The Kindle 3 was released to much Amazon fanfare late last week; in the sea of iPad and general tablet news at the moment I wonder how many people have even noticed. My girlfriend didn’t know what a Kindle was until tonight, and I really don’t know how this has happened. I can only assume that I’ve been right every time I thought she wasn’t really listening to me. She’s been mocking my iPad cravings for a little while now (I maintain it’s not iPad-lust (iLust?), but borderline-usable-tablet-lust, it’s just I happen to think that that’s a very narrow category right now), but she’s the kind of person that Amazon must hate, because she’d probably rather like a Kindle if she knew what it was and what it could do. See, she’s a neuropsychologist and reads almost everything as a sea of .pdf articles, but hates being tied to reading at her desk. She also reads a lot of popular, modern classic, and classic novels. This seems like a person for whom a Kindle would seem a natural fit: native pdf support with highlighting and annotating, easy on the eye, portable, a store full of books she’d probably enjoy; there’s a lot to love for the scientist in your life. And yet, and yet…nothing.
She’s probably an unfair test subject, I thought, because, well, we’re students. At £150 I couldn’t buy her a Kindle if I wanted to eat; she wouldn’t buy herself a Kindle (she’s funded which makes it a choice, at least, if still an obvious one); and very few of our friends are in a position to indulge themselves either. If we don’t listen to the advertising then the device ceases to exist, as became apparent during our conversation.
And yet we can’t afford an iPad either, doubly, triply so, but still we listen to the adverts, we read the articles, and, in a spate of boredom disguised as love, she even tried to win me one in a variety of online competitions (and I choose to believe she would have parted company with said device if it had arrived at her door). Not only do we know it exists…we have friends who own them. The same friends who complain about money being tight, about savings being hit hard, about recessions double and triple dipping, they get all this information by reading the FT as an app on pin sharp touchscreens, downloading it from 3G networks supported by less than generous pay-monthly plans. The iPad is not dead to us, even if it is out of reach.
I went to a talk recently where the person presenting used the words: “after all, ereaders are cheap.” They then went on to talk about Nooks, Kindles, and Cool-er Readers. At the cheapest estimates these readers average at £150 (in fairness there’s a version of the Kindle 3 going for £109, it just doesn’t have the free 3G access to the bookstore. I was interested to learn that 3G appears to weigh 6 grams
a number I couldn’t help thinking implied that the internet weighed three and a half times less than a human soul).
I don’t think I’m going too far wrong when I say that £150, or even £100, doesn’t feel ‘cheap’ just yet. And of course, this doesn’t factor in the price of ebooks bought, a figure which remains awkwardly close to how much p-books cost, but without the added perks of actual ownership, rather than what feels like renting evanescent content.
I’ve been trying to work out just why a Kindle 3 doesn’t seem cheap, or rather trying to establish what could make it so. The answer seems to lie not in low cost, but in value. I read around 100 books a year (if you factor in poetry and comics and ignore journals), and I probably pay for about 75 of them (the rest being gifts, a general backlog of unread items, borrowed books, free ebooks, or used works so cheap as to be negligible). Of those 75 I try to get about 50 second-hand (not possible with ebooks), so my average spend is maybe £350 (I suspect it’s a bit lower due to bargains, but that’s close enough). If I bought a Kindle at £150 I’d treat it like a computer and would want it to last a minimum of 5 years, so that works out as an extra £30 a year for its life. Would I make enough savings buying slightly cheaper ebooks over 5 years to cover the cost of the device? Without second hand books I doubt it. Plus my tastes and requirements aren’t always catered for; critical theory, cognitive psychology, and books on the philosophy of technology are probably not at the top of any ebook store’s priority list to provide, and colour graphic novels wouldn’t work on an e-ink screen anyway. So the Kindle would represent no saving unless the ebook market rapidly evolves to accommodate me. If we ignore graphic novels and say that I’ll be able to get everything that I want, then maybe, maybe, the small savings on each book would make me break even or better. But that’s on my 75 books a year for 5 years. Many people read a lot more than that, and they might find it very easy to call the Kindle cheap; abundant ebooks of things you like and a decent device, which I have no doubt the Kindle 3 is, may well represent a solid saving. Most people, however, don’t have the time, tastes, or inclination to turn the Kindle into a ‘cheap’ (i.e. good value) device. If you read 10 books a year or less, if your tastes are esoteric, or you can’t fathom why you would struggle with an e-reader when there’s perfectly good paper kicking around, then the Kindle 3 can only feel expensive as hell.
