On Amazon’s Kindle and the eBook format.

by WyldKard on May 5, 2009

The Amazon Kindle: fail.

The very idea of an eBook reader is the stuff of the future. One device to store a library of information? Just imagine – clearing up household clutter by being able to get rid of all one’s books (and bookshelves!) and replacing them with one small device. A device that, so conveniently, is about the size of a netbook. Paper is so 20th century, isn’t it?

Well, not quite. eBook reading hasn’t taken off, though Amazon wants to convince us that it has. With their eBook reader, the Kindle, and their recent purchase of the studio behind leading eBook application Stanza, Amazon is positioning themselves to dominate the digital book download market. The idea, from a future financial perspective, is pretty solid: get in on the ground floor, and establish oneself as the market leader. Then, slowly push out the legacy competition by offering the more convenient eBook format over paper.

And why not? From a convenience perspective, there are only a couple reasons not to jump on the eBook bandwagon. For one, buying an eBook is near-instant gratification. No need to run to the store, and no need to wait for a book ordered online to ship. For books sans graphics, read for casual entertainment, there’s little differentiating the reading experience on a Kindle compared to on paper. Most novels, for example, don’t require the reader to flip back and forth between pages; reading is an entirely iterative process: flip forward, one page at a time, until reading is complete.

But that’s where eBook convenience pretty much ends. No matter how great the Kindle’s battery life is, it’s still reliant on a battery. And on-Kindle service is bound to Sprint’s network availability. Even if these factors aren’t huge turnoffs, there’s still the fact that the Kindle is pretty expensive at this point, costing $360. Even with the inflated price of paper books these days, the Kindle proves a poor purchase. Just now peeking into Amazon’s store, Kindle books look to cost around $10 a pop, with their paper equivalents only costing a couple dollars more. With a price difference of only $2, the break-even price of a Kindle doesn’t happen until we’ve purchased 150 books, having spent $1,800. For most consumers, even buying 150 books is unrealistic, begging the question as to just how worth it the Kindle’s convenience is, space-saving aside.

The numbers above can be tweaked, naturally, if we discount the price of the Kindle. Assuming we already own an iPhone, for example, with the free Kindle application, we’re now talking pure savings, since we don’t need to break even on a purchase. And this is really where the Kindle’s inconvenience can be seen. Talking about the break-even point for the iPhone is a non-factor because it’s unlikely that the purpose of purchasing an iPhone is for eBook reading alone. The iPhone is already used for a number of purposes, and a free eBook reader only makes the device more lust-worthy. Compare that to the Kindle, which offers almost no functionality other than presenting . Granted, there’s a built-in web browser, which is somewhat of a saving grace, but we question its usability over something tried-and-tested (like Safari).

Yes, there are other small advantages the Kindle offers, such as presenting text using a technology known to produce less eye-strain over the LCDs used in devices like the iPhone. But these minor boons to the device are what make the Kindle a luxury device, not a realistic, ubiquitous replacement for paper books. This becomes ever more noticeable when we’re looking at eBook readers for displaying textbooks and other tomes of reference. Simply put, tabbing paper pages is significantly more convenient than bookmarking eBook pages. That’s not to say a reasonable digital interface couldn’t be designed to simulate the real-world flexibility of tabbing pages (and adding notes), but no eBook reader is there just yet.

Recent talk is of a “large” Kindle for displaying newspapers, as though that’s what people (and not the newspaper industry) want. The Kindle isn’t going to solve the problem of newspapers publishing old news, nor the fact that the same news is available, for free, online. A Kindle with a large screen may be nice for displaying pictures alongside text (i.e. in magazine format), but without colour, the merits of such a device remain questionable.

What really needs to happen before eBooks will truly take off is a much cheaper cost to the consumer. A two-dollar price difference is nothing. eBooks should run $5 tops if there’s a paper-back equivalent, and more if the only alternative is an expensive hard-cover copy. As it stands, we’ve seen newly-released books cheaper in conventional format than their Kindle counterpart, and that’s based on Amazon prices for both. Ridiculous.

That’s not to say that a Kindle-like device isn’t attractive, merely that it’s not attractive right now. With a significantly larger magazine subscription selection, and more functionality (like colour graphics and a full-featured RSS reader), and ultimately a cheaper price, the Kindle may yet solidify the eBook industry. In the meantime, however, the eBook entrepreneurs at Amazon need to keep a careful eye on the potential competition: tablet-like devices could very well steal Amazon’s thunder, especially since they, like the iPhone, will be ever-more full-featured than the Kindle. Ultimately, it may be the Kindle eBook format that will determine the Kindle’s success, and not the Kindle device itself.

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