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By Stephen Windwalker

Windwalker 1.jpgI don’t bring any special credibility to the table here at TeleRead. I’m a working author, a believer in the potential of and vision behind the Kindle both for readers and authors, and I have acquired a bit of expertise about Amazon’s underlying business strategies over a decade of writing about the company’s innovations and practices.

I care about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues, but I am not doctrinaire about them. My inclination is to believe that these issues will be sorted out at certain critical times in the future development of the book business, and that it may be counterproductive to try to resolve them too early in the process. With a few notable exceptions, the publishing companies that ought to have figured out the most about the importance of electronic publishing to their futures seem to know the least. The process by which they learn – as for all of us in any way connected with the book trades – is likely to be somewhat Darwinian.

Just as a time came when Apple was able to locate its corporate self-interest in allowing customers to remove DRM from their iTunes store audio purchases for a price, a similar time will probably come for Amazon with respect to customers’ Kindle Store purchases. In both cases, the timing seems to require that some critical mass of the applicable publishers reach a certain nuanced understanding of and experience with the changing revenue streams and marketing channels that digital publishing and distribution allow. It’s not exactly dialectical materialism, but it is a world in which changes in politics must be driven by, rather than be the drivers of, changes in economic relationships.

We can’t all be Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow, and neither Amazon nor Apple will ever be Google, Creative Commons, or Project Gutenberg. Most publishers possess little understanding of Lessig or Doctorow or anyone else who has discovered the viral (and, often, easily monetized) marketing power of setting one’s words free in selected venues, and many probably label them as the “free books crowd” and shut down reflexively in the face of any opportunity to listen to them or learn from them. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe that Jeff Bezos does possess some nuanced understanding of these issues, and in time, armed with the larger and larger payments his company’s Kindle division is making to publishers, will be in a better position to bring them along into a future where there is a wide acceptance of DRM-free electronic publishing standards. But on the Darwinian path to that future, it would be very uncharacteristic of Amazon not to continue to consolidate and strengthen its position.

Meanwhile, I have to admit that – among the various electronic publishing issues on my radar – I am more troubled by the highly unstable, weakly supported, “beta Wild West” nature of Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform. I’ve been publishing books, articles, and book excerpts there with great success since the week the Kindle was launched in November 2007. Initially I was impressed with the potential that the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) held out for authors and publishers to experiment with new ways to connect with readers. Jeff Bezos appeared on the Charlie Rose program and elsewhere heralding a Kindle future in which authors might serialize their books for Kindle readers a la Dickens or Dostoyevsky in an earlier age. The Kindle Store allowed publishers such as myself the neat opportunity to support readers by allowing them to update and refresh a previous Kindle Store purchase any time, to retrieve new content, simply by downloading the file anew from their digital media library at no additional cost.

That very popular feature was subsequently disabled and abandoned by Amazon with no notice to customers or publishers, and the Kindle’s Digital Text Platform remains deeply flawed and almost totally unsupported. Uploaded files seem to get mangled as often as not, particularly if they are sent from a Mac or attempt to make any use of the Kindle’s native web browser. And I have discerned zero initiative by Amazon to engage Kindle owners in unleashing what could be the awesome viral power of social and literary networking around this most connected of e-readers.

Why not just give up, or follow Cory Doctorow’s principled suggestion and simply boycott the Kindle Store? Well, between Kindle owners and the potential iPhone and iPod Touch market for the Kindle App, we are talking about tens of millions of potential readers, and no polemic will ever convince me that any author should start turning his back on obviously motivated readers. And, especially in these difficult times, it is not inconsequential that the royalties paid to Kindle authors – for those who pay attention – are, for now, about as good as any in the book business.

By Stephen Windwalker, publisher of Kindle Nation

 
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