Point Oh!

In news of products that no one is asking for, Amazon swiftly moved into the publishing business this week with the official announcement of Kindle, their new ebook reader. While there has definitely proven to be a market for ebooks, no matter how niche, Amazon is hoping the wireless revolution will really put them over the top here. Amazon’s new reader will have Wi-Fi and work on Sprint’s EVDO network so consumers will have the option of buying thousands of titles directly from Amazon.com on-the-fly. Seems like a fairly natural extension of the company’s book business, right?

Well, the verdicts are in and, apart from an elaborate fluff piece in Newsweek (oh print media, how you’ve changed), the sentiment is generally pretty negative. Unfortunately for Amazon, they are not a hardware manufacturer and the’ve somehow managed to come up with a device that looks even more antiquated than Apple’s Newton (pictured above). They’re even figuring out a way to make you pay for blog content, which seems like the kind of Achilles heel that would make a competitor salivate.

At one time I was a member of three book clubs simultaneously so I know first hand that some people have very legitimate gripes about the idea of carrying around multiple books with them everywhere. Obviously, computers aren’t a real solution to this due to battery life, start-up time and a host of other reasons so there does seem to be room for innovation in this area. They certainly come close when you think about how many people have abandoned print publications for their online counterparts but the mainstream consumer just isn’t ready to read books on an electronic device quite yet. But yet again, when you consider elderly people who need larger type or IT professionals that need access to large tech manuals, you can easily imagine who might buy this.

So why does everyone already hate this device? I think it comes down to brand. Sentiment surrounding Amazon is generally positive from consumers and Wall Street but this is due to how the company acts as an e-commerce brand and not a hardware manufacturer.

Aside from the device itself, Amazon appears to be falling into a lot of the same old digital media problems, most notably pricing and DRM. The company has been one of the driving forces in DRM-free music but for some reason it doesn’t feel compelled to take this fight into “print” media. Also, by the time you’re done paying for wireless data service, a few blogs and a 2-3 books a month, you could be spending considerably more than you would on the books themselves. Can anyone think of any instance where people are willing to pay more for the digital version?

I wish Amazon took a mixture of the GPhone and Audible approach here. Google isn’t in the hardware business so they chose some partners and provided the part of the equation they were best equipped to handle. Audible, on the other hand, has had its ups and downs but has now come up with a pricing model that makes sense for their content and, while it’s a subscription model that is still crippled by DRM, consumers appear to be willing to accept the shortcomings of the product when the pricing is reasonable.

So will Kindle and the wonders of E Ink forever change the way people read and purchase books? Probably not but you can expect to see them start popping up more in airports and Starbucks when the people with the tiny blinking Bluetooth earpieces hear about this.