Famously out of stock, the Amazon Kindle for now is available for delivery as early as April 22. How long until it sells out again? Or is Amazon finally catching up with demand fueled by a Newsweek cover story and massive publicity elsewhere? Will sales of the Kindle fall off suddenly in the next few months because Amazon has at last satisfied the gadget lust of early adopters? My hunch is, No. Mostly likely Amazon will show up the analyst who predicted just 50,000 units moved in the first year.
ePub as a way to extend Kindle owners’ choice of books
In any event, if the Kindle supply is sufficient, e-publishers will finally have ideas as to the extent of the viability of the proprietary format. I just hope that they’ll look beyond the Kindle, to other machines such as the Sony Reader, which is supposed to be able to do ePub soon, and try to knock down the Tower of eBabel so that someday sales of e-books aren’t as much tied to the availability of device X or Y. Replacement of DRM with social DRM would also help.
Most Kindle owners probably still ignorant of the long-term negatives
Meanwhile thousands of understandably excited new Kindle owners probably still don’t understand what’s going on.
“My sole complaint as a reader is that all the books available through Amazon aren’t yet available in Kindle format,” says one buyer. “But this seems to be the fault of publishers and authors, not Amazon.”
Granted. But wouldn’t publishers be more likely to convert books into a Kindle-usable format if the same files worked on a number of different machines, the International Digital Publishing Forum‘s goal for ePub?
One good sign—for now: Am I right in recalling that earlier the Kindle was drawing only three or three and a half stars from Amazon customers? it’s now up to four out of five stars, aided by the verdicts of people who have actually bought and used the thing. One issue is what will happen when they fully grasp the limits of so proprietary a device—and the fact that the future usability of their books will be at the mercy of Amazon’s whims. Remember, Amazon didn’t hesitate in the least to try to herd publishers and readers of Adobe books into the Mobipocket format.
The Standard Oil parallels: Jeff Bezos’s mentality on the above and other matters seems to remain as monopolistic as ever, for now. It’s as if he’s John D. Rockefeller dreaming of lamps that can run only on his oil. Hello, Jeff? I’d love for you and Amazon to prove me wrong by making the Kindle able to render ePub files natively, and if you can drop the DRM, as you’ve laudably done for music via your MP3 store with “Play Anywhere, DRM-Free Music Downloads,” then so much the better. If nothing else, give publishers a say in the matter rather than inflicting DRM on all your Kindle books despite the hostility of many small publishers toward such a consumer-hostile technology. With such a burden on small guys, not to mention your POD power grab, why shouldn’t people use the robber baron parallel?
(Via MobileRead.)
