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The economics of Kindle
Here are two short essay-lets. I'll admit to not yet having seen a Kindle, but I think it is not the wave of the future and not the next iPod. The key feature of the iPod is the use of software to organize your music collection, not just the portability. The (somewhat) comparable use of software for reading is RSS, but Kindle is not an efficient way of reading blogs, it is mostly designed for full-length titles. (And if you really want to read your favorite blogs on RSS, while you walk around, the iPhone already allows that.) Furthermore we want to hear our favorite songs many times, but the ability to call up again our favorite book is not of comparable value, again limiting the value of using software to organize our reading. Plus a book takes longer to consume than does a song, so just carry the book you are reading instead of carrying Kindle. Maybe Kindle is good for voracious readers who take long trips, and don't want to buy books along the way, but can you build a market on that?
Here is one interesting review of the product, here is a very detailed and very pro-Kindle review. I'm still a skeptic, at least until software takes on a larger role in reorganizing the reading experience.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 26, 2007 at 06:13 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
As far as software reorganizing the reading experience:
I've been using Supermemo for the past couple months to retain my foreign language vocabulary. It's pretty amazing, functioning like another section of your brain, one with code to remind you when you're about to forget a word.
But. One of the features of the newer versions that I have yet to use is called Incremental Reading. It's billed as a way to read (and memorize?) multiple articles at once, generally by cutting them into strips a bit at a time, and occluding portions to prompt the memorization. The newest version has scheduling and time-tracking features built-in to optimize your life spent doing this.
It sounds like a horrible way to read, and iirc one post on metafilter called it (or something about Supermemo) a "discredited" mode of learning. Well, the flashcard system works and that's good enough for me, but I imagine that the maintainer who writes an ungodly amount of propaganda/instructions for it would have more pressure to clean up the UI if people other than him actually used the more advanced features.
Posted by: APS at Nov 26, 2007 6:43:26 PM
EBooks will eventually replace the book - its only matter of time. But is Kindle the product to begin that transition? I have to admit I am the target market for this type of thing. Amazon did several things right (free wireless access) but also some mistakes (can't read my own PDFs? what?). I thinks its a very compelling from a magazine and newspaper standpoint which are more throw away items anyways. Not so much from a book standpoint as the content isn't there yet and the DRM is a big issue. But its only 11 ounces. If I had to choose between carrying three books or a 11 ounce gadget? - I would lean towards the gadget.
Posted by: tim at Nov 26, 2007 6:52:14 PM
I don't get the Kindle move. If anything I see a desire on the part of consumers to consolidate, not have one more gadget to carry around. And the keyboard seems largely superfluous. But what do I know, Bezos and his predictions have a much better track record than mine do. ;-)
Posted by: Chris Meisenzahl at Nov 26, 2007 7:05:18 PM
Who knows if this will blow up? Remember CmdrTaco from Slashdot's first review of the iPod:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Anyone remember the Nomad? Read the the comments. With the luxury of hindsight, they make for great reading.
So much for the wisdom of the crowds.
Posted by: Varangy at Nov 26, 2007 7:23:41 PM
I like having books on my shelf.
How expensive will paper have to get before this is a no-brainer?
Posted by: Ansel at Nov 26, 2007 8:07:55 PM
What about Kindles for academics? Specifically for papers rather than books?
I normally have shloads of papers I'm trying to keep track of and interrelate so there's some inherent value to organiation.
Then they'e short enough that I may want to read a bunch at one sitting (or at least skim)
Posted by: Jody at Nov 26, 2007 8:08:12 PM
What will inspire some significant jump to e-book readers is when they incorporate the ability to load and read any pdf document, and annote it with a stylus pen. I have a Sony reader, and while you can upload your own pdfs, you can't magnify them beyond the text boundary of the page. The text on a research paper is generally so small that it is difficult to read, and notation is pretty much impossible. A lot of academics and business people would love an annote-able electronic repository of pdf documents, but none of the readers offer this functionality yet. The Sony reader, any way, is very nice for reading books available from Sony (the zoom function is great). You can store a ton of them, the reader never gets hot, and the battery measures in weeks. If you add wireless functionality to the point that you can download pdfs directly from the web, make it easy to zoom in on any pdf document, and provide a stylus pen for annotation, and if you could make the whole thing cost less than $500, there would be a very sizeable market of professionals willing to buy.
