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By Stephen Windwalker

Windwalker 1 As of Friday morning, February 27, three days after the Kindle 2 began arriving at the ship-to addresses of significant numbers of Amazon customers, I find it interesting to take a gander at the composition of the Kindle Store bestseller list.

First, the explosive growth of the installed base of Kindles is stunning. The beta version of my new guide to the Kindle 2 has been out for five days and has climbed into the mid-teens on the Kindle Store bestseller list, but with daily sales figures that just last Fall would have placed it among the top three Kindle titles in the store. My year-old guide to the Kindle 1 is hovering in the low 200s, with  daily sales figures that would have placed it in the top 10 Kindle titles last Fall. I’m just saying, there are a ton of new Kindles out there.

But more important, in terms of the changing nature of the Kindle catalog, may be the fact that thirteen of the top 25 titles on the list are essentially free. These include seven books that can be downloaded at no cost, four periodicals that are offered free of charge for the first 14 days (and can be easily cancelled before any charge is processed), another book that could be downloaded free of charge until yesterday, and the company’s free in-house Amazon Daily blog. Two of the free books on the list are from among the Kindle Store’s offering of over 7,300 free public domain titles; the number-one seller on the entire list is one of these, an English Standard Version edition of the Holy Bible.

Different observers may draw different conclusions from this data, which changes on an hourly basis and is available for all to see.

Although it is stating the obvious to say that Kindle owners are generally more affluent than the average American by dint of their capacity to lay out $359 for a device that nobody but Teleread.org readers had ever imagined just five years ago, we can also see that they like free stuff. As someone who has already downloaded over 100 free titles to my Kindle 2, I am not mystified by this. Some wealthy people get rich by being smart. And for those of us in the ever less vast middle class, there’s nothing quite so effective at combating the prospect of gadget buyer’s remorse as the chance to persuade ourselves that the new gadget will help us save thousands of dollars.

Some of those wealthy people who got rich by being smart work for Amazon, and they never, ever miss the importance of information like this. Those 7,300 free public domain books were rolled out in the Kindle Store about a week before the Kindle 2 announcement, and now seven of them rank in the top 100 on the Kindle Store bestsellers list. The timing of the rollout may have had less to do with the Kindle 2 launch than with a contemporaneous announcement from Google Book Search, but in any case Amazon clearly wanted its new Kindle customers to know that they would be able to get a lot of free stuff with their Kindles.

The fact that the Kindle Store versions of these public domain titles are now layered with Amazon’s DRM guck is, of course, ridiculous on its face. But Kindle honcho Ian Freed has said that Amazon will announce soon that its Kindle Store offerings will be available on other hardware devices. In addition to telling us that these devices would include the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the Android phone platform, and the Blackberry platform, that announcement ought to be accompanied by an explicit Amazon commitment to work with publishers for adoption of compatible or standard universal e-book platform(s) that, at the very least, phase out DRM.

Pressure on Amazon to do the right thing in this regard will come more from the marketplace than from our exercise, either as consumers or as pundits, of our democratic right of free speech. For Amazon, working with publishers who are scared to death of change must be a bit like negotiating with dinosaurs over the timetable by which they will become extinct. As the negotiations proceed you keep telling them how indispensable they are, and you buy them a meal now and then, perhaps with the occasional unhealthy ingredient. All the while, a few creatures are mutating and adapting so beautifully that they force the negotiators (Amazon) to change in order to keep up, or join the old change-averse dinosaurs in their not-so-slow death dance.

About Stephen: He’s been writing about Amazon’s strategic innovations since his niche bestseller on online bookselling in 2002, and his Complete Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle was the top-selling title in the Kindle store for 17 weeks in 2008, but on advice from Amazon’s attorneys Windwalker refuses to divulge how many books have been sold. Stephen is also publisher of A Kindle Home Page and the weekly Kindle Nation email newsletter, and his latest book, on the Kindle 2, is now available in the Kindle Store .

 
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