Apr

7

2008

The Kindle is Amazon’s bid for the e-book market, and their first-ever consumer electronics device.  Yesterday I looked into the history of e-book readers to see what failed and why.  Today I am going to look at what Amazon did to overcome the challenges of providing a commercially successful e-book technology.

The success of Amazon as a bookseller really revolves around just one thing: Reducing the cost of getting almost any book you could possibly want into your hands.  When you think of it, online bookselling seems too absurd to work.  It’s pretty hard to browse through lots of titles to find something that catches your eye.  You can’t flip through the pages to see if it looks interesting.  You have to wait at least a couple of days to even hold your purchase in your hand.  Despite these problems Amazon has grown to one of the world’s largest booksellers.

If we presume that Amazon’s primary appeal is that it has a lot of books that it sells cheaply by being more efficient than anyone else, its move into e-books becomes painfully obvious.  Much of the cost of selling books is in paper, printing, warehousing, and shipping.  What if you could remove all of that in one fell swoop?  Consumers could have a less expensive product while authors, publishers, and especially Amazon.com make even more money.

That was always the value proposition of e-books.  We know it can work because it has worked for most other publishing industries.  But as we saw yesterday, the reader technology was just not good enough to appeal to a mainstream audience even if a sufficient collection of titles had been available, and they weren’t.

I believe that to attain mainstream appeal an e-book seller needs to supply product and technology with six major attributes:

1. A large inventory of titles.
2. Lower cost per title than paper.
3. Delivery that either does not require a separate computer or that is extremely easy to use with a computer (a la the iPod).
4. A reader device with battery life sufficient for reading for at least a full day without recharge, and preferably for days on end.
5. A reader display technology that is both high resolution and which works across a wide range of lighting.
6. An inexpensive reader device.

Prior to Amazon’s effort very few e-book readers successfully solved even two of these problems, much less most or all of them.  Sony’s Reader device, the first to use the revolutionary e-Ink display, was clearly the best previous effort.  Unfortunately both the original Reader and its follow-on suffered from poor inventory, high cost of both titles and reader devices, a balky store and annoyingly difficult book loading.  It looked gorgeous, but it was too hard to buy too few books, making it something of a paperweight (pun intended).

What makes the Kindle revolutionary is that it offered solutions, at least in part, to the first five problems right out the door.  Given that, and the propensity for electronics to become better and cheaper with each product iteration, everyone expects the sixth to fall into place within a few years.

It is possible, even probable, that previous e-book reader devices could have been successful if only they had a decent library of available titles that were sold at lower prices than the same titles in paper.  It didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, until a behemoth bookseller like Amazon threw its weight behind the task.  Without someone with the clout of Amazon forcing them to the party mainstream publishers had little incentive to offer electronic versions of their titles, especially at a discount.  Most offered only a paltry few, if any, and often in formats that were not readable on anything but a full-blown Windows PC.  Amazingly, Amazon managed to convince almost every major publishing house to put up current titles.  The Kindle Store opened with more than 90,000 titles on the first day, more than double the nearest competitor and almost five times larger than most e-book vendors’ inventories.  About 90% of the current best-seller titles were available right from the start.  That alone was enough to make people pay attention.

What’s more, Amazon’s price structure was appealing.  Most current titles, those available in hardcover at prices of around $20 in bookstores, sell for just $10.  Back-catalog or paperback titles usually sell for $5-7, a couple of dollars less expensive than their paper counterparts.  Some titles, particularly of classic out-of-copyright texts, are available for as little as $1.

Every review of the Kindle I have read mentions the $10 price point of bestsellers, but few mention that most titles are considerably less expensive.  I have purchased about forty titles to date, and the average cost works out to about $6.  That is a little more expensive than used books, but significantly less expensive than new paper books would have been.  Some titles were 60% less expensive than their paper counterparts.

Unfortunately while Amazon has far more e-book titles than anyone else their inventory still has gaping holes in it.  Pick any prolific author you care to name and Amazon may have a couple of their titles, but it will be missing most of them.  What makes this less worrisome is that Amazon is expanding their inventory very quickly: In the four months since the Kindle became available its list of available book titles has grown by more than 25%, now exceeding 115,000 titles, and the rate of growth is accelerating rapidly.  It appears that the Kindle has already forced a tipping point in the publishing industry.

