Kindle not the game-changer everyone craves

The E-newspaper of the future has finally arrived. At this point, though, it’s too late to change anything.

Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it does come with a smart-looking pleather case.

The most interesting item on its insanely huge product page is this one:

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

That’s really revolutionary, for several reasons. Because Kindle has its own cell-phone-style network connection, you can get these updates anywhere there’s cell service (without paying data fees, which is nice). Kindle also has a 160 dpi electronic paper display that approximates the way printed paper looks. A portable device that wirelessly downloads articles each morning and displays them on a crisp paper-like screen? This is the device that’s going to save the newspaper industry from the Internet, right?

Well, not really. True, if you were debating about the newspapers vs. Internet a few years ago, someone might have proposed a device exactly like Kindle. (Like Kindle except for one detail: the hypothetical paper-saver would be supercheap, instead of $400 like Kindle.) But the Internet’s threat to the traditional newspaper business has evolved over time. For one thing, Kindle isn’t interactive. For another, there’s still the ad problem: if newspaper content on Kindle comes free, how are the newspapers getting making money? Will there be ads on Kindle?

Web sites are too deeply ingrained at this point for Kindle to get people back to reading the E-newspaper. Plus, unless there’s a very strong and aggressive ad system on Kindle, newspapers won’t be making much money either. Then there’s the ethical problems with Kindle: everything on Kindle belongs to Amazon and the content creators, not you, and you can’t lend Kindle books or articles to other Kindles. Amazon also makes it difficult to upload content to Kindle. Philosophically, Kindle (and other E-book readers) are a change for the worse in the way we think about writing, reading and intellectual property. Mark Pilgrim has assembled a nice collection of the different voices on this issue in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).

Kindle is already being referred to as the “the iPod of books,” and people will probably continue to refer to it as such. It’s best summed up by John Gruber:

You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion.

Doesn’t sound like a win to me

Review of the Amazon Kindle →

I speculated that the newspaper and magazine subscription service was the Kindle’s killer feature. A device that is automatically pushed the day’s paper every morning is the future, right up there with flying cars and an insolvent social security. So I subscribed to The Journal. To be sure, its neat having a copy of the day’s paper always on hand, and the $9.99/month price is fair. But, while the Kindle successfully captures the book metaphor, it is not so good with newspapers.

Taking the Kindle for a test drive →

"Enter Lulu, all slinky hips and clodhoppers. Self-publishing is the new blogging. No more compromises. No more external deadlines. No more heavy-handed editors and ham-fisted copyeditors. No more teachers, lots more books. You don’t need distribution, you’ve got PayPal. You don’t need stores: there’s only two left, and nobody buys books there, anyway. You don’t need traditional marketing. Didn’t we already prove that? Got book?"

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Self-publishing is the new blogging

Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours →

Thought provoking article on ownership from Gizmodo. This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been reading so many free Tor eBooks lately.

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018 →

Reading between the lines here, it looks like the Internet is making certain types of books obsolete. BUT (and this is a big deal) not everything.

While 39 percent of respondents agreed that online bookselling was the most important industry development in the 60-year history of the fair, some 25 percent forecasted that the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete in the next 60 years; the literary agent (21%) and the editor (14 per cent) also were said to be facing a slow demise.

See, the doom-and-gloom forgets that people don’t buy book solely for reading. A book is a device for transferring information, sure — just like a newspaper, and those have been facing some issues of their own lately. So perhaps the Scott McClellan expose-type books will be going away for good. But on the other hand, certain categories of books are bought just as much for their physical existence as objects as they are for the information they contain. And those books won’t be going away. We may not have bookstores, but we will have coffee table books, cookbooks, and big honking literary novels. Trust me.

"

Part of the problem is right there in the name: e-book. In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only—or rather, that’s the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all.

This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes—vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3—but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows—with or without the content owners.

"

John Siracusa: The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

"Readers and publishers alike need to stop envisioning books as just “content.” In many ways, the digital revolution makes the back-end invisible and therefore hard to quantify, monetarily. Does anyone ever think how expensive it is to run the massive Google server farms? Or the enviromental impact of the billions of cell phones, ipods, and e-readers (not to mention computers), that last for only a couple years and are not recyclable? … Publishing works the same way. A book is not just content and production. We’re not the enemy here, we’re just trying to feel our way forward to an unfamiliar future–and in an unfamiliar present."

MobyLives writing on the challenges of transitioning from books to e-books

"A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life?"

Kevin Hartnett, writing in In Our Parent’s Bookshelves for The Millions (via thebronzemedal)

View high resolution

Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book (via austinkleon)