Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Perhaps it’s time to stop the pretence. There’s an all-out war going on and it’s time to admit it.

The Fight for Our Money and Time

Let’s say we each have 10 hours of free time a week.

Companies are trying desperately to get our money – in return for entertaining us during that time.

1. The movie companies want us to watch movies in theaters and buy and rent DVDs. 
2. The game companies want us to buy a game and play it.  
3. Book Publishers want us to buy books (or ebooks) and read them.
4. An app store wants us to buy apps and try them out. Sometimes the apps are games.

That’s fundamentally what it’s about – getting our money. 

You’d think Publishers would be happy that eReaders make buying and reading books so convenient.

Well, the problem is that Publishers lose control and they lose their control over the profits.

The War within Books – Publishers Vs Challengers

Publishers want to be able to leverage eReaders to compete with other forms of entertainment and also not lose control.

That involves a lot of persuasion -

1. Convince eReader makers that Publishers should get the lion’s share. 
2. Convince Authors that Publishers should get the lion’s share. 
3. Convince Authors that Publishers are the only gatekeepers.
4. Convince readers that eBooks are worth a lot. 
5. Convince readers that Publishers are still the best source of books.

This is War because the larger share Publishers get the less authors and ereader companies get.

The other aspect is the price readers are asked to pay for eBooks.

1. $9.99 has worked well so far.
2. However, Publishers want more.
3. That in turn leads to them trying to fight both Amazon and readers on price.

Basically, there’s a war for the future of Publishing and we are fortunate enough to be in the middle of it and in a position to decide the outcome.

The Fight for the Future of Books

The second fight, whose importance and presence is much harder to appreciate, is the fight for the survival of books.

Here are the factors that were impacting book sales and growth adversely -

1. Books weren’t as easy to get as other forms of entertainment. 
2. Books hadn’t really evolved – no changeable fonts, no thousand books in your hand, and so forth. 
3. The iron grip of Publishers was limiting innovation and openness.
4. Book prices were going higher and higher while other forms of entertainment were mostly getting cheaper.
5. Schools and Colleges were killing reading.

There were a whole myriad of reasons why even people who wanted to read weren’t.

eReaders revitalized Books

eReaders changed everything.

• It was easy to get books, you could change fonts, you could carry a ton of books with you, and more.

They also did a few things which were vital -

1. Amazon’s $9.99 price made book prices reasonable again.
2. Free Public Domain Titles made reading extremely cheap and added a whole new dimension. 
3. Indie authors got channels to promote themselves.
4. The value for money increased dramatically with features like Text to Speech.

Despite the downsides (no used book market, no lending) eReaders overall had a big positive impact.

1. People who already read could read more and at cheaper prices.
2. People who wanted to read but were getting distracted – were no longer distracted.

It’s hard to get distracted when you have 60 second downloads and the only thing you can do easily on the device is read.  

So far things are going great – We have 3-6 million eReader owners and it’s guaranteed to do great things for books.

There are however two big dangers.

The twin dangers of multi-purpose devices and competing forms of entertainment

As the market for ebook readers became big you got all sorts of people stepping in -

1. Companies that wanted to take over eBooks.
2. Companies that wanted to take over eReaders.
3. Companies that want to sell you devices that can do more than just read.
4. Companies that want to save you from reading and do other things instead.

The big problem is – A lot of these companies don’t care about books and they don’t care about us (people who love to read books).

This is why it’s war -

A company would take one of us (a person who wants to read books) and convince them that a device that just reads books is a terrible idea.

So we get a multi-purpose device instead – because it can let you do additional things.

Once we own the device we would have other forms of entertainment compete with books – movies, games, television, and such.

Suddenly we are back to not reading books.

There is no disguising the truth -

1. Every multi-purpose device sold instead of an eReader is a stake in the heart of Books.
2. Every person who intends to read books on their multi-purpose device and gets side-tracked is a loss for Books.

There is no reasonable person who would believe that a person with a multi-purpose device reads as many books as they would if they had a dedicated eReader. Yet the multi-purpose device is supposed to be better for people who love to read.

In the quest to get your time and money companies would happily let books, and your love of reading, die.

The competition might be ruthless and amazingly manipulative but with Millions of dedicated eReaders we are on the right track.

People who are resistant to temptation and immune to distractions are well served by a multi-purpose device. For the rest of us it might be best to get a device that lets us focus on what we really love to do.

Filed under: Reality Tagged: | book wars, future of books