Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

With the Kindle selling so well there are numerous attempts by Publishers and Rivals to attack it.

We discussed some of these in the last post – including Google offering free books to Kindle rivals, Borders and Indigo teaming up, and Publishers delaying ebook releases by 4 months.

However, all of these take hard work and planning and execution. The lazy man’s strategy is to scare and misinform people.

The next big Kindle controversies

The Press has spent a lot of time in 2009 attacking the Kindle and the time is ripe for them to mount another attack.

How will the Press attack Kindle this time?

Perhaps Misinform people on Kindle benefits

Here are the Kindle benefits that the Press leaves out -

1. Free Internet.
2. Free Wikipedia.
3. Larger range of new books than any other store. New means not public domain.
4. Text to Speech feature, and the fact that half or more books have this enabled.
5. PDF support – some articles don’t mention this.
6. The Screen and the readability. There’s a big difference between LCD and eInk and reading on eInk is much better. The Press often forgets to mention this.

It’s easy to attack the Kindle when you leave out its strengths.

Beat the Openness Drum

Hey, there’s nothing to say here. Every #1 company wants to benefit from their investment and initiative and companies that lost out or didn’t invest want to steal promote openness.

Openness is to losing companies what world peace is to beauty contestants.

Scare people into thinking they might lose their accounts.

MobileRead has a discussion going on where someone had the ability to do Kindle returns revoked because they returned 30 Kindle books.

What this person used to do is routinely buy 4-5 books on a subject and then decide on the best and return the rest.

His friend who’s pleading his case openly admits this.

Here’s the letter from Amazon saying that he’s no longer entitled to return any of his purchases - 

Hello from Amazon.com.

We’re writing regarding your request of Refunds.

Unfortunately, the number of issues you have sustained with your Kindle Store orders has led us to believe that there might be a larger issue. Since it appears that many of your orders have been accidentally purchased, we ask that you contact Customer Service for troubleshooting in an effort to avoid these issues in the future.

Effective immediately, we are unable to compensate you for any additional issues with your Kindle Store orders.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com

This is a good candidate for becoming a huge anti-Kindle flare-up in the Press -

1. There’s the poor anonymous victim who thinks he returned only around 30 books. 
2. You can link it to rights and freedom and other very idealistic things.
3. It can be easily distorted to ‘if you return 3 books you’ll be kicked out of your account’.

Plus it’s a slow news week.

If this does blow up you’ll notice that 50% of the articles attacking Amazon will not mention that this person used to routinely buy 4-5 books, try them all, pick the best, and return the rest.

All they’ll write is – Return Kindle Books and you might get kicked out.

At MobileRead there are actually some people who think it was wrong of Amazon to revoke return rights for someone misusing the system in this way. Really?

Perhaps the Press will Attack the whole international book rights issue

There are two directions in which to approach this -

1. Fool people into believing that Amazon is denying them their rights by imposing regional restrictions. There’s a discussion like this already going on at MobileRead.
2. Have Publishers find instances of Amazon messing up regional rights and then sue Amazon.

If you think the second is unlikely just wait till Publishers get desperate – there are going to be quite a few lawsuits in the near future of Publishing.   

Perhaps Play up unrealistic $100 eReader Prices

eReader prices drop from $400 to $259 in 2 years and what do you get – The Press starting talk about how the ideal price for an eReader is $100.

Never mind that people buy cameras, video game consoles, cellphones, and a lot of other gadgets that are $200 or more.

Perhaps the Press will tell people to wait for Que or another eReader

This is a good strategy too. Publishers delay eBooks and the Press ask people to delay their eReader purchases.

They’re just hoping that a Kindle killer materializes in the interim.

Say that competing eReaders or competing eBook stores are better

The newly announced Kobo Books (formerly ShortCovers) has 2 million eBooks.

They slip in that 1.8 million of those books are free books from the Internet Archive (available free in Kindle format from the Internet Archive site).

Oh, so you mean to say that you actually have 200K or so books.

However, the Press are just going to write that Kobo Books has 2 million books while Kindle Store only has 360K.  

The Press do the exact same thing with eReaders – they drum up even the smallest and most meaningless feature and claim that it makes the eReader better than the Kindle.

The favorite – rant against DRM

Well, there’s nothing to say here. If you’re very anti-DRM, then the Kindle’s closed system and cheapest prices and best range aren’t for you.

Closing Thought – The next round of anti-Kindle attacks are imminent

It’s been too long and the time is ripe - it’s literally months since the Press attacked the Kindle.

The Press is looking for a new angle of attack and some angles are opening up. 

My money is on either the ’30 returns issue’ or the ‘international book rights issue’ being the foundation for the next attack on the Kindle.

Filed under: kindle Tagged: | kindle criticism