The Kindle is a new, evolving family of devices with drawbacks and growing pains – disadvantages I don’t shy away from highlighting in my kindle dx review and other posts.
However, the last few months have seen the rise of loads of anti-Kindle propaganda (by people who are attacking me now for setting the facts straight).
Here are the most common Kindle and Kindle DX myths and misinformation -
You’ll lose the kindle books you’ve bought
The common arguments -
- Amazon might go out of business and then you lose all the books you bought. Well,
Amazon had profits even during the downturn. They aren’t going anywhere. Plus, you can save your books on your computer if you want to be on the safe side.
- The number of downloads is restricted. Actually,
Number of downloads is not restricted. Even the person who started this rumor is admitting as much now.
The number of devices is restricted to 6, and that’s pretty reasonable in my opinion.
As some really polite people are requesting where this admission lies, here from GearDiary’s KindleGate link-bait post #2 is part of the ending -
So Here Is The Bottom Line – (I think…)
According to the last customer representative spoke to…
You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.
Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.
Wait a minute – so your’e admitting there are no limits. Why not just update your original link-bait post which still says -
Second, there’s no way to find out in advance how many times a book is able to be downloaded. You can buy a book and it can only be downloaded numerous times or you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.
Amazon will kick you out of your Kindle account.
This was again an outlier case of someone who made 3 big-ticket electronic purchases, returned all of them for vauge reasons, and then got banned from Amazon.
If you’re abusing any system, you get kicked out. Ask yourself a simple question -
- Will you buy 3 or more $1,000+ electronic items in a short time-span and return all of them for vague, minuscule reasons ? If not, you have nothing to worry about.
This story evolved into the person being kicked out for returning kindle books which is nonsense. If you dig down into the story you find that he returned some pretty expensive items for some pretty strange reasons – repeatedly.
Amazon is hiking up Kindle prices, Kindle books are expensive.
First, it’s publishers doing this; and Second, it’s not working.
As of right now (5:47 pm PST on June 22nd) there is exactly one book priced over $9.99 in the top 50 bestsellers in the Kindle Store. Just 4 in the top 100. That means -
- Books over $9.99 aren’t selling much.
- There are enough books < $9.99 available.
The ‘rising kindle prices’ articles are pushing the notion that 90% of Kindle Books are now over $9.99. Simply not true.
You’ll notice that people who write about ‘rising prices of Kindle books’ use vague data -
- They never talk about sales ranks or bestsellers.
- They never mention that you can get $24 new hardcover books in their kindle edition for $9.99 because Amazon is discounting the price.
- They take general, vague statistics i.e. what percentage of books in the Kindle Store are over $9.99. A lot of technical books, travel books, etc. sell for much more than $24 and a $9.99 price for them would not make sense.
As long as we don’t buy books over $9.99, publishers’ attempt to hike ebook prices won’t work.
Amazon is withholding color and features and hiking up price of the Kindle
This is an evolving technology. That means -
- Prices will go down with time and as more and more devices are sold.
- There are some features (like color) that just aren’t possible.
- Other features (like touchscreen) involve trade-offs and force Amazon to leave them out.
Think about it rationally – Amazon is locking up customers with every Kindle they sell. The more Kindles they sell, the more locked-in customers they get who buy anywhere from 1 to 10 books a month.
Amazon would have to be crazy to do things that would reduce sales on purpose. They are not holding back features, and they are not charging you double of what the kindle costs to make and market.
Amazon is evil because it gives authors and publishers only 35%
Two data-points to consider -
- Amazon discounts nearly every book between $9.99 and $24.95 to $9.99 and gives publishers 35% of the list price.
- Amazon discounts nearly every book less than $9.99 by 20% and still gives authors 35% of their list price.
So every publisher that is complaining about Amazon ’stealing’ 65% of the price is being dishonest with you.
Authors who self-publish their book are getting, when you factor in the 20% discount, approximately 43.75%. That’s a lot more than the 8-15% they’d get from a publisher. Not to mention that they might not even get published.
Amazon is evil because newspapers and blogs and magazines get only 30%
Don’t really have an opinion here – anyone making that argument ought to mention that there are bandwidth costs and that the ability to reach the kindle owner audience has some benefits.
