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Kentucky Fried Kindles, anyone? What if Amazon licensed Kindle tech for other vendors to use in their gizmos?
August 26, 2008 | 9:12 am
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By David Rothman
Kentucky Fried Kindles, anyone?
What if Amazon licensed manufacturers to pick up the basic tech—and serve it up in form factors of their choice?
We’re talking about licensing, not a franchise arrangement. But I still can’t result the term "Kentucky Fried Kindle." Come to think it, a company called Kentucky Fried Computers actually did exist—that was Northstar’s first name.
Source of the Kentucky Fried idea, although he doesn’t call it that, is TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington:
Imagine if Amazon launched a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.
Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.
Very quickly we’d see a wide variety of Kindle devices, all competing on price, features (large and small screens would just be the start) and form factor. Hardware manufacturers, who are all constantly trying to squeeze a tiny bit of margin out of their products, would suddenly have another revenue stream to tap.
A fascinating idea, Michael. But if Amazon is to grow still more powerful, that’s all the more reason for the world to insist that Kindle-style machines render ePub natively. If nothing else, I wonder about the possible anti-trust complications. Would Kentucky Fried Kindles be good or bad for consumers, given Amazon’s existing clout in the e-book world?
I can think of other angles. Could Amazon eventually use this approach with other kinds of devices and break into Microsoft and Intel territory? At least the licensees would know ahead of time of at least one major vendor interested in their wares.
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Comments:
What would that be good for? Everyone concerned already knows how to solder PDA hardware to an eInk screen and equip the whole affair with a lightweight Linux operating system (at least as long as the GOOG does not come clear with Android). The cost of hardware is not due to expensive R&D, but because of the steep prices of the screens. (And believe it or not, there is currently no one competing with eInk, if you want to build something with a passive, energy-saving screen.)
If you are a company that wants to market an alternative to the Kindle, you can go ahead, pay 100K to Jinke or the StarEBook-makers for a custom case, and you are almost done. But you will be in the same price range as the Kindle or the Sony reader. Or worse, if you are small and attempt to implement an alternative to Whispernet…
It would be great if the Kindle supports PDF and ePub natively, just as Sony does. But since it _does_ display some free formats, you can always use a conversion tool to rip your PDF collection. And as soon as Amazon gets around to it, I expect them to give us an on-device converter too.
I am really curious wrt to the rumours concerning a new large-screen Kindle, though.
I must agree with Joscha: the choke-point is eInk manufacturing, how many can be turned out, at what rate of acceptable quality, at what price.
But what if the ‘kindle engine’ was put into a single chip, and could be put into a cell phone, an iPod, or a nettop EEE-like device – to say nothing of desktops or laptops?
This ‘kindle engine’ would contain what’s needed to contact the Amazon kindle store for purchasing, and the necessary means to decode/decrypt kindle-books.
Or it might be a software app, for that matter (if that is technically feasible).
Whichever form, it would let me or you be known to the kindle store as ‘ourselves’ and access our ‘library’ on whatever device we are using.
Much cheaper to implement than new eInk reading devices, and it would double, triple, Amazon’s Kindle-book sales within a week or two. The whole trajectory of Kindle (monopoly) expansion would be raised to a higher level. Epub would not stand a chance. Nothing could compete. World domination within a year … bwa-ha-ha….!
(On second thought, maybe we should all hope that Amazon doesn’t consider this.)
The “Kindle engine” could be something like the Mobipocket reader. I think that it easy to license, even today… Thus, every smartphone and every PDA might be just one step away from reading the Kindle stuff. But we will still have to find out how many people want to buy Amazon’s expensive bytes, when they get the same bytes for free and without DRM elsewhere. It could turn out that eBooks will – just like MP3 – be primarily a hardware business. (In a way, books have never been a software medium, but cheap pieces of hardware. And while people gladly pay for hardware, many are not used to the idea that they have to buy the hardware of a book, and then the software too.)
The amazon servers are everything in the kindle platform.
Basicly amazon went to foxconn and bought a j2me based cellphone with an eink screen, because thats all the kindle is from a technical perspective. The software it runs is not revolutionary either(this dont mean that it is bad).
What sets the kindle apart is the way it links into amazons mainframe and the stuff amazon have secured access to by being the biggest single book retailer.
Wry they havent opened the servers to non kindle’s yet puzzles me a bit but they probably think they will make more money on a closed hw/server system them by seperating the two links, even if they will get more users by seperating. Im pretty sure that if they dont someone else will, build one