The Kindle has a lot of books, about ten times as many as a typical bookstore, and they are priced well: Two things that no e-book vendor accomplished previously.  But what about the reader?

The Kindle brings together a host of technologies that have been developed in various industries over the last decade or so.  PDAs pushed the envelope on low-power processor technology and the use of flash ram for nonvolatile storage.  Internally the Kindle looks a lot like a current-generation Palm or Windows PPC device, it’s nothing special in this regard.  It doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t take much computing power to display a page.

Like Sony’s Reader devices, the Kindle uses an electrophoretic display, often called electronic paper, from a company called e-Ink.  The Wikipedia article on the subject goes into far more detail than I can manage here, you should read it if you’re interested in how the technology works, but for our purposes there are really only a few interesting points.

Electronic paper is nothing like popular LCD display technologies.  It uses no power unless it the display contents are being changed, it has a resolution approaching that of print, and it works extremely well in bright light.  The practical upshot is that it’s like reading a page printed on slightly gray glossy paper stock.  Everyone I have shown the display to cannot believe it is a computer display.  In terms of readability it is a vast improvement over what everyone is accustomed to.

Even so I am not convinced that its readability is so much better than LCD technologies as to make it a giant leap forward on that alone.  It is its power use characteristics that seal the deal.  Almost all of the power drain of a PDA is the result of the backlight on its LCD display.  Electronic paper has no such backlight, it doesn’t need it, and that makes it substantially more efficient.  It doesn’t use any power at all except when the display contents are changing.  The practical result of this is that while the current generation of PDAs can run for about six hours on a charge, a similar device using electronic paper can easily run for days.

In its most efficient setting the Kindle will run for about six days on a single charge.  We’ve all been trained to put our devices to sleep, or turn them off entirely, in order to conserve power.  It’s not necessary with the Kindle, you can just leave it on all the time.  That took some getting used to.

The final technology that sets the Kindle apart from its predecessors is its cellular data connection.  Previous e-book readers have used a variety of technologies from analog modems to USB connections to load new content.  Without exception they were a hassle to use.  The simplest of them, like the Rocketbook, required to you plug the device into a telephone jack and let it dial up to the mother ship for books.  Almost all of the rest tied book loading to a PC.  You buy the books online, download them to the PC, then sync them to the device.  Perhaps if the sync software had been as easy to use as iTunes the USB connection would have worked well enough, but the software was universally lousy.  Even if Sony had a large enough library its device could never have been mainstream with their horrible synchronization software.

Amazon chose to use the cellular network.  This makes the device considerably more expensive, but means that the Kindle can be used without ever connecting it to a PC.  You can browse for, purchase, and download books entirely with the device itself in a matter of a couple of minutes.  It’s addictively easy, and Amazon bundles the cost of the cellular service into the price of the unit and the books.  There is no monthly service charge.

For the first time you can have an entire bookstore—a really big one—in the palm of your hand, almost anywhere you can get a cellular signal.  No more are you at the mercy of the airport bookstore for entertainment on the second leg of your journey.

The downside of the cellular technology is a heavy tax on battery life.  With the cellular radio off I have used my Kindle for six days straight without recharging, but if I turn it on I get about 46 hours before it’s dead.  (These numbers are almost exactly what Amazon claims, which is refreshing.) Luckily the Kindle has a switch you can use to turn the radio off easily, and I leave mine off when I am not using it for browsing or downloading.  This allows recharge intervals of about four days.

This confluence of content and technologies is why many people think that the Kindle can be successful even though all previous e-book readers have failed miserably.  It’s why I decided to buy one the moment they went on sale, and why I believe that the Kindle is the first flame in a fire that is going to burn down the paper book industry that we know today (and rebirth it as something else entirely).

But the Kindle isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and tomorrow we’ll look at what they did right and wrong in Hands On With The Kindle.


Categories: Entertainment

1 Comments

Hasn’t the ebook industry been difficult?


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