Posted by: Sean at Nov 26, 2007 8:10:47 PM
Kindle strikes me as a useful device for travellers, though not worth $400 to me, at least. You can carry a lot of books with you (I never know what I'm going to feel like reading on the plane), including guide books and, I suppose, maps.
The whole ebooks idea ignores some of the joys of book-buying: browsing, discovering something that looks interesting, hearing from a random fellow customer (or clerk) that a book is really good, etc. Maybe all that is not a big deal, but I think that for some heavy book buyers it is.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Nov 26, 2007 8:24:49 PM
I don't really understand why everyone is making such a big deal about the Kindle in the press. I've been using the Sony Portable Reader System for several months now. I'm an avid reader, and it's a godsend. As a lawyer, the potential for this platform is great, but there's still a lot to do on that front. As far as reading is concerned, it's great to have a sackful of books in one sleek package.
Posted by: Michael Roffe at Nov 26, 2007 8:54:28 PM
I don't really understand why everyone is making such a big deal about the Kindle in the press. I've been using the Sony Portable Reader System for several months now. I'm an avid reader, and it's a godsend. As a lawyer, the potential for this platform is great, but there's still a lot to do on that front. As far as reading is concerned, it's great to have a sackful of books in one sleek package.
Posted by: Michael Roffe at Nov 26, 2007 8:55:00 PM
Sean's got it right. Pdf portability and annotation would have had me lining up to buy one of these things. Would you not like the ability to carry around a couple thousand journal articles Tyler? I'm imagining sitting in the back of an audience at a conference or a talk where the speaker makes a claim you don't like about some or another paper. With the ability to call that paper up instantly there would be whole new ways to knock softballs out of the park during talks. Now I'm getting all giddy...
Posted by: Greg at Nov 26, 2007 8:59:39 PM
How expensive will paper have to get before this is a no-brainer?
Well, in some cases, paper is already expensive enough for this to be a no-brainer, depending on how you define "expensive". I'm a pretty fast reader who can't sleep on planes: On my last trans-Atlantic flight I would have killed to have enough reading material for the flight on an 11oz device instead of the books I hauled back and forth in my carry-on. I don't make many trips like that, but enough people do every day that if I were running an airline I'd buy a few thousand and rent them out freshly loaded with a dozen newspapers and recent bestsellers.
I'm currently working on my PhD thesis, so I heartily agree with the people talking about annotating one's own PDFs. (As a sudoku fan with a dozen MB of puzzle PDFs, too...) I'm tired of hauling papers out to a coffeeshop to read and then back, filing them away, probably never to use the hard copy again.
On the other hand, I also greatly value the ability to lend or give someone a book I just finished, or a paper I found interesting. I seriously doubt that any of the next few generations of Kindles or Sony Readers will allow me to do that.
Posted by: Dolohov at Nov 26, 2007 9:04:21 PM
I too have the Sony device, ( new version model 505 with the page and option buttons on the right). I 've been using for a couple of months now, and I really love it, the design , form factor and controls are just right. But I agree that is for avid readers ( such as myself) I read fiction as well as technical papers in PDF and HTML, the battery and the screen are amazing. However I don't think the device is for everybody, the book selection is limited, the software is Windows-only and it's far from perfect. It's not about reading blogs or even magazines, this is for books, and only for books, newspapers, maybe, I am not sure.
I would not compare any of these devices to the ipod, but they are more like the first mp3 players, lacking good software and polish, but heading in the right direction.
When the price goes down enough and the screens get color and better response, we'll see the ipod for books.
Posted by: Alejandro at Nov 26, 2007 9:15:45 PM
Remember CmdrTaco from Slashdot's first review of the iPod:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Anyone remember the Nomad? Read the the comments. With the luxury of hindsight, they make for great reading.
So much for the wisdom of the crowds.
No, the crowds got it right. The first reviewer was just that--a lone reviewer. The market (i.e. crowds) ate it up.
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Nov 26, 2007 10:08:34 PM
The most interesting economic aspect of the Kindle is that they are trying to turn conventional internet service payments upside down. Besides your $400 device, you get free EVDO wireless internet service, but you pay for the content. This is contrary to the current common model where you pay your ISP for the connection to the internet, but read mostly free content (like this blog). Presumably Amazon is covering the costs of the connection via the cost of the content you download.
