Slate: ‘Fear the Kindle: Amazon’s amazing e-book reader is bad news for the publishing industry’
"…even if the publishing industry isn’t devastated when a single bookstore takes over the e-book world, the marketplace for books will be diminished." – Farhad Manjoo, Slate (via North100).
Related: Why the Kindle’s DRM is anti-elderly: AARP should fight against it, which we published yesterday.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Am I wrong, or is this a glaring inaccuracy:
“Even worse, you can buy books for your Kindle only from Amazon’s store. Indeed, the device makes it difficult to read anything that’s not somehow routed through Amazon first…”
I just re-read the Kindle TOS and I didn’t see ANYTHING in there to suggest that you cannot buy unsecure MOBI from another seller and put it in the device via USB. (not sure if emailing it to your kindle and using the wireless for this is allowed or not, but I suspect not).
For that matter, I don’t see anything in the TOS that would prevent you from buying DRM’ed MOBI from someone other than Amazon, removing the DRM and putting THAT file on the Kindle. The TOS seems to define the protected “Digital Content” as being content FROM Amazon.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, please?
February 27th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Until amazon now the volume is incredible small were talking small on the scale that there probably more downloads from project gutenberg every week then there have been from amazons store since launch.
theres also the mess with numbers played by amazon having it sold out is almist a marketing gimmick those days, it’s simply a matter of predicting demand and putting just that on the market.
February 27th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
John Hagewood is correct. The Slate article is wrong. I have a Kindle and can put all sorts of non-Amazon content on it. I’ve always downloaded to the computer and transferred via USB. Have never emailed anything to Amazon and would only do so if I needed something like a pdf converted. Although I haven’t done it, it’s my understanding you can set the Kindle up to download books directly from places like Feedbooks via the Kindle’s web browser.
February 27th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
John H and Daniel:
John: Appreciated your thoughts. You’re technically correct on most details, but here in the States and many other countries, it is illegal to strip DRM in most cases even for legitimate reasons. What’s more, I’d guess that 95 percent of the Kindle purchases are from Amazon’s own store rather than from Fictionwise and the others. Whatever the reason for buying from Amazon, the TOS or convenience, Amazon is gaining influence, not just revenue.
Daniel: Volume is small now, but it’ll grow, and we need to look ahead. Just wait until Kindle prices drop and the software is available for other platforms.
Thanks,
David
February 27th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
That Slate article is a disgrace.
First the author makes outright false claims like “you can buy books for your Kindle only from Amazon’s store”. Then he argues Amazon will attract customers and authors by offering them a better deal than Amazon’s competitors but this will somehow hurt authors and customers. So far Amazon has offered a greater selection and cheaper prices than it’s competitors but we need to take it on faith that as soon as they get a large market share they’ll start “call[ing] the shots on pricing, marketing, and everything else associated with the new medium” and customers and publishers will have nowhere to turn.
The author implies Apple tried to prevent users from buying music elsewhere than the iTunes store. Yet iPods have always been able to play mp3s and if record labels weren’t willing to let competitors to Apple sell DRM-free music that was their own fault. If Amazon will become dominant through DRM and this will ultimately hurt publishers then why are they insisting upon DRM! The author claims Apple used DRM to become dominant but what has Apple done recently? Started selling DRM-free music! I predict that Amazon will do the same with ebooks at some stage in which case the theory that customers will become trapped into buying Kindles because they wont be able to read their books on other devices will be totally false.
The author implies that eventually Amazon will become a monopoly and abuse it’s power. This is quite preposterous considering how easy it is for other people to set up ebook stores. The market entry costs are essentially zero. Of course it may be hard to attract publishers to sell from your site, but if, as the author claims, Amazon is abusing it’s market power then they’ll be the ones starting up ebook stores.
Seems to me that Farhad Manjoo is looking for a problem where none exists.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
You can certainly put non-Amazon content on the Kindle – I’ve got tons of things on there, and I’ve only bought a couple Kindlebooks, plus downloaded a few freebies. But the problem is, these books, articles, etc., are still locked on the Kindle, because Kindle converts them to a DRM-format, in order to be read. And if you try to just click and drag a text file over, for instance, the margins usually end up unreadably ragged.
The Kindle is a wonderful tool but I hope it does not represent the future. I would tend to agree that if the major publishers take the Amazon bait and DRM-up all their books, they’ll have to learn the hard way like the music industry did. The main difference here, it seems to me, is the absence of relevant P2P networks for e-books; these ultimately did the music companies pro-DRM stance in. We don’t have that with e-books. Amazon yields far more power over the marketplace than any similar entity did with music.