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Amazon acquires Lexcycle/Stanza – Wow!
April 27, 2009 | 3:41 pm
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By Paul Biba
This is certainly a surprise, especially since Amazon has its own iPhone/iPod application.
From the Lexcycle blog:
We are very excited to announce that Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon.com!
It has been an amazing experience to see Stanza grow out of our brainstormed ideas into one of the most downloaded iPhone applications. Throughout this period we have attempted to listen to and innovate for our customers to provide a great ebook reading experience.
We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.
We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in ebooks. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for ebooks and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time.
As always, we encourage people to ask questions or provide feedback through our forums at http://forum.lexcycle.com or directly to us at info@lexcycle.com.
Best,
Marc, Neelan and Abe
I, personally, find this a very worrisome event. It can’t do anything good for the ebook community and I suspect will only wind up lessing competition in the long run. I don’t think that Amazon has any vested interest in seeing that organizations like Feedbooks, Guternberg, Smashwords, etc. survive. Luckily the ebook market is still too small to worry about monopolization. The market is not a zero sum game at this stage of its development. This only happens when two or three major competitors dominate the market space, and we are very far from that. After all ebooks are only a tiny percentage of the market. Nevertheless it does not look like a good development to me. I fear the trend is not looking good.
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Comments:
Well, hell. I guess the e-text is on the wall for Stanza, too.
In the very faint silver lining department, this might be Amazon’s way of adding ePub support to the Kindle, and improving its Kindle app for the iPhone: adapting the technical expertise of the popular ePub reader for the iPhone. Maybe Stanza will even get to read Kindle books.
And it’s faintly amusing that, while B&N owns Fictionwise, Amazon now owns a company to whom they’ve licensed their eReader format and DRM. It’s almost like a metaphorical tug-of-war. Might the Kindle end up reading eReader books too? …nah.
All the same, I can’t help but think about how Amazon has (apparently) blocked Mobipocket from coming out with an iPhone app. Will Stanza be allowed to continue development? Will it be stopped from expanding to new platforms so Amazon can have less competition for its Kindle app?
This really bugs the hell out of me.
I don’t like the sound of this either. The shutters are coming down at Fictionwise as well, with geographical restrictions being enforced and many Mobipocket only titles appearing. The squeeze is on, and customers are unlikely to benefit.
I don’t trust Amazon when it comes to ebooks. They have some of the most restrictive DRM out there and now they own the own company that was very open as far as formats go. I smell a rat. I hope I’m wrong, but it doesn’t look good.
And like Chris Meadows pointed out above its amusing that B&N owns Fictionwise and Amazon owns Lexcycle, whom they licensed their DRM and eReader to. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that relationship.
Fictionwise is affected by publisher dictates when it comes to geography. As for “Mobipocket only titles”, I wish! It seemed that for months there were eReader-only titles. Now I see a lot of titles I would have bought except for that showing up again in Mobipocket. And, it looks like Hachette Group is coming back, knock on wood (at least Greg Benford’s “The Martian Race” is now available). Fictionwise, next to Baen, remains my source for e-reading.
Fred is correct, the global e-rghts issues are determined by publisher, not by ebook retailers. Some publishers own global e-rights – Harlequin for one – not that this would be helpful to sci-fi fans, as that publisher rarely produces sci-fi.
The purchase of Stanza by Amazon reminds me quite a bit of the decade-old battle between Amazon and B&N when both first sought to capture the online print book market. I think we’ll all be watching carefully – it’s like Mothra vs. Godzilla!
I have great loyalty to Fictionwise (as my overstuffed bookshelf will attest). However, as the profile of the ebook market is raised, and the publishers start to pay attention to it, Fictionwise may start to find their hands tied even more by absurd restrictions imposed by publishers. Especially if the publishers decide that Kindle/mobi is the only format they will allow because of the Amazon hegemony and the illusory DRM umbrella that provides.
What worries me about this is that Amazon is clearly banking on dominating the market via the Kindle—a product they continue to sell only to Americans. What about ebook readers who are not American? Will they be shut out forever from any future developments, or relegated only to the PC-only Sony store for paid content? If the Kindle were only a world-wide product, I would feel much, much better about Amazon’s ‘world domination’ but as they seem bent on supplying books only to Americans, this worries me.
Can we say “Empire?”
Time will tell what kind of empire it is, but it is, clearly, empire.
I’ve not done any exhaustive searching or comparisons, but I’ve noticed a few cases where ebooks are available in Amazon’s Kindle store but not elsewhere. Cornell Woolrich’s FRIGHT, for instance; William Goldman shows several books available in the Kindle store, among them THE PRINCESS BRIDE which is probably his most popular novel, but only MAGIC seems to be available through any other retailer.
I’d bet those aren’t unique cases.
Other posts here at TeleRead have noted that publishers don’t seem to get it at all, that ebooks have been around for over a decade but only now with Kindle and to a lesser extent Sony do they seem to be trying to do anything with the potential market; how many of them think they’re doing all that needs to be done simply by making titles available for Kindle? By the time half these houses understand that Kindle wasn’t the only game in town, maybe Kindle will in fact be the only game in town.
