Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

At GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham has a post entitled ‘What Is It About eReaders?’ in which she asks -

But What is it about e-readers? … in a nation where roughly half the people don’t read novels … why the focus on e-readers?

Let’s take a stab at walking Stacey and every other non-believer out there through the reasons eReaders are very important.

First of all, Could we focus on people who read?

Everyone seems to constantly focus on the people who don’t read – why do we care about non-customers?

Want to see how biased people are?

The GigaOm article, to support the proposition that eReaders aren’t important, links to a ‘Reading on the Rise’ article.

The only thing is – That article is all about how Literary reading has risen in the US for the first time in a quarter century.

Some key snippets -

 For the first time in the history of the survey – conducted five times since 1982 – the overall rate at which adults read literature (novels and short stories, plays, or poems) rose by seven percent.

Young adults show the most rapid increases in literary reading. Since 2002, 18-24 year olds have seen the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary reading.

The U.S. population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups – readers and non-readers.

 113 million adult Americans read Literature and 117 million read books.

And GigaOm wants us to ignore them and focus on the other half that don’t read books???

If we’re talking about eReaders, we should focus on these 110 or so million people who read books. That’s a big enough market by any standard.

The Books Market is Actually Bigger than We Realize

The size of just the US Books market is over $25 billion. The $25 billion does not include sales of Kindles and Sony Readers.

Here are a couple things to contrast it against -

1. Google’s revenue (not profits) for the last calendar year were less than that.  Likewise for all of 2008 when they earned $21.75 billion.
2. Total revenues for music CDs, Vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads were just $10.4 billion in the US in 2008. 
3. Newspaper Advertising Revenue for all of 2009 is on track to be around $27 billion.

Books are nearly as big as newspapers, much bigger than music sales, and bigger than Google. Yet, people think eReaders are not worth worrying about.

Talking about newspapers brings up a crucial point.

Reading and eReaders cover more than just Books

This is actually what eReaders are looking at -

1. $25 billion plus books market in the US. 
2. $27 billion or so newspaper revenue in the US in 2009. 
3. Magazines had over $23 billion in advertising revenue in 2008.
4. Blogs.
5. Business Reading.
6. Education.
7. Much more.

Everyone seems to ignore that we ‘read’ all the time – reading a blog is reading, reading a newspaper is reading.

Perhaps most important of all – all the reading we do at work is reading.

eReaders are not going to be used just for books.

Think replacing paper, and all sorts of reading, and not replacing just paper novels.

In Reading Providing Value is much more important than Sex Appeal

We’re so lost in a world where new products need to have technological sex appeal or look beautiful or add to our personal attractiveness that we’re forgetting that products are supposed to provide some core value.

Value is the Cake and the Rest is Icing.

There seems to be a trend to obsess over the Icing.

Let’s look at eReaders -

1. eInk is the most unsexy technology possible – it refreshes slowly, there’s no color, and it hasn’t changed much in years. It’s apparently never heard of Moore’s Law.
   

   Of course one tiny mitigating detail is that eInk makes reading on an eReader just like on a book. 

2. eReaders focus our energy instead of distracting it. eReaders are basically the anti shiny new object.  
3. There’s no psychological manipulation with eReaders i.e. we won’t become sexier, it doesn’t make us cutting edge, we don’t get to join an exclusive club and call ourselves artistic and cool.   
4. Kindle in particular goes out of its way to be unsexy. 

All of this makes sense because reading is all about the reader providing the imagination and the magic - you could say the eReader is just the backdrop that allows the reader and the reader’s imagination to shine.

The eReader isn’t trying for the Best Actor Oscar – in fact, it isn’t even trying for the Best Supporting Role Oscar. It’s just a beautiful set in the background that you don’t even notice because your imagination is the star.

All these factors explain the current disbelief and misguided advice

When you consider these factors i.e.

1. People focusing on 40-50% of the population who don’t read. 
2. People ignoring that newspapers, magazines, blogs, work and school involve reading too. 
3. People placing technological and aesthetic sex appeal above pure functionality.

It’s easy to understand why we have a lot of people -

1. Incredulous that eReaders are getting so much attention.
   

   Oh My God – Google, Amazon, Verizon, B&N, Microsoft, and so many other companies are totally wrong.

   There is no future in eReaders because I refuse to step out of my narrow definition of what eReaders are and what reading is.

2. Offering their advice on how to fix ebooks and ereaders.
   

   Wait a minute – you say this new market is booming and expanding faster than any other market.

   But … it isn’t what I think should work.

These people are confused out of their minds because they aren’t willing to step out of their ‘reading means reading novels’ box and look at what reading really is.

Closing Thoughts

eReaders are extremely important. People who disagree should note down all the times they read i.e.

1. The news. 
2. Blogs. 
3. Books for pleasure.
4. Books for work.
5. School.
6. Email.
7. Every other scenario.

And they’ll find that it’s a few hours a day (at the minimum). 

1. Optimizing those hours and improving your reading experience is what eReaders do. 
2. There are very few other things that take up a few hours a day - every single day of our lives.
3. There’s a lot of value that can be added.

In one form or another, eReaders are going to become more important than music players and cellphones.

This might sound like heresy – However, contrast the amount of reading you do and the value you get from it (in all contexts – work, school, pleasure) with the value you get from a cellphone or from listening to music and it’s not even close.

Filed under: evolution, thoughts Tagged: | eReader, reading