The iPad’s expensive too, of course, three times more than a 3G enabled Kindle at a minimum, but it’s only been out for a couple of months. The original U.S.-only Kindle, released in 2007, was $400 (£255 at the current exchange rate). The Kindle 3 is $139 (or £88.50; yes we get ripped off here), a better than 2/3 drop in three years. By the same factoring, a $200/£125 (in the U.K. more like £200) iPad in three years time, a device covering near all of your book, video, radio, music, picture, and internet needs, would be an incredibly persuasive set up, possibly even deserving of the word ‘cheap’ in a way that a £150 Kindle 3 could never be. A lot of people are even finding £450+ very persuasive right now it would seem.
Seth Godin’s discussions of a ‘paperback kindle’ make a lot of sense. In societies where we will probably, in the long term, see a waning interest from the majority in physical written media, the best way to get everyone on board with dedicated devices is to put one in everyone’s hand. You need to nearly give them away, perhaps that’s the only way, to persuade people that this is a device worth carrying. Because if tablets (almost certainly not just iPads) do a mobilephone-like sweep of the marketplace over the next decade or so, that will mark the end of people’s appetite for a dedicated apparatus for reading, save for a vocal and significant minority, in many nations. And if the next OLPC project succeeds, converged devices may become the norm for written work in many places across the world.
I don’t know if this is good or bad yet, no one does. It’s an argument for another time, but if we are able to maintain our attention and attraction toward long form arguments I see no reason to disparage devices which can also play movies and connect us to the web. Is a visually ergonomic (go with it) e-ink screen enough to save dedicated readers? Is super-long battery life? Is 6 grams of free 3G? It’s not enough to make a £150 device feel cheap to me (or to her, the tolerant scientist). It’s probably not enough to make a £50 device feel cheap to be honest: “after all,” will go the argument, “that’s money you could be putting towards one of those expensive i-book-pod things.”
Editor’s Note: the above is from Matt Haylers 4oh4 – Words Not Found blog. Matt is a PhD. student in England. PB
OK, if she is into research pdf’s with her job as a neuropsych, she would really love to use a program called “Papers”. It is available for the Mac, iPhone/Touch, and also the iPad. It is a godsend for researchers and piles of pdf’s. That program alone is enough to make someone put out hard earned cash for a device to use it on.
http://mekentosj.com/papers/ipad/
Hi Mark, thanks for the tip! You’ve ruined my life a little bit by showing me (even more) that I need some kind of tablet during my own research too. After reading the above post she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that maybe a Kindle 3 wouldn’t be a bad Christmas present after all, but with this it’s probably going to be back to us both wanting an iPad…
Thanks again for the advice though, it does look like a great program.
Interesting and relevant article. Early adopters, like the people who have bought Kindle and iPad and read eBooks on eReaders and discuss them here, have a tendency to overestimate the significance of what is currently happening in a new sector like this.
Despite the fact that we are a couple of years into this eBook revolution the reality is we are still in it’s infancy. The vast majority of ordinary readers don’t plan to buy a kindle or an iPad and look no further than their local book shop. The Publishers are floundering, and torn between milking eBooks for every cent they can and growing the market by realistic pricing. Manufacturers are scrambling around trying to come up with a killer eReader in time for the time eReading breaks out into the mainstream. They are throwing all kinds of testers into the market because no one really knows what will happen. All we can be sure of is that things will look a lot different in one year’s time.
People I have discussed it with locally mostly feel that they will make the jump when the eReaders are subsidised and come tied to specific sellers.
The Kindle is cheap, not because you can buy cheap ebooks (though there’s plenty of public domain titles), but because of the value it brings to the reading experience. It’s being able to have access to your library at any time, anywhere, in a device that’s lighter than your average paperback. It’s the instant gratification of having whispernet delivering a book immediately. It’s going on vacation and not being tied to a charging brick, or multiple heavy books. It’s when your house/apartment is so overflowing with books that you have trouble even finding the one you’re looking for, and you know that it’s right there on your ereading device, and it remembers where you left off reading to boot.
It’s a very cheap entry ticket to a new type of reading experience, especially compared to other new technology. You’re not just buying the device itself, but the possibilities it offers.
