You already know about the Kindle‘s potential, especially for the elderly, who might benefit from its ease of use and the ability to blow up text.
And you’ve read and seen the reviews in text and video—some positive on the whole, some more skeptical.
Without doubt, however, the current Kindle is an e-book standards disaster, a manmade Katrina. You can’t even officially read books DRMed in Amazon’s own Mobipocket format. Amazon rivals like Sony are promising to move toward e-book standards. So far, however, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has yet to commit to meaningful standards compliance for the Kindle.
Luckily it isn’t too late for Amazon to repent. Jeff’s people can probably update the firmware to accommodate the new .epub format and (in time) an interoperable DRM standard from the IDPF. Let’s hope they will. Hello, Jeff? Hello, Steve Levy? Anyone want to follow up? Meanwhile, since Amazon is promising to keep backup copies of books, why not assure customers that in the future they’ll also have .epub versions of past purchases—with interoperable DRM from the IDPF used, if publishers keep insisting on “protection.” That way, Kindle owners will know they’ll be able to enjoy their e-books on a variety of machines (although the real solution would be an customer-accessible, industry-wide archive for e-books, especially the DRMed variety).
Ego vs. practicality
Practicality ahead of ego, Jeff! People want to read your books on their desktops, laptops, PDAs and cellphones, Ouija boards, you name it, not just Kindles; and beyond that, your customers never know which vendor will come out on top. I remember when a Random House VP was dead-certain that Sony’s proprietary format and DRM would conquer the world.
Given all the conflicting hype from chest-beating conglomerates, shoppers may feel uneasy in their guts about e-books, even if they can’t toss around terms like DRM. See the latest eBabel/DRM horror story in Paul Biba’s item below. Oh, and remember Forrester Research is predicting just 50,000 sales of Kindles in the first year—impressive for most companies but not for a powerhouse of a marketer like Amazon. Even if Forrester is wrong, a full-fledged embrace of e-book standards could help Jeff’s bottom line by boosting consumer confidence in the Kindle.
The rest of the news
Now on to The News—K-dominated:
- The Kindle, sold out in the current craze, is going for as much as $1,000 on eBay, as noted in TechCrunch. See current listings. (Via Mike Cane.)
- Joe Wikert at Wiley has started the Kindleville blog, and I’m delighted that Mary Minow, a Kindle owner with an interest in DRM from library perspective, is among his first interviewees.
- The Gadgeteer‘s Rob Tillotson has reviewed the Kindle, mostly favorably. You might want to drop by the comments section and be your diplomatic best while educating him about DRM.
- Simon & Schuster sales reps are starting to tote around e-book readers to read manuscripts of books they’ll be promoting (not sure which brand), Joe tells us. Hey, what about literary agents and editors? In time will they ask authors to submit manuscripts in .epub? Actually the Sony Reader and some others can also handle RTF, which Word and Open Office can serve up. So when will the literary world connect the dots?
- Fan fiction will find a haven for their writings by way of the Organization for Transformative Works, as reported by Ben Vershbow in if:book.