And bests to all,
–tr
Companies buy other, smaller companies for many reasons. Sometimes it is for the smaller company’s signature product; either to add it to the bigger company’s portfolio or to suppress it. Sometimes, the product is more of an obstacle than an aid, though, and what is actually being acquired is the staff or the technology controlled by the smaller company.
When Amazon bought Mobipocket, it is clear now that what they were after was not the Mobipocket Reader app or the online bookstore, but the underlying technology; that is where Kindle came from, after all.
The Lexcycle acquisition may fit this pattern.
If we look at Lexcycle not as “Stanza’s creators”, but rather as a company with in-house expertise in creating e-reader apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, and portable devices; a company with expertise in crafting reader app interfaces for touch-based devices, and a company with expertise in ePub rendering (which Mr Meadows pointed out above), then there is a whole lot of non-Stanza motivated reasons for Amazon to acquire Lexcycle, no?
After all, as solid an offering as Kindle is,(especially on the hardware side), it still lags far behind PC- and- PDA-based ebook reader apps in functionality, interface, and typography. And that’s without getting into issues of alternate format support.
Lexcycle addresses all those areas.
Is a future Kindle going to have a touchscreen? Lexcycle knows how to deal with that.
Does Kindle need ePub support?
Lexcycle can handle that.
Does Kindle need more typographic user controls? Lexcycle can handle that. (Though to be honest, Mobipocket *should* be enough. But they haven’t stepped up for whatever reason.)
–continued–
Also, lets not discount the matter of code base; Lexcycle has a lot of Linux- and Arm-based code already on hand. So look to the Stanza feature set and consider how much of that code base can be readily ported over to Kindle to improve it.
The deal may be as simple as Amazon wanting to kill or co-opt Stanza, but it may also be a lot more complex; a lot nastier, actually.
–concluded as soon as the site lets me enter the last paragraph–
–3–
Amazon could enable DRM’ed ePub and eReader support using Lexcycle licenses and code.
Then they could simply sit back and let market forces do their dirty work for them; reader could choose to buy ePub or eReader using a PC to buy and transfer the files vs buying azw straight through whispernet. Scrounge around multiple retailers (possibly running into regional licensing issues) vs just buying azw via whispernet, secure in the knowledge that if you can see the book you can buy it. And above all, rely on their scale and purchasing power to maintain the cheapest prices and broadest catalog.
–4–
Amazon doesn’t need lock-in to dominate ebook retailing. They can get there just by “firstest with the mostest”. So far, they are (for most folks) first in mindshare and probably first in marketshare but they are not necessarily the “mostest” when it comes to functionality. Not that any dedicated ereader device comes even close to what end-users need.
(Just compare the richness of desktop readers like Mobipocket and, yes, Stanza for PC to what Kindle or Sony or the other gadgets offer; night-and-day, right?)
It may be that Amazon does in fact listen and that acquiring Lexcycle (before somebody else–say Sony–did) is a step to fil in the gaps before anybody else can take advantage of their current feature weakness.
No way anybody outside Amazon can really tell what exactly they have in mind but there most definitely is a game afoot.
And me, I’m thinking as this noise and drama is bound to attract other sharks.
For starters, I’m wondering about Wal-mart…
(Think about it.)
There are definitely a number of Mobipocket-only titles on Fictionwise, including pretty much everything current from Macmillan…including all of Tor’s recent catalog (at least the parts available on Fictionwise at all…they have books 1, 3, and 4 of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series but not book 2).
Of course, all of them (including the missing book 2) are available on Kindle.
Christopher, ‘The Ghost Brigades’ that’s available from Amazon is a Topaz book (topaz books are generally crappy quality). However you can get ‘The Ghost Brigades’ from Pan Macmillan in DRM Free epub…
http://www.panmacmillan.com/Titles/displayPage.asp?PageTitle=Individual%20Title&BookID=410477&International=
MacMillan (the US version including Tor and St. Martin’s) has got to be one of the worst as far as ebooks go, although it sounds like they might be working on getting better.
~
Hmmmm… I’m begining to feel like Amazon has the midas’ touch of ebooks — if midas’ touch was the swine flu instead of gold.
Yes, I may be biased—but only because I enjoy my eBooks and every time I turn around amazon is doing something to undercut my reading experience.
Their product is shoddy at best, and instead of improving it they have a pattern of monopolizing the business and killing technology that does work. I only hope they don’t do this with Stanza….
The thing I like about Stanza as is is the availability to purchase from a large amount of retailers–if one iphone store doesn’t have my book, another does. Comparitive shopping–it’s that simple.
In addition, some retailers have really stepped up the reading experience. Take for example BooksOnBoard ( it’s listed on the top spot in Stanza catalog).
BooksOnBoard has developed a QikClik technology that takes 3 clicks from selection to download, so I don’t have to go through the huge hassle of most retailers (including Amazon) which made me hesitant on ereading in early on.
With Amazon taking over Lexcycle what will happen to technological advances like this? Will we be left with the same old Kindle problems ? will all the good advances be swept under the rug in order for Amazon to stay on top?
Personally, I just want my reading experience to keep improving. There are still alot of bugs that need to be worked out to make it simpler, but I’m afraid that if Amazon keeps aquiring rather than making advances –the readers will be the ones left with the short end of the stick