Apr

10

2008

For most of the last week I have been talking about the e-book market and the design and day-to-day use of Amazon’s Kindle reader.  Today I’m going to wrap up my series on the Kindle by talking about the process of obtaining books for the thing, and touch on a few of its features outside of its main raison d’etre.

So, what is it like to get books for the thing?

Amazon’s goal with the device is to sell you books, and they’ve made it very easy to buy them.  Using the web browser on any computer you can browse to books on Amazon.com and select “Kindle Edition” if there is one.  Purchase the book and it will download automatically to the Kindle in a few minutes.

Or, if you are nowhere near a computer, select “Shop in Kindle Store” from the home page menu.  You’ll be greeted with a simple page offering you the ability to browse for books, newspapers, and magazines as well as a row of books Amazon thinks might interest you.  Oddly Amazon chooses to show its recommendations using icons of the book covers.  As I mentioned previously the graphics display capability of the device is very limited, so what you usually get is a row of unrecognizable gray blobs.  It seems kind of silly.

At the bottom of the page is a search line with which you can get a list of books with a particular title or author.  It’s very much like a simple version of the Amazon.com website.  Assuming there is a Kindle version of a book you want it’s easy to find with searching, and the recommendation system is ok for random browsing, but it’s still nowhere near as nice as walking through a real bookstore.

On the other hand this particular bookstore is available anywhere that you can get a cellular connection, which is just about everywhere these days.  I have had friends mention a book I might like, found it on the Kindle Store, purchased it, and started reading it in less than five minutes.  That’s pretty nice.

Unfortunately the catalog of Kindle books is still fairly small relative to print.  I mentioned the other day that Kindle has more than 115,000 titles now, and the number has been growing very rapidly in recent weeks.  That’s around ten times as many titles as a normal brick-and-mortar bookstore but nowhere near as many titles as you can buy in paper from Amazon.com.  If it’s on the bestseller list you’ll probably find it, and many authors have one or two books available, but catalog depth is still a big problem and will remain so until the publishers decide to start converting their back-catalogs wholesale.  With the surprise popularity of the Kindle this is starting to happen, but it’s going to take time to build.

Ironically one thing I don’t like about the Kindle Store is just how easy it is to buy things.  Click “Buy” and you bought it!  That’s convenient, but it also means that I can’t give a Kindle to my young daughter because she could put me in the poor house buying Little Fairy books one after another.  Amazon needs to add a password, at least as an option.

Most Kindle reviews mention that books cost $10.  This is really only true of bestseller titles, the books you can only buy in hardcover for around $20.  As such they are priced at about half of the paper version, but bestsellers are not the only books available.  Amazon also offers a lot of books at prices of $5-7, usually a dollar or two less expensive than a paperback version, and offers a lot of classics at prices as low as $1.  My average book price has been around $6, which is much less than I usually spend for paper books.

The improved economics of e-books is actually why I selected the title for the kick-off of series of postings.  E-books are so much less expensive than paper books that, once readers are out there in volume, it will be cost-effective to publish many texts that simply could not be made available in paper form.  Back-catalogs especially, and niche books, short texts like individual poems, etc. If e-book readers become ubiquitous, which I believe is going to happen as the price falls below $100, even popular books (think “trashy romance novel") will be published only in electronic form.  At that point the falling demand for paper books will make them even more expensive and much of the paper publishing industry will die almost overnight.

This seems like a nightmare scenario to a lot of people, and I for one do not want paper books to disappear either, but in a lot of ways it will be a blessing in disguise.  There will always be a market, albeit a smaller one, for paper books.  Without mass market publishing, and given universal electronic availability of text, print-on-demand is going to explode.  I expect niche booksellers to pop up who print with boutique materials; we will see the re-emergence of custom leather binding if you’re willing to pay for it, and you’ll be able to get hardcover versions of any book you want even if it was released years ago.  There are books I own that have only ever been released in paperback that I would love to have in a more durable binding so I look forward to this eventuality.

Getting back to a more personal level of economics, the per-book cost savings for the Kindle start to add up quickly if you’re an avid reader.  I expect to break even on the $400 cost of the Kindle within a year of purchase, and possibly sometime this summer.  As the price of e-book readers drops, as it surely will, it will not take very many purchases before it is cheaper to buy the e-book reader and texts than their paper counterparts.

