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The Kindle and the Sony Reader are doomed. Convergence devices will become the e-readers of choice, Trevor Dolby predicts I’m not in the business of selling books. I sell writing. It doesn’t bother me how they want to read it as long as it’s true to the ideas I had. People criticize e-books for being nothing like the real thing. But they’re not trying to be. E-books are just a different way of getting writing and storytelling. Personally, I like a nice book. I need that private intellectual space that a real book gives me. But I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way. - Irving Welsh
It's an overpriced, inflexible piece of proprietary doggie doo. - Mike42
Apart from your cooker and your fridge, how many other devices do you have in your house that do just one thing? The trusty old Roberts in the bedroom perhaps? The microwave? I bet if you are going to buy a new radio you’ll be after one that has DAB and an iPod dock - and maybe internet radio to boot? Buying a TV? Not enough that it just picks up Sky and BBC, it has to be HD ready - and the latest have internet access and film downloads and can play your music wirelessly. IPod? Not just a music player: games, TV, emails and books. Computer? Everything. It’s called convergence and flexibility.
Last month Sony launched its new dedicated e-reader. Apparently this single function electronic device that costs anything north of £250 is catching on in sufficient numbers to make it a world-changing commercial proposition. On the next planet along there’s Amazon, from which almost every week we hear some statement about how the Kindle is changing the way we read.
The simple truth is that at present these devices are not changing the way we read. No matter how much vested interests bellow at me in an attempt to change my mind, they are not going to persuade me that my cat is a dog.
No one can dispute that mp3 players revolutionized the way we listen to music. They did so because the technology was a clear advance. But books are uniquely suited to paper. All these devices do is mimic electronically what the humble ink on paper does. The only USPs are rather minor. You can have 100 books with you at any one time – how many books can you read over a week? And you can get new ones quicker. (I’ll save the price issue for another time.) I don’t think I’m unique in the use of my e-reader. It’s continually running out of battery power, it’s slow, and, crucially, I cannot advertise how clever and interesting I am to young ladies on the Tube, since there’s no cover.
According to the latest figures from Sony, it sold the grand total of 400,000 e-books to January this year. There are no verified or Amazon-endorsed figures for the number of Kindles sold. On 10 August, Cowen and Company made a stab. They released a statement that Kindle revenues would top $266 million in 2009 and would represent 10% of Amazon’s North American retail sales in five years, accounting for $2.3 billion GAAP revenues. Cowen and Company expects Kindle unit sales to grow 11% to 1.8 million in 2010, increasing the total Kindle user population (what that?) to 3 million by the end of next year: “We believe that 17% of active US Amazon customers and four per cent of the total US population will own a Kindle in five years,” the report states, adding that Amazon is poised to dominate the European e-reader market as well. On what do they base these figures? “Four per cent of the total US population will own a Kindle in five years”? Is that the grumble of the Soup Dragon I hear?
Elsewhere on the net I found this quote: “Amazon managers told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates did not run them by the company.” By the way, Cowen and Company is, among other things, an investment bank specializing in “growth leveraged buyouts”. I’d sooner take advice from my sainted granny.
Amazon did have one chance to change the consumer habit of at least some of the book market and to protect its perceived iTunes model, but it missed the boat. If, a year ago, it had set aside $1 billion as a loss leader and said it would give away a Kindle with every five ebook downloads, it could have swamped the market with a proprietorial machine that might just have swung it. It didn’t, and now the Kindle will go the way of the Amstrad Displaywriter.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the iPod is sexy. The Kindle and Sony e-readers, on the other hand, look like they’ve been designed by a committee of archeologists.
It is the convergent devices that will take over the market. The unannounced but pretty much certain iTablet and its equivalents will be the devices that we all read books on. OK, you say, so what about e-Ink - isn’t that supposed to be the major distinguishing feature? Well you are not going to tell me that Steve Jobs hasn’t made a call to a small team of boffins in Cupertino and said, Right fellas, I want a program that mimics e-Ink: stable and energy-efficient and looks like “the real thing”.
In five years the Kindle and Sony e-book will no longer exist. On our wafer-thin computers, like large iPods, we will be reading a book while listening to music. The phone will ring or mail will ping, the machine will ask if you want to answer, you will chat, then the machine will ask if you want to continue reading. As for battery life, these devices will recharge continually via wi-fi.
I echo Paul Taylor’s parting paragraph in his assessment of the new Sony e-reader in the FT on 28 August. “I will continue to use the free Kindle App that runs on the iPhone/iPod Touch and which delivers most of the benefits of the Pocket Edition without requiring me to carry yet another device.” Trevor Dolby is Publisher of Preface
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