The iPad has other things going for it (and isn’t quite as good as a dedicated reader), but it’s much harder to justify the entry costs, since they’re so much higher. Yet people buy them anyway because of the value it has for them – it may be in the form of productivity, or leisure, or a combination of usage.
Don’t forget all the free and bargain books available on the Kindle. (I currently have 250 free books on my Kindle.) Certainly some of the books aren’t that great but there are still some great ones that are released for free on the Kindle for a short period of time.
Check the Kindleboards forum/Book Bazaar section and the Books on the Knob blog to see what type of free and bargain Kindle books are being released all the time. If you don’t want to do that, you can sign up for the Free Kindle Watch via Jungle-Search to receive emails on new free Kindle books (there were four free books today alone).
You confuse “cheap” with “good value”.
The Kindle is still an expensive luxury for most people.
I’m guessing Howard is responding to Frode with his last comment (apologies if not Howard, do correct me). I’m not sure if I agree that Frode has perhaps mistaken the way I’m using ‘cheap;’ I complicated the term towards ‘value’ in the article. But ‘cheap,’ to me, is a perception which revolves around more than money, and also more than value. The Kindle clearly seems ‘cheap’ to Frode, not just because of its value as a reader, as in adding value by saving time, labour, or raw finance, but also because of the experience it can offer. And this is something I can’t comment on, this is what I mean by saying ‘cheap’ is perceptual. To Frode the Kindle 3 is perceptually cheap because of what it offers. To me it isn’t, maybe can’t be, and, I suspect, to many people it never will be (Howard goes into this a little in his first comment, Seth Godin implies it in his ‘paperback Kindle’ articles). Frode can’t argue against my perception of the relative ‘cheapness’ of the device on these terms because I have my own perception, and he his. But if he successfully argues for the merits of the Kindle then he can actually change my perception of ‘cheapness’ (which I’ve used as a catch-all term for the perception of value, fiscal reality, and user experience). Everything that Frode says is actually quite persuasive to me, but still not enough to lower my perception of the Kindle as anything but prohibitively expensive. I would just say that it’s not a ‘very cheap entry ticket to a new type of reading experience,’ it’s just the cheapest, and I really do believe it’s a mistake to confuse those two terms, however we define ‘cheapness.’
To Sandir, I always worry that free books will seem better because of their price, rather than their merit, but I know that’s just me being snobbish (and maybe jealous because I don’t yet own an e-reader besides my desktop). I have no doubt that I would download and enjoy a lot of free content on whatever device I got, but I would still worry that my tastes were being structured to the texts available, rather than my tastes structuring what texts I accessed.
Thanks to everyone for commenting and reading.
_m
Apols Matt you are correct and I should have referred to Frode for my response. You are also right in that I believe he was confusing cheap with good value. I have no doubt that this Kindle is pretty good value for someone with that kind of spare cash. But for most people it is an expensive and unnecessary gadget.
I also agree that free products elicit a lack of appreciation by customers. In some previous threads comments were made about the problem of lowering current prices and it’s affect on people’s appreciation. In that case I agreed because the lowering was ‘relative’. But if all eBooks are lowered to a reasonable price then the relative factor disappears. Only dropping prices to something ridiculous like 80cents or free would then lose customer’s respect for the product and probably produce little in the line of sales.
Well, you surely got my brain juices flowing (a rarity, for certain). I was just about to grab one of the new Kindle 3G’s (actually, I was going to buy the wireless w/o the 3G since I have much more access to wireless…) In any case, I read voraciously (even resorting to the backs of any bathroom product that’s handy if I forget to bring my reading material) so when the Kindle was offered at $139.00 I thought that I would finally give in to my husband’s whining (tho, he calls it reasoning) about my books being on every available surface (and some that aren’t) of our home and get an E-Reader to satisfy him (ie; shut his pie hole).
Heh, now…not so excited. D@$# you, Mark. I had finally gotten myself past the “I gotta have, I deserve to have, I desperately need to have an IPad!” blues. I haven’t owned an Apple product since our Apple II+ bit the dust back in the (way) old days. Been a PCer since. Worse yet, I sneered and jeered at all those Apple MACers, IPODers and those elitist, snobby (luckier than me) IPADers.
Well, thanks to you, I now have my IPad lust in aces again! What a swell guy you are….my husband wants to beat you up (ok, he’s not a fighter but he could out grouch you any day!)
Why must you make so much sense….WHY? Now, I have to wait for the IPad to lower it’s price – which, of course, will be about the time they come out with an all new and better IPad that I won’t be able to afford but will want with the intensity of a woman stranded in the outback looking for a mall!
