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Kindle naivete in BW, more balanced Forbes piece
December 4, 2007 | 1:07 am
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By David Rothman
Henry Ford, puffed up in the press just like Jeff Bezos, said that history’s more or less bunk, but I’ll excuse him on the grounds that he was a business guy with a steady stream of new products to promote.
I’ll be a bit less forgiving of David Kiley of BusinessWeek‘s Detroit bureau, author of Amazon Can Empty Bookstore Shelves. He’s dreaming of selling 40,000 copies of a book for $9.95 and getting 10,000 of the buyers to pay the same amount for various forms of updates. Hey, that’ll be great if it happens. But, pre-Kindle, 1,000 was an awesome number for E, and while I expect the Kindle and other machines to produce dramatic spikes in sales, let’s not get carried away, at least not about the near-term. Please, David. Read Andrew Pace’s reflections, and familiarize yourself with the related issues of DRM, e-book standards and genuine book ownership. Also check out your competition. Andy Greenberg of Fobes has a pretty balanced piece on the Kindle’s pros and cons.
“Sure,” Greenberg writes, “Kindle uses innovative ‘electronic ink’ that comes close to real paper in resolution and readability, and it can download any of Amazon’s 90,000 e-books in less than a minute. But the reader’s clunky design and grayscale screen have led bloggers to compare it to a 1970s science fiction prop at least as often they compare it to an iPod. A week after Kindle’s debut, users on Amazon’s own site gave the device an average rating of just three stars out of five.” Greenberg goes on to observe that “even if Kindle’s hardware doesn’t yet wow users, its competitors’ inventions soon will.” Exactly. But let’s just hope the press can look beyond the gadgets to such issues as the ability of buyers to own books for real. Otherwise, for consumers and the e-book industry alike, the Kindle and similar gadgets could be ticking time bombs—demolishing the e-book hype when consumers discover the harsh realities that have dogged e-book purchasers before them.
Related: Kindle-Sony Reader comparisons in MobileRead.
(Thanks to Peter Brantley for the BW link.)
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Comments:
That man is deluded if he thinks people will pay $10 for a blog. Here is another idea, you write the blog for free as a promotional tool to drive traffic toward your book, and you sell more copies of the book that way. Look how well Peter Bowerman and Angela Adair-Hoy do with that model—both started out as freelance writers, and now write about writing. Both have very high subscriber bases for their FREE e-newsletters, which they use to provide decent free content and at the same time advertise their e-books and ancillary products. That’s the way to go.
i’d also offer cory doctorow and wil wheaton as examples of what joanna mentions.
A bit off of the subject, but I’d like to share a comment that has been percolating in my mind for a while. This is a post I just made on the forums at pcMagazine:
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I am a big ebook fan, and I own a Bookeen reader from Cybook. However, before we get too excited about Kindle, Cybook or the illiad, we should understand that these are all just experiments and that mass adoption is not only unlikely, but impossible at this stage.
The problem is the limited capacity for eInk display screens that all of these systems use. Currently, the only manufacturer of these screens is a company out of Taiwan called PVI. Do a search on the net and you will find that as of this time last year they were quoted as having capacity for 60,000 per month with capacity expansion planned for 2007/08, I couldn’t find any hard figures on their current capacity, but AFAIK, they had a press release at some time where they quoted a planned capacity from their plant of 1 million screens. Currently, the news from PVI is all about making flexible eInk screens, not about capacity expansion.
Anyway, the point is that this 1 million capacity is spread across all the products that use eInk, including Kindle, Cybook, Illian, Jinke, and I’m sure others that I’ve forgotten about. 1 million worldwide is only a drop in the bucket. As a comparison, there are about 80 million smartphone’s sold per year (IDC: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2007/gb20070227_008389.htm). As a comparison, I would argue that smartphones are huge among business people, but they are a bit expensive (phone price plus data plan of at least $30 per month) for the average consumer. The bottom line is that the capacity of e-Ink screens is one to two orders of magnitude below where it would have to be for mass market adoption.
Because of this it is no wonder that current prices are so high. They can’t supply a mass market, so there is no reason to leave money on the table with mass market pricing. The Kindle is sold out; the Cybook is sold out; and this shouldn’t be a surprise.
There have been a number of other companies showing eInk style prototypes to the market, but I haven’t heard of any of these setting up for commercial production. Another problem may be getting anyone to invest in production given the fact that the technology is still undergoing rapid change. If a market is huge (memory chips, integrated circuits) you might support larger production even if manufacturing techniques keep changing (45nm, etcetera) since the investment can still pay off. However, when a technology is still in its infancy (slow refresh, gray scale only, no backlight) and the market is unproven (the only real market for current technology is ebooks you need color and speed to use these screens in wider applications) then it is probably tough to make a multi-million dollar bet on a technology that might be obsolete in a year or two.
Michael