The disappearance of kindle free book offers earlier today got me thinking about services the Kindle could benefit from.
Trying to go as broad as possible so there might be some crazy ideas included.
Kindle value-add services
Here are some services that would go well with the Kindle -
- Auto-buy option for free book offers in certain categories. So you might say – the minute there’s a free romance novel just buy it for me.
- Kindle to Kindle social network.
- Kindle to Kindle Book Lending Help Features - These could be built into the social network.
- Kindle Book Deals section in Kindle Store with the option to get updates to your Kindle for categories and criteria you choose.
- Alerts for when a book’s price drops. This should be baked into the Kindle Store and into the Kindle itself.
- Reminder when battery is 50% and when it’s 25%.
- Option to either share collections across all Kindles or have separate Collections per Kindle.
- A PC tool optimized for shopping and doing various Kindle related things. It would have sections for Deals, Free Books, Public Domain Books, Organizing Collections, Organizing Photos, and so forth.
- Statistics on books that were finished most often (as opposed to bought most often).
- Gift suggestions based on the books you’ve bought and read. These would be added to your account – An automatic wishlist.
- Migrate and Clone functions. This could be via the PC tool or via the Settings Page. This would migrate all your books from one Kindle to another without you having to download them one by one. The Clone feature would be if you wanted your new Kindle to get a copy of everything that is in your old Kindle – documents, photos, everything.
- Kindle to kindle messaging. Perhaps even chat.
- Budget Alert – Set a monthly budget and get alerts when you hit 50%, 75%, and 100%. Option to switch off buying when you exceed your budget. Currently you can do this via kindle gift cards - Buy a $50 card and apply that to your account and then disable your credit card. However, it’s too complicated a process.
- Official Kindle Forum alerts sent straight to your Kindle – Pick discussion topics or keywords and get updates when discussions related to these start.
- User Sharable Edit Lists – Users could create an edit list that is a layer that goes over a Kindle book and corrects typos. Then you could share out your list of corrections so other users who buy the book can get an error free version.
- User Sharable Kindle Tips – If a user finds a very good tip she ought to have an easy way to share it with other Kindle owners.
- Group Discount Site – Groupon for books. If 2,000 Kindle owners are interested in buying the same book then they can contact the Author/Publisher and ask for a 25% discount for a group purchase. Publishers can offers various deals to users – deals that come into effect if a certain minimum number of users sign up for the deal.
Those are some Kindle services and features that would probably add a lot of value to the Kindle ownership experience. The interesting thing is that a lot of these are features that only Amazon can add. There isn’t really a way for developers to provide services to Kindle owners directly. It’s good as it’s more secure than letting anyone do anything and it’s bad as it makes it really difficult to build services.
Let’s look at a couple of features in-depth to understand the benefits and possible disadvantages.
Automatic Migrate and Clone Tool
Assume you’re a Kindle 2 owner who buys a Kindle 3.
Well, you have to start from scratch and have to download your books one by one. It’s quite simple to do it from the Manage My Kindle page if you have a small number of books. However, if you have hundreds or thousands of books it’s pretty time-consuming.
If Amazon added a Migrate feature or let someone make an app of that sort (it’s not currently possible as apps don’t have access to the user’s Archive) then all you would have to do is click ‘Migrate’ and all the books that are on your Kindle 2 would get automatically downloaded to your Kindle 3 with the same Folder structure and the same highlights and notes.
The downside is that there’s a lot of data involved and a high cost in terms of bandwidth. It’s understandable that Amazon doesn’t want to enable something that is a huge money sink. However, it could make the Migrate feature WiFi only or add a PC tool. That would take care of the bandwidth concerns.
The other downside is that this would make piracy easier. There’s probably no workaround for that.
Auto-Buy option for Free Kindle Books
What Amazon could do is let Kindle owners choose categories for which they want all free books that are offered. Any free books offered in those categories would automatically get purchased and downloaded to the user’s Kindle.
It could have an option to include public domain books and perhaps to even include books below a certain price point. Maybe it goes so far as to say -
- If any free book is offered in Historical Fiction. OR
- If any free public domain book is offered featuring the History of England. OR
- If any book by Dan or Don Brown hits below $4.
Then automatically buy it for my account and download it to my Kindle 2.
There are obviously a lot of downsides -
- Bandwidth costs. Here Amazon could limit it by either limiting the number of categories you can choose or by making it PC or WiFi download only.
- Kindle owners wouldn’t visit Amazon.com and Kindle Store as often. That’s a real downside and there’s no cure for that.
- If buying of non-free books is offered there’s scope for disaster. Perhaps we just leave out this functionality.