If so many bloggers have a problem with it, why are they adding themselves to the Kindle Store?
Since the Kindle Store was opened to blogs, the number available has shot up from 1,400 or so to 5,487. In this case we ought to listen to what people’s actions are, not what they say.
Kindle Myths – Closing Thoughts
There’s a combination of two reasons why so many kindle myths get perpetuated -
- Lots of people are anti-Amazon. Anti-DRM people, publishers, book purists, Amazon’s rivals, some journalists, and many more.
- Internet blogs and sites are desperate for anything that drives traffic and anything contentious guarantees traffic.
Send in your favourite Kindle Myths.
A limit of 6 devices is NOT reasonable. Think about it… you got the first gen kindle, then bought the second gen and, drat, they released the DX and now you have three kindles.
You also have an iphone, and as someone experienced, if you update it to 3.0, it forgets it was already registered and re-registers, using one more slot.
That’s five “devices”, not counting you ipod touch or your wife’s kindle.
It’s not easy to hit the limit of 6 devices, but it’s not an extreme either.
Damn, I paid for the book in the first place, why are you going to treat me like a criminal that is trying to “steal” it just because I’m trying to use it on more devices than you thought we reasonable?
apparently you can talk to customer service and change what devices have licenses for your books.
Just as you think 6 is good, not great, Publishers and Authors probalby think letting a book shared between 6 devices is too much.
a line has to be drawn somewhere and 6 is reasonable, in my opinion.
My point is, precisely, that “Publishers and Authors” should not have a say about how many devices I can use.
I think a limit of six registered devices at any given time is reasonable. The Reader works the same way. When I buy a book, I my wife and my daughter can, since we all have readers, all read it at the same time. So I get the book for less money than a single physical copy and it can do duty as multiple books? That’s a pretty good deal.
I know that DRM sucks, but so far I don’t actually hate the way it’s being implemented in readers.
Would you like bread or cheese with that?
[...] In Kindle Myths, Misinformation, the iReader Review attacks critics of the K machine. And you know what? Erroneous anti-Kindle reports have in fact appeared. [...]
Some very good points here. I’d note that some of the misinformation comes from multiple anecdotes of statements by Amazon’s own customer service reps. Combined with the fact that Amazon’s PR department does not respond to queries from us ordinary bloggers, I would suggest that Amazon is thus in part culpable. They need to be far more active — and could easily be by using the existing Kindle blog, a new FAQ or other channels like Twitter to respond.
Your defense of the revenue split on Kindle books is, if anything, too weak. The revenue split between Amazon and all the major publishers is not a single, known ratio like 65/35. Major publishers have typically been getting 50% or more of the print list price on Kindle books, which can often be more than the $9.99 Amazon collects. Lately, there’s been a proliferation of “Digital List Price” showing up on Kindle book pages. This may reflect some new deals Amazon has struck with publishers on royalties. That said, I think you could agree that discounting off a made-up, not sold anywhere Kindle digital list price is pretty misleading. See the Tim Russert example on my blog.
Finally, your argument about rising prices attacks a strawman and flies in the face of too much evidence. No one has said 90% of Kindle books had prices increased or sell for more than $9.99 or anything close to that. And it is Amazon, not publishers, which sets the price of Kindle books. It may be true that books over $9.99 aren’t topping the Kindle best seller list, but there sure are a lot of new hardcovers arriving with prices over $9.99, as you find if you’re just an avid Kindle reader like me, if you take note of the growing over $9.99 boycott movement or you look at these database analyses, limited though they may be (no more limited than you citing a snapshot of the top 100 sellers, either, though). As I write this, the #2 book in the store is $14.84 and 2 of the top 20 and 8 of the top 50 are recent hardcovers with prices over $9.99 (usually around $13 to $15).
The Kindle is a great thing, Amazon is cool, but neither is perfect.
well, at the moment it’s 2 of the top 50.
So obviously some people who’ve been waiting for a book go for the higher price – however, the majority don’t.
8 in the top 50? you must have found an exception. There are 2 right now. And there are usually not 8 in the top 100.