Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Craig Newmark of Craig’s List writes on the Huffington Post about the importance of trust in news.

Here’s a comment that gives me a chance to talk about trust -

Are you working for Amazon?

That’s a beautiful comment because it asks a question with zero context.

What this Blog Is

The first thing is this blog is not a news site – it’s a review site, its a Kindle site, and its a ‘get the most out of your kindle’ site. 

1. People are already coming to this blog with intent i.e. they are already interested in the Kindle or in eReaders.  
2. My job is to provide information. It’s not marketing (that’s why there are no ads).  

If you want to call me biased take your pick – my current three favorite things are my Kindle, my iPhone, and Windows 7. 

Who my Real Customers are

You. Readers are my real customers.

Here’s how the blog benefits from the people who visit -

1. Traffic and repeat visits and it makes me feel good to see visitors and comments.
2. People link to the blog and it helps with search engines.
3. People click through to Amazon and buy readers (mostly Kindles, but also the occassional Sony Reader) and books and other things and that makes me money.

It’s all about Trust and Customer Service

If I lose trust from my real customers (you) then there’s no point to blogging.

On my kindle 2 vs kindle dx comparison post the kindle 2 wins - even though recommending the Kindle DX would mean more money.

It wins because your self-interest (and other readers’ self-interest) is directly linked to my self interest.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s integrity or long term strategy i.e.

1. Integrity would mean only recommending the right product because it’s the right thing to do. That’s what I’d like to think it is. 
2. Long Term Strategy would mean recommending the right product because then the customer becomes a repeat customer. The magic Trust word.

Regardless of whether you’re very honest OR you’re very smart you do the right thing for the customer.

Google is all powerful, Amazon sends me money

Google owns search. Search is 50% or so of my traffic.

If you accused me of indirectly working for Google you’d be right.

1. Not writing posts regularly drops traffic. 
2. Not writing good posts means no links which drops traffic.  
3. Not writing about things people search for drops traffic.
4. As a bonus you can never, ever criticize Google.

After readers, my immediate priority is Google. Hopefully this blog is big enough some day to not have to cater to the whims of Google.  

Next is Amazon

Whenever anyone clicks through to Amazon and buys anything (anything – toothbrushes, kindles, ipods, video games) there’s a cut (from 4% to 10%) that’s my share.

This financial reward creates an interesting conflict -

1. Do I recommend something that’s not good for you just to make money? 
2. Do I do the right thing?

Think back to the long term strategy i.e. repeat customers are more valuable than one time customers. Both Integrity and Intelligence point in the same direction.

As long as my readers trust me I can review and sell ANYTHING. 

Also, as opposed to Google which totally owns search, there are a lot of companies and stores selling eReaders (even the Kindle – eBay, Google Ads).

Amazon is the company that people trust the most – hence my focus on Amazon.

Which brings me to –  

My main motivation for Blogging about Kindle and Publishing

There are a lot of areas worth focusing on – a lot of them are more lucrative than eReaders (finance, high end clothes, etc.) and a lot of them are higher volume (iPhone, Cellphones, Computers).

Why focus on a Kindle Blog?

1. Because we are at the most exciting stage in the evolution of books. 

We are talking about a complete overhaul of Publishing and Books.

We don’t even know who will win. The Kindle might, or Google, or Apple or perhaps some company that no one knows about yet.

Hopefully it’s a company that cares primarily about books, and not a company that cares primarily about Profit.

However, who wins and what happens will determine whether Books evolve and thrive or they die out.

2. Because we need people who actually love books and reading.

All the major news outlets and main stream blogs are super biased. The good book/publishing blogs (persona non data, teleread, jeff jarvis, etc.) are tiny compared to Gizmodo and Engadget and TechCrunch.

Search for any Kindle or eReader related term and most of the sites that come up don’t give a hoot whether books die or live – Engadget, CrunchGear, CNet, PC World, Gizmodo, TechCrunch.

How can a gadget site or one that writes about Twitter and Facebook 5 times a day paint an accurate picture of the importance of eReaders and how to pick one?

Yet, they are the ones who are telling people whether eReaders are good for them or not.

The Bottomline

The crux of why I write about publishing and the kindle -

If books were to die out today, all the sites that are telling people what to think and what eReader to buy wouldn’t care – they’d just write about what Apple was doing next or what celebrity was on Twitter.

For me, it would be an infinite loss.

That doesn’t mean you should listen to me – only that perhaps you shouldn’t listen to a site that specializes in something other than books and reading.

The war we’re witnessing is portrayed as being about which eReader wins. The Truth is – We don’t even know whether publishing and books have a Future. This war is about the survival of books and reading.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | disclosure, future of publishing, infinite joy of working for google