One of the big complaints people have with e-books is that publishers usually release them with onerous digital rights management (DRM), i.e. they are in encrypted form that limits how you can read them and takes away your right to lend or sell them.  This is true, and if you’re someone who sells his books to finance future purchases you’re going to hate that.  If you’re someone who builds a library, however, DRM really doesn’t get in the way.  Amazon allows up to six Kindles to be associated with one Amazon.com account, allowing books to be shared amongst each of them, giving a measure of flexibility that most people don’t expect.  Buy a Kindle for each member of your family (after prices come down!) and they all have access to the complete library, all the time, without paying more for additional copies.  There’s some give, but there’s a little take too.

The Kindle can be used with unrestricted books as well, although you either have to pay Amazon ten cents to load them via wireless or use a USB connection to copy them into the “documents” directory of the Kindle’s built-in flash or an add-on SD card.

It supports several document formats, including plain text and the very popular Mobipocket format.  (Aside: Amazon bought Mobipocket, and the Kindle book format is just a slightly modified version of Mobipocket.) Any e-book vendor that offers Mobipocket books already offers books for your Kindle, which means you can buy from vendors like FictionWise.  You can even get a DRM-protected Mobipocket book to display on the Kindle, although extracting the Mobipocket device ID is a little annoying and you have to tweak the file slightly.  I expect other e-book publishers to automate this process in the near future.

The popular document format that the Kindle does not directly support is Adobe PDF, and many consider this to be a serious limitation.  Amazon has a conversion system available where you mail a document to a special e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account, Amazon converts the document, then either e-mails it back or downloads it directly to your Kindle.  It works ok for text documents, but not so well for anything with tables, and is generally a so-so solution.

I don’t consider this a huge problem because it has been my experience that PDF documents display poorly on anything other than printed paper.  You need a big LCD display to be able to read PDF documents without a lot of scrolling or scaling down to microscopic sizes, and PDFs on small display devices like the Kindle (or, worse, a Palm) are an exercise in futility right from the start.  The value proposition of PDF, that it produces exactly what you want, is a huge limitation when the display medium is not the same size or resolution as the original page design called for.  HTML has already impacted the spread of PDF and I think e-books are going to kill it.  Thus while the Kindle’s lack of PDF is a bit of an annoyance, and for people who need to read a lot of PDFs it’s a deal-killer, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference to the mass-market viability of the Kindle over the long term.

Interestingly most Kindle reviews focus on the $10 bestseller and completely ignore the substantial catalog of free e-books that are available now.  Organizations like Project Gutenberg have been digitizing out-of-copyright texts for more than a decade, and Project Gutenberg alone has more than 20,000 books available at no cost whatsoever.  Almost all of the classics, like the complete works of Shakespeare, are available for free.  If you like older books the economics of the Kindle are very favorable.

There are even lots of modern texts available from places like ManyBooks.net (for example, try Ventus by Karl Schroeder) and Tor, a book publisher known for its fantasy and science-fiction books, even offers a free title a week as a marketing gimmick if you’ll sign up on an e-mail list.  Tor is pushing this hard: They’re not offering the lousy stuff, they want you to see how good they can be so that you go out and buy more.  Some of the books they’ve offered already are amongst the best science-fiction I have ever read (for instance, Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, although that was not offered as a Kindle version as newer releases are).

If you like to read then an e-book can be an enjoyable and even economical way to do so, despite the hue and cry of curmudgeons and Luddites.  I think the Kindle is going to cause a tipping point in mass-market acceptance of e-books, although it will be at least several years before we’ll know for sure.  I hope you’ll be reading with me, whether electronically or not, as the digital revolution comes to books.

As the Kindle and the e-book market evolves I’ll be revisiting it on a regular basis and I always welcome your comments.  Let me know what you think!


Categories: Entertainment

1 Comments

I just went through an exercise in “down-sizing” prior to moving and had a book disposale service come in and cart off about 700 books of all types. What I realized is that moving, dusting and finding a book becomes very difficult when your library is so large. I can’t stand the dusting and books that get moldy I just can’t take the sneezing fits. Also newsprint makes my hands break-out in a rash. So to read a large paper requires gloves or frequent washing of my hands.  This makes an e-reader very attractive for all the above reasons. Just want to thank you for such a well organized and complete article on the Kindle and e-book publishing in general.


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