumption is that an open, global Kindle would serve Amazon better, but they've clearly built themselves a cash cow with plenty of lock-in and a userbase that won't be in a hurry to migrate when the Next New Thing appears; the .com will probably happily support paid ebook downloads in other formats when a more standard system appears, but that R&D won't be on their dime.
So this is a case of wishing the device were something they didn't feel like building -- aka "wishful thinking." It's more about snagging the heavy fruit among frequent-fliers, bookworms, and the literati that blow through print faster than the postman can deliver it.
It may also be about promoting the "subscription model" for wordy content in general, which is of interest to merica's troubled fish-wrap industry. Even possibly-healthy periodicals like Time are drooling over the idea of cutting their distribution costs while keeping customers billed, and hyping up the Kindle accordingly.
Nick, calm down. It sounds like you're in a fit of jealous rage!
The kindle itself is not that great. Adding a PDF reader may pull it over--but then you'd have to lug that huge DX footprint all around.
No, the Kindle App on the iPhone is where it's at. Works all around the world, and fits in the palm of your hand.
Plus, the Kindle marks you as one of the literati, I mean, TrueNerds. The iPhone? Just a smart consumer.
Here in the USA we can enjoy the Kindle, but so what? It's nothing compared to living in the land of British humor...
The Kindle is a joke. Here's one of the punchlines:
If you are working on a paper, book, story, screenplay, and want to load it onto YOUR Kindle, you have to pay Amazon to do so..
Hmmm, YOUR device, YOUR work, YOUR desire, THEIR money.
There are other problems as well, but that is the one that really sticks in my throat.
Interesting article. I don't see the big deal here, the eBook technology is clearly in its infancy, the pricing too, prices will come down at Amazon once there's real competition. Technologically speaking, they're waxing the Sony at the moment (seems like Sony, who owns part of a cell phone company, would remedy that part of it fairly quickly). And there will eventually be still lighter units, with still bigger screens, and eventually color. First IBM PC was $3k and monochrome. Now much more powerful systems are available for $300. Same progression will happen with eBook readers. As the quality of the Kindle displays gets better, as the price comes down, sales will take off. They're not bad now, but they will take off as critical mass and functionality are reached. The costs of printed distribution, just doesn't work anymore. The printed book will go the way of the portable CD-player after the iPod came out. Will people buy purpose specific book readers like Kindle? Yes, just like they bought purpose specific music players like iPod.
In the land of the illiterate they really only want to read the date, time and location for the next monster truck rally or WWF extravaganza.
Books?? What would they use them for? Propping up a wobbling La-z-boy or throwing at the old lady when she won't fetch another beer. The old fashioned kind work much better than the Kindle for that. Well the Kindle might fly straighter...
So what was Amazon's mistake? Selling ebooks to Yanks is like freezers for Eskimos.
The whole e-book file-sharing mayhem that is sure to occur once the Kindle (or a product like it) actually becomes popular will be some serious deja vu. When will the nanny state (and greedy industry) learn that it can't stop file-sharing? Unless the public eventually folds to DRM-proprietary everything (which I think is outrageously unlikely), people are going to figure out a way to share! Data will cease being a commodity!
The true paradigm shift is coming where pure data will be valueless. The pay-per-view internet will become the Library at Alexandria* and we all will move on to bigger and better things. Much of the data economy will HAVE TO shift into a pseudo-gift economy to coexist with this new world. Many things already have: a great deal of electronic art (web comics and the like) are almost completely supported by donation... as is Wikipedia. Music and literature will be next, its only a matter of time.
*One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, it allegedly held all the known information on every subject.
Or how about ITOME, IVOL, IREAD which is more of a statement. But you know perhaps the best is just a juiced up bluetooth screen for your IPOD.
Amazon can't even get the format of the address right in the EU. For some reason the brains at Amazon assume the format has to be the same in the US and EU. Not to mention details like the date, time and units. They can't even write something as simple as "kg". And now you expect them to realise that the world does not care about that old US CDMA telephony technology? :-)
Anyway, Amazon can put their DRM pest where no sun shines.
Hey, remember what happened to Walmart in Germany? :-)))
The Kindle device is completely irrelevant. Here's why:
It doesn't read eBooks (PDF, DjVu, CHM)!
Gonna get one of those Chinese gadgets: Runs Linux, reads everything.
Dear Amazon,
Just give me a simple ebook reader with about 8GB of storage.
I won't buy it if it has ANY of the following:
vendor-lockin, support for DRM, on-line connectivity or any kind of service, any kind of recurring payments, non-standard battery sizes.
Does Europe produce anything of its own these days? If it's such a lucrative market, why hasn't some European-based company taken it up? It's already happened with game distributions, granted that doesn't involve hardware manufacturing.
It's probably the high taxes and regulatory crap that Amazon would have to deal with to penetrate the European market, especially as a foreign company. Plus they have to deal with all the country-specific taxes, regulations, etc. It sucks having to deal with a conglomerate of nations, rather than a single one.
But seriously, can't somebody there fill this gap?