Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

In all the Kindle 2.0 buzz, what’s getting lost is that the forthcoming Kindle Textbook Edition might very well have a much bigger impact. Here’s why I think KindleText will be a huge hit (and I’m focusing solely on the impact on college students and the textbook market – the impact on school children I’ll write about later) -

Kindle’s TextBook Version will make Students’ lives easier

The impact is much more than just potentially lower prices -

1. Buying cheap licenses for textbooks is a better option than buying expensive textbooks and trying to sell them before publishers have new updated versions of the textbooks out.  
2. Up to 6 Kindles can share an account – study groups anyone?
3. Portability and Convenience.  
4. Free Internet – For all the talk of being able to access the internet on your laptop and cellphone that requires a subscription that is usually really expensive. Wikipedia, a dictionary and the limited browser do cover most academic needs.
5. A Kindle is a value adding device as opposed to a lot of new devices that are time wasting devices. The lack of features actually helps you focus better on the core task at hand.

In a way the Kindle is a netbook focused exclusively on reading – the precise reason that people think the Kindle cannot compare with netbooks and the iphone i.e. the lack of features and multi-functionality, is the reason the Kindle is great as TextBook 2.0.

Kindle helps Publishers, even though they are reluctant to understand this.

There is an endless war going on with publishers trying newer and newer (and stupider) methods to try to maintain profits (new editions every 6-12 months; eTextbooks with limited usability). Students, on the other hand, are selling used books, scanning textbooks and putting them on torrent sites, and photocopying pages. This is a pointless struggle on both sides.

There’s actually a rather straightforward exchange of value that happens when a student buys a textbook, and there are two competing models that should be encouraged  -

1. Published TextBooks with one person use, unlimited time licenses. The kindle becomes an ideal device for implementing this.  
2. Open source Textbooks - available in a variety of formats that enables use on the Kindle.

Two competing models would mean that more specialized areas or textbooks that are very expensive to create are still produced by publishing houses, and easier to create textbooks come under the fold of the open source textbooks model.

The Textbook Publishing industry has to face the truth – their industry has to evolve with technology, and it’s not going to continue to be a cash cow forever. Publishers need to stop fighting technology (a hopeless battle they can never win) and instead focus on using technology like the Kindle to create a better value proposition for their customers.

Portfolio Magazine has an interesting comment -

Textbook publishers should be intrigued. They hate the used bookmarket. It cuts deeply into new book sales and forces them to continually published “revised” versions to force students to buy newer versions. With e-books, students can’t easily resell the textbooks, while at the same time publishers could charge less so students have less incentive to buy used books anyway. This could be good for everyone involved — except the college bookstores.

A Small Interlude

Although we might think that students and publishers are the main stakeholders, there are a variety of other parties that are involved – each with their own axe to grind. I’m going to talk about each of them, and hopefully you can chime in with your thoughts.

TextBook Authors and the Kindle

There are two obvious camps here with the open source textbook people, and the ones who (rightly so) want to be paid for their effort. The beauty of the Internet is that it lets people who want to give away their effort for free, do just that. Personally, I think altruism is just a different life strategy. However, let’s look at what’s probably going to happen -

1. The first possibility is that there will be a few hundred thousand wikipedias that will spring up. The recent ‘plea for help from Jimmy Wales’ shows the inherent difficulty in maintaining something like Wikipedia. In my mind, there is no way that high quality textbooks can be maintained without financing.  
2. The second possibility is that the more popular textbooks, which have the backing of lots of students and professors, will migrate towards a wikipedia or open source model. And nearly all niche and less popular textbooks will continue to be published by publishers. This has some possibility of coming about – however, it’s not the one that gets my vote.   
3. The third possibility is that a new model of authoring, publishing and distribution will come up. This is actually what is happening in a lot of other areas and with books in general. We no longer need paper creation, distribution of books, and storage and display. There are other tasks like inventory management that are being automated and made more efficient. This modernization is cutting into the number of jobs available and also reducing  the prices of books and textbooks. This is inevitable – technology is disruptive and it will lead to a new business model for textbooks.