Thanks again, Mark…thanks, just thanks…mumble…
I think we all have different definitions of ‘cheap’, depending upon our circumstances. I think Matt did a very nice job of explaining why the Kindle was not cheap for him. Where I think the discussion falls apart is when we start applying our own definition of cheap to ‘most people’, because then we’re assuming that most people are like us. Matt (and others in this thread) assume that ‘most people’ won’t find ereaders cheap or of good value, while they will find iPads eventually cheap or of good value, because they provide more.
I’m lucky enough to be able to afford any of these devices, so I get to choose what I want. As it happens, my choice has been Kindle; I have a K3 on order, and it will be the 4th Kindle in our house. I have played with an iPad, and have chosen not to buy an iPad, because I haven’t (yet) found any compelling reason to own one. Of the people I encounter regularly, I see more Kindles than iPads, probably because I tend to run into people like me: suburban mom waiting to pick up kids. Are we ‘most people’? No, we’re not. But neither are students, or twentysomething hipsters, or tech press writers, or lots of other people writing about how ‘most people’ aren’t going to want dedicated ereaders.
You got me so riled, I forgot to offer my opinion on what would make the Kindle (or any E-Reader) cheap enough.
They could offer it for free! I’m not being unrealistic (in my eyes anyway). Many, many sellers will offer a product for free in order to get a buyer ‘hooked’ and then make their money back on the items the buyer must purchase in order to use the ‘free’ product.
Direct TV is a prime example. They sent us the satellite dish and DVR/Receiver for free (we had to do the install, or course – this paid for itself in entertainment value while I watched my husband trying to balance his 250+ lbs on his 60 year old legs on our steep roof)…..Onward…Direct TV got a paying customer in return ( a customer who couldn’t resist getting the ‘ultimate’ package ‘cuz, geez, which Channels could I really do without???) Not to mention the occasional Pay-Per-View movie or event that we buy.
It’s this type of quid-pro-qrap that might make the Kindle 3 a bargain, yes? (Or did I go off my med’s too soon?)
I meant “cheap” in that if you compare it to other new technology it costs a lot less. It’s cheaper than most iPods even. It’s past the early adopter stage and fast coming down to mainstream pricing. The step from £109 and breaking the 3-digit psychological barrier to £99 is a very small one. After that it’s mainly a consideration of “can I afford this”, rather than a question of the price being good.
Just doing the math mechanically by looking at the device price and book prices to see whether there’s any gain like Matt did is certainly viable, but it ignores all the other factors I mentioned (and other things you can do with it that I haven’t mentioned).
Howard – I agree that only a blanket drop of prices avoids the risk of devaluation. It would be like penguin offering most 300 page penguin modern classics at £8.99(ish) and then having In Cold Blood at £2.99. Would this mean more sales for In Cold Blood over the others, or would there be a creeping anxiety (“why is it so cheap?”). If a small section of products costs a negligible amount then, yes, for all that I’d like to have bought In Cold Blood for £3 I think it has the potential to devalue those works.
Krabkat – I apologise for diverting your e-reader lust from the Kindle! I didn’t mean to say it was a bad device, not at all, and if you have the spare monies I reckon you’d love it. Got to weigh up the pros and cons of e-ink screens in particular I reckon (do you do much reading outside?). For me it just takes a lot of additional functionality to persuade myself away from bound books (which I adore, and amass in equal measure it seems; I spread them over every available surface too, much to the annoyance of my housemates I’m sure!). As for the giving it away for free I’ll link to the Seth Godin piece I mentioned – bit.ly/pbkindle – I agree that a free dedicated reader of any sort is probably the best way to make ereading appeal to a mass market, and his “give away the razor to make ’em buy the blades” comparison seems to be what you’re suggesting here too.
