Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Amazon had to lose this battle to be able to win the war.

Kindle 2′s Read To Me is a great  feature

1. It significantly increases the Kindle 2′s value proposition.
2. It really helps people in situations like driving.
3. It really helps low vision and blind people. Wikipedia states -
   

   In 1994-1995, 1.3 million Americans reported legal blindness.

   In November 2004 article Magnitude and causes of visual impairment, the WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind

   That is a lot of people that could benefit from Kindle 2 and Read To Me. Around 1.3 million blind people and around 3 million low vision people just in the US.  

4. The continuity of switching between Read To Me and actually reading is really useful.
5. Kids can have books read to them.

Overall, its a feature that will encourage reading, bring reading to new audiences, and make things convenient for customers. Contrary to publishers’ stance its actually going to increase overall sales. Read To Me really is a star feature.   

Why then, does Amazon have to make Read To Me optional?

The answer is rather simple -

There is a much bigger battle going on,  and Read To Me creates huge legal liability and gives Publishers an angle to attack Amazon’s Kindle Store and Kindle 2 success.

Publishers are desperate to carve out as big a piece of the new books/publishing industry as they can. For them, Read To Me is an opportunity to bargain with Amazon for more money. Given that Amazon is already subsidizing Kindle Edition book prices, it can’t really keep giving concessions to Publishers.

Amazon is basically using technology to improve the reading experience and reconstruct the book and publishing industries. Publishers are either not realizing that there will always be a place for specialists and specialized companies or they are looking for a disproportionate share of the money.

Making Read To Me optional is the right decision

Personally, I think Amazon did the right thing in making the feature optional based on publishers’ and writers’ preferences -

1. Amazon has zero legal liability now. 
2. Publishers get negative PR if they’re backward thinking about Text To Speech. 
3. It creates Competition between Publishers as having Read To Me for a book makes it more valuable.
4. Its better than closing the feature entirely.
5. Publishers can explain to people who really benefit from the feature – blind/low vision people, commuters, people who want books read to their kids – why they are shutting off Read To Me for their books.

 A few predictions about Read To Me and Publishers’ Response

Publishers are either going to drop the charade of ‘Read To Me infringes on audio book rights’ soon, or they’re going to wait until they see that books with Read To Me enabled are selling better. In either case, publishers will open up to Read To Me with at least 50% of publishers enabling it by end 2009.

The losers at the moment are Kindle 2 owners. It’s important for them to understand that it’s the publishers and not Amazon that are causing them grief. Amazon’s hands are tied due to legal issues.

The overall bigger aim is making Kindle 2 + Kindle 3 successful, expanding to other devices, and ultimately rethinking and rebuilding the publishing industry. Making Read To Me optional is a necessary loss on the way to much bigger successes.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | kindle 2, kindle 2 read to me