The efficiency will manifest in terms of lower prices for customers and publishers and authors cannot expect to survive using past models. Authors really need to be careful (as do content providers and publishers) – If the barrier to entry is low and/or there are enough altruistic/crazy people willing to give away their work for free, then you want to stay away from that niche.

Amazon and other Companies that want to make money by evolving the Textbook market.

Lets not be delusional here – it’s only because Textbooks are a $5.5 billion business that so many companies are looking at this market and coming out with products. The more a company claims to be doing things ‘just for the greater good’, the higher the chance they’re pulling the wool over your eyes. That being said – if a company really does build a better mousetrap and save customers money, time and effort, they do deserve to benefit from their efforts. With that in mind, any company that helps improve the Textbook industry will benefit greatly. I see three types of companies -

1. Amazon, Apple, and other companies that want to provide the device and the ecosystem for distribution and use of textbooks. 
2. Companies that want to create open source textbooks and then make money off of means like advertising and so forth.  
3. Companies that are providing services and consulting to individual Publishing Companies with regard to eTextBooks – enabling them to create their own little ecosystems and distribution mechanisms.

For all of these companies the evolution of books and textbooks is great since it provides them an opportunity to get a foothold in the market. 

Student BookStores and other Companies that make money off the existing TextBook Market.

This really is the inefficient part of the equation – preying on the inadequacies of the system. The way I see it, the used book market is all arbitrage – regardless of their real or stated aims, they make things worse for both students and publishers.

Interestingly, Amazon is beginning to establish itself in this market with its new TextBook Store. Regardless of the direction the textbook market evolves in, Amazon is going to get its share.

Colleges – Institutions of Higher Learning and Higher Profits

I’m not a fan of US colleges at all. Quite truthfully, the recent news that they’ve let companies like Bank of America sell credit cards to students only underscores my feeling that colleges are increasingly becoming mercenary businesses that would rather profit from their students than help them create a strong foundation for the future.

Obviously, colleges must get some share of the textbook market profits. And they will probably be the most reluctant to welcome a new business model that could not only reduce the size of the overall market but also reduce their share of the pie.

Pros and Cons of having Textbooks on the KindleText

Here are some obvious pros -

1. Saves Trees 
2. Good for the environment i.e. no transporting of books.  
3. Good For Students – they don’t have to carry around books.  
4. Good for Publishers – Books can’t be sold as used books.

Here are some obvious cons -

1. No color on the kindle, and probably not for 2-3 years.
2. Not much support for images and illustrations. Again, it might be 2-3 years before better support is available.
3. Students can’t sell their old books - though lower prices would definitely make up for this.
4. Student Book Stores and used Textbook stores lose their utility. I’m not shedding any tears as they don’t serve much purpose in my eyes anyway. 
5. If there’s one winner, there’s the risk of a monopoly. Apple might be the eventual monopoly – however, if we can have monopolies in OSes, search, and other areas, what’s wrong with a monopoly in textbooks?  

DRM in my mind is not a negative. I’m going to add a little note to people who’re very anti DRM – I don’t know of any way to ensure that people who contribute get paid without having DRM. We would all like to live in a world where things are peachy and wonderful. That’s not real life though. I for one would prefer to take my money upfront, rather than be pleading with users for donations like Wikipedia recently did.

Links to Peruse

1. A good article explaining part of how textbook publishing works.
2. Another good article on textbook publishing that examines a rather unsuccessful initial foray into etextbooks and has some other insights.
3. A good blog post from Archive Fever. 

Textbook Publishers’ Current Next Gen eTextBook Initiatives

1. CourseSmart - 4,980 textbooks available, with nice numbers for trees saved, and savings per eTextbook.
2. Publishers that are in talks with Amazon to publish for the Kindle – Princeton University Press, and university presses at Yale, Oxford, and the University of California.

Amazon and its Kindle TextBook variant have a really good chance to bring the textbook industry into the 21st century and I really hope they make the most of it. If they profit a lot in doing so, it’s a well earned reward.