There’s a discussion going on at the Kindle Forums on the fact that Baen doesn’t have its books in the Kindle Store. Its a great example of the amount of lock-in the Kindle Store has on Kindle owners.
Basically, you can go to Baen and download books in Kindle format. Plus -
- You can even download books right from your Kindle.
- The Books are DRM free.
- They have a very good price point of $6-$7 for all ebooks.
- Like with Kindle editions your books are stored in the cloud and you can re-download them anytime.
- Baen books are free for disabled readers in recognition of Veterans Day.
There’s a lot to like. However, Baen’s store is competing against the convenience of the Kindle Store.
Why is a Publisher’s Store not compelling for Kindle Owners?
This snippet from the Baen discussion at Amazon (via M. Wells) says it perfectly -
Seems silly to me whether they have their own ebookstore or not. I don’t generally go looking outside of Amazon for books for my Kindle to actually purchase, so I would have never stumbled across the site … It’s kind of like having a fruit stand vs. getting your produce in a grocery chain… except I guess ebooks don’t go bad… or bruise.
People constantly underestimate
- The importance of the path of least resistance.
- The fact that most people don’t even know publishers have their own store.
- The amount of actual effort required to download from a source other than the Kindle Store.
What that means is
There’s Non-Trivial Effort to download from the Baen Store
To figure out the amount of effort I went through the entire process of figuring out how to download and then downloading from the Baen Store (on my PC, not from the Kindle). There were a few important decisions along the way -
- Where is the Baen site? Google/Bing will help you with that.
- Where do they sell books? Got sidetracked by the design and the free library.
- The ‘Add to Cart’ and checkout process. Enter my credit card information again?
Actually stopped at that point because its just too painful to register on a Saturday afternoon.
- It was NOT a straightforward process.
- There’s no feedback when you add a book to the cart.
- Its very different from most online stores.
- Its going to be even tougher on the Kindle.
The prices are good and if you care about DRM that’s a bonus. However, it’s way too much effort.
Scale that Effort by Number of Publishers and Kindle Store’s advantage becomes clear
This is another key point that people miss -
Its not just one publisher. If you had to do it for every publisher or even every genre the amount of effort becomes too much.
The prospect of adding credit card information for one additional site is scary - There’s no way people are going to do it for 10-20 different sites.
There is a huge benefit to being able to buy from just one store, and to buy easily and get your purchase quickly.
Amazon understands the power of the path of least resistance very well and they’ve built up the Kindle Store to be so easy and convenient and so expansive (relatively) that kindle owners don’t really explore outside of it much.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | kindle store, kindle vs publishers
It is not that I disagree with you but I have been buying from Baen long before I purchased anything from Amazon. In fact, I have probably spend twice as much from Baen as all of my kindle purchases so far. Because of the free library I have probably downloaded well over 100 books (between purchased and free downloads). Baen has an option setting up the email to directly send your book to your kindle so it is no more difficult to buy a Baen book. Until Amazon started charging, it was also free, now it will be 15 cents or so for most books.
I do agree that there is not a reason to not offer its books on the Amazon site, the will get significantly more profit on the books sold on their site as they do on Amazon.