It makes me curious as to whether there are places this sort of "pay for content get free service" model would work. It does seem a bit susceptible to people using the Kindle to get content from other providers that aren't paying for the connection.
Posted by: matt mcknight at Nov 27, 2007 12:00:54 AM
For those clamoring for an ereader able to read pdfs and that supports annotation: it exists. The irex iliad. The annotation looks like a bit of a pain (you have to merge the pdf and annotation file afterwards) but it is out there. A bit pricy though.
The real problem here is easy access to the long tail of books, which is what appeals to the early to mid-adopters. Pdf support isn't enough (helps for academic papers though) because it is a pain to convert a book to pdf. The most to hope for from Kindle is that it pushes more and more publishers to put out electronic versions of their books. DRM is an issue, but not as much as availability (though, of course, the two issues are related).
Posted by: Drew Mehta at Nov 27, 2007 12:41:19 AM
oh yea, and its ugly!
http://mattkern.com/re-design-the-kindle-contest/
Posted by: Matt Kern at Nov 27, 2007 1:09:34 AM
I'm bemused by this post. Is price not an issue? A decent e-reader that reads pdfs will turn the publishing world upside down because it will allow people to inexpensively publish their own books. The authors can then drastically drop the price and make more profit.
Books are also really expensive when they first come out. Imagine the market for downloading ebooks via peer-to-peer. But of course there are no cost conscious bookworms are there? Except the entire student body of the world (and even academics in most of the world).
Posted by: Finnsense at Nov 27, 2007 3:36:45 AM
I would love to have something like a Kindle, but I hate the Kindle itself. It would a student's dream to carry around multiple books on one device-- doing that with textbooks, for example, would be amazing. Good for plane trips, too. But the Kindle itself is ugly, doesn't support PDFs, and has a ton of weird fees associated with reading blogs/newspapers, etc. Inconvenient, ugly, and $400? That can't be the future.
Posted by: kolya at Nov 27, 2007 5:15:53 AM
bill stepp...the crowds at first didn't eat it up...at least, not the tech crowds. I promise...i was one of them, spouting the idea that minidisc was WAY better than some stupid hard drive player.
Now, I'm on my third ipod. :)
as to the kindle: once it gets rockboxed (open source firmware, typically allowing all SORTS of things that the original firmware didn't, though sometimes not as elegantly), it's more interesting.
Posted by: shawn at Nov 27, 2007 8:20:18 AM
does it give you a headache the way a computer screen does?
Posted by: josh at Nov 27, 2007 8:58:08 AM
Hmmm. $500 for free wireless broadband as long as I'm willing to browse in grayscale? Forgetting about ebooks, I might go for that deal. But if many people buy Kindles for wireless web and don't buy ebooks, Amazon is screwed.
Posted by: Slocum at Nov 27, 2007 11:07:26 AM
"[P]aper has a unique set of "affordances" -- that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. ... Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text."
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Social Life of Paper"
Posted by: Timothy at Nov 27, 2007 11:53:16 AM
FWIW, I think the interesting race will be between tablet PCs coming down in price, and e-books moving up in functionality. It sounds, from these reviews, like folks really want a tablet that lets you read easily and with log battery life.
(As a genuine sandal-wearing UNIX programmer, I'll probably choose the Asus Eee PC for something to play with during this gizmo cycle, more flexible than an e-book, but also less pleasant for reading-not-surfing.)
Posted by: odograph at Nov 27, 2007 1:05:58 PM
Apparently, .pdf capability is coming to Kindle soon. However, instead of directly displaying a .pdf file, it will convert it to Kindle's native format, and it is this format conversion that Amazon is still working on perfecting.
I'm a person who moves a lot, and the task of hauling 2000 lbs of books to a new state or country every 3 or 4 years is getting old. Plus I typically carry a few pounds of reading material on every holiday or business trip.
I think the most valuable aspect of Kindle might be a combination of free browsing and periodical reading. I'd still want the physical SuDoku's, though.
I'm generally patient enough to not be an early-adopter, but this might be different for me. Another six weeks of news and reviews and I might just make the jump.
Posted by: bartman at Nov 27, 2007 2:02:34 PM