Sherri – Your right, I shouldn’t talk about ‘most people,’ I don’t know ‘most people’ and I apologise. Perhaps I could be a little clearer in what I mean. As a PhD student I teach classes, and each year I talk to my students, around 36 a year, about ereading. So far only one knew someone with a Kindle. Most thought that ereading was expensive for them or for any member of their families (and these are people who buy a lot of books). I also used to work in a bookstore where we used to sell the first few models of SONY Reader, and as someone who had to try and push that product, day in and day out, to everyone that came to the till, I began to realise that whereas I lusted for a similar device (iPads were a hazy future at that time), to most people *I encountered* (key modifier I should have used) it was both unobtainable, and/or unfathomable that it should be desirable. Add in my friends and family and I know two people who use ereaders (which have been out 3 or more years), and 5 iPad owners (which have been out two months), and I see an assertion that the iPad might be a good way to spend a couple of hundred quid (though maybe not four or five hundred) in a way I never witnessed with all the other ereadering devices together. That desire for this new device is what motivated me to write the piece, what makes it seem so special? One last point though: In Britain I’m relatively happy to say that most people don’t find £100 inessential items ‘cheap’ or even ‘affordable.’ But if we’re not talking about the suburbs, and we’re not talking about students, let’s not talk about country boundaries either; if we consider the world’s population I’m even happier to say that a Kindle is not perceptually or fiscally ‘cheap’ for *most* people. And I also believe it is no coincidence that, despite the importance of reading, the One Laptop Per Child project focuses on spreading converged devices (now tablets), rather than dedicated ereaders. This is persuasive to me as to what most people might actually want or need, even if I can only work on inference, rather than knowledge.
A very interesting blog post. That said, although I’ve read both it and this thread carefully I have a notion that this topic is presented a bit more esoterically than the actual situation merits.
There is a very interesting blog post on Kindle Review comparing, to an extent, Kindle 3 with iPad and their respective strengths and weaknesses (http://ireaderreview.com/2010/07/30/kindle-3-ipad-thoughts/) that i suggest reading. The author, in a nutshell, suggests (costs not considering) getting an iPad if you need a multipurpose device AND don’t do a lot of continuous reading, i.e. reading for prolonged periods undisturbed by other activities. I suppose scientific research reading does not fall into that category since the actual reading is continually interrupted by taking notes, comparing various resources, doing online searching etc. Reading Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” or Shakespeare’s collected works for hours, on the other hand, should fall into the continuous category. Naturally, if the other way around is the case, the author suggests going with Kindle, especially if the form factor or reading in sunlight is important.
After everything you’ve said about your (e)reading needs I’m inclined to think you’d be much well off with (saving money for) an iPad because its multipurposeness would benefit you more than Kindle’s specialization, regardless of the higher price. That said many IT resources mention as almost certain a flood of iPad alternatives during this year and later on that will compete to provide all or more of iPad’s features (albeit on a different operating system) at lower prices. Hence it may prove wise to wait a bit if looking for the most cost effective solution.
Thanks again for a lovely blog post.
sounds like a blend of love for printers, toner and paper with kind of a lack of imagination. but she may have an epiphany when she sees a colleague pull out a kindle at a meeting, or reading professional literature on a kindle.
so she’s not an early adopter. no big deal. but observe her behavior (as a neuropsychologist, she won’t take offense, right?) and when she notices — or better yet, expresses the intention to adopt — let us know! it sounds as if she may be a cherished ‘tipping point’-canary..
sukjuk – thanks for the kind words and advice, that’s a really good review you linked to as well. I must say, I’m dead set on the iPad as what I need on the move is twitter, email, RSS, a book or two to read, and some .pdfs (and some games when I travel!). The iPad is everything I described that I wanted about three years ago and said would be about ten years away! My girlfriend is in a similar position I think, and would definitely value the iPad over the Kindle for the reasons you listed. As to over complicating the matter: probably! But in my work (my thesis is on digital reading) I’ve begun to realise the complex set of choices that go into interacting with ereading devices (financial, tactile, ontological (in terms of apparatus), general phenomenological, even ethical), and I guess, even in relatively informal pieces like this one, that desire to reveal even a little of that complexity just comes out, successfully or not…
asphalt – I told my girlfriend she was a ‘tipping point’ canary because someone on the internet told me so 🙂 She was thrilled! To be honest she may well be as good a marker as any, someone for whom the geekery of early adoption means nothing, but who will get stuck straight in as soon as it proves itself useful, probably a bit before it becomes stablised as just the ‘normal’ thing.
Thanks as ever to everyone who commented and read
_m
My understanding is that the age group that buys most books is the 45-54 age group .. anyone know any more ?
By the way I found this brilliant site for ALL kinds of stats on publishing/books
http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm
Howard – great link, thanks. Not sure who the biggest book buyers are, but that sounds about right intuitively. Possibly not the biggest reading group though, as they’ll be buying for multiple kids in school and relatives too…