- If there are a limited number of copies available for a particular free book offer it would turn into a lottery. Perhaps users who search the Kindle store and the forums every day should have a natural advantage. On the other hand there’s little point in disappointing Kindle owners and perhaps ‘lottery’ type free book offers shouldn’t be allowed. Let publishers use free books for marketing but don’t let them use free books to buy sales rank.
- Less purchases of paid books. If Kindle owners started automatically getting each and every free kindle book offer they were interested in their paid purchases would probably go down. No workaround for this.
Amazon’s probably not going to add this feature because nearly all the downsides are important ones and are difficult to mitigate.
It’s unrealistic to expect Amazon to be able to get 100% or even 75% of the services and features listed at the start of this post. However, it’d be great if they could work in 25% or more of these features as these features would add a lot of value to the Kindle ownership experience.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | kindle as a service, kindle value for money, kindle wishlist
I’d be pretty happy with just the option to remove a book (and not just hide it away)
I would like to be able to mark a non-Kindle book as one I want on the Kindle. Then if a Kindle version is ever released it message me directly on the Kindle.
Flag books to not synchronized (as far as progress through the book) via Whispernet. This would be useful if my wife and I were reading the same book at the same time on different devices registered to the same account.
Those are good suggestions – especially the first one.
“I would like to be able to mark a non-Kindle book as one I want on the Kindle. Then if a Kindle version is ever released it message me directly on the Kindle.”
Absolutely. No way I am going to go back and check over and over to see if a Kindle version has been released. Publishers don’t realize how many times there is only one opportunity to gain a customer who is then lost to them because of the absence of such a mechanism. Amazon could also use the number of such requests to convince publishers and authors of the demand for a Kindle version to convince them to release a K version.
From WSJ article just released:
Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold.The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer—recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year,
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704369304575632602305759466.html
I don’t see how Kindle migrating feature would create a piracy problem. Couldn’t Amazon just make it so you can’t migrate to a Kindle that isn’t tied to your account?
It could be hacked quite easily. Then it would be able to migrate books to any machine.
Switch, you ought to be on the Kindle’s official Steering Group!
Make that King of its Kibitzer Kommittee.
I hope Amazon realizes that its infrastructure is perhaps the Kindle’s main advantage, because the Kindle’s OVERALL excellence is what turns Kindle owners into evangelists. (Evangelical users are Apple’s main advantage, not Jobs’s RDF or its slick appearance and hipness. Its user-satisfaction ratings support this interpretation that its advantage is built upon basics, not flash and filigree.) Infrastructure features are hard to convey in an ad, but that doesn’t matter. They’re long-haul, “gravitational” forces with immense power that get summed-up in user-satisfaction ratings.
No single infrastructure improvement will impress more than a minority of owners, and sometimes it will impress only a small minority. But if that small minority is VERY impressed, or is an influential/vocal minority, it still works out to being a worthwhile addition, on the bottom line.
In order to establish itself as absolute king-of-the-hill, EBR-wise, the Kindle Kommittee needs to kommit itself to a full-bore program of improving the Kindle to the point of Insane Greatness, not just to Sane Goodness. They shouldn’t rest on their laurels, IOW, but aim for perfection. (“A thousand trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.” –Michelangelo (I think).) Spend a few million dollars more per year and step up the pace even further. That way, the Kindle will be so far ahead of the pack that anyone who’s a serious reader won’t even think about anything else.
PS: I wrote, “No single infrastructure improvement will impress more than a minority of owners, and sometimes it will impress only a small minority.”
What I worry about is that the Kindle’s kurrent Kommittee-men may be thinking in konventional terms about improving it. I.e., they may be filtering out good ideas by asking such wet-blanket questions as,
“Are users clamoring for this?
Is it on anyone’s checklist?
Does it make a good sound-bite?
How much additional revenue will this bring in?
Will a reviewer rave about it, or even mention it?
Do we need to do this to avoid giving a competitor who’s done it a selling point?
(Etc., etc.)”
Amazon needs to transcend this dreary normal-mode of thinking, push the pedal to the metal, and head for the stars. Boldly Go, and let the world eat your dust!
This probably has a lot of truth to it. Amazon’s in the dangerous position of not wanting to mess with a successful product – However, they might be missing out on taking it to the next level.
Switch,
I love your 15th suggestion, the one to provide a way for readers to suggest edits. Many books I’ve bought have formatting or proof reading errors that I would love to have fixed.
Someone posted this same idea in the offical Kindle forum. Believe it or not, some people were actually opposed! It wasn’t just one crazy goofball – a handful of people actually argued against a way for readers to point out errors. They aruged that this would be equivalent to Amazon making its customers “work”. That made no sense to me. I kept asking “how is reporting a flaw in a product being put to work?” but no one gave me a logical response.
This was about a month ago. I don’t know how long Amazon forums are archived, but you should try to dig it up if you want to see how crazy people can be.