Kindle owners, prepare yourselves. As ebooks grow in market share, you’re going to be hearing a lot of arguments from publishers–all of them deeply suspect–about why they have to price their books higher.
If you were around for the whole mp3 revolution–from its tiny birth pangs in ‘98 and ‘99, through the iPod’s first really disruptive years in ‘03 and ‘04, to the fairly mature market we have now–you’ll have heard all of these arguments before. If you’re not a technophile and don’t even think of your beloved Kindle as a disruptive technology, the arguments might be new to you. But they’re false, and they’re being made by businesses with broken business models, publishers who want to hobble the marketplace via the only technique they have left after letting their distribution network be supplanted by newer technology. They’re going to do it by training customers to pay more for no good reason.
What’s prompted this tirade post? A confluence of two online incidents. The first is a comment I read over the Thanksgiving holiday by a purported publishing insider, and while there’s no way to verify that he’s the real deal, his general attitude reminded me of something I was disappointed to see at a Google publishing conference a year and a half ago. The second is more immediate and distressing to me as a consumer: some books are now being priced above the ten dollar mark on the Amazon Kindle store.
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Only minutes after posting that the Kindle is sold out for this year and wondering whether we’ll see a Kindle 2 in early 2009, I came across this article that might just answer my question. TechCrunch writes:
It was scheduled to be released in October in time for this holiday season, but Bezos himself reportedly pulled the plug for last minute changes to the software. Our sources now say it’s tentatively scheduled to go on sale in “early next quarter.”
Key differences from Kindle 1–and if you saw all of these stories back in August when the rumors first surface, yes, they’re the same changes as then:
- dpad-style joystick (think cellphone dpads) instead of white lcd scroller
- no more SD card slot!
- longer
- thinner
- rounded corners (a welcome change in my opinion)
- keyboard unified into a single block
- smaller page buttons to reduce accidental clicks
Below is a photo from BoyGeniusReport on what it will look like.
Personally, I’m not feeling the marshmallow-y softness of the new design. The original Kindle design may not have gone over well with the masses, but I always liked its angular, asymmetrical look. I just didn’t like the sharp corners and too-easy-to-press buttons, so I guess you take the good with the bad.
If you were planning on grabbing a Kindle for yourself or a booklover you know, you’ll have to wait until January–Amazon says they’re sold out until at least December 24th of this year. What no one seems to know yet is whether we’ll be seeing Kindle 2 when the new year rolls around, or whether they’ll continue to ship the ugly/cool device we’ve all grown to love. (If you recall, there were lots of rumors a few months back that version 2 of the device could be here as early as October, which obviously didn’t happen.)
Update: Looks like the rumors have been semi-confirmed that the Kindle 2 will indeed ship early Q1 2009.
Stanza is an iPhone app that lets you read public domain books on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Why do you, a Kindle owner, care? Because the company behind Stanza is working on a desktop version of the app (OS X and Windows only, no Linux, boo) that not only greatly improves the PC reading experience, but also lets you convert any text you’re reading into the Kindle format without having to use Mobipocket Creator.
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