Another report of a Kindle launch Monday: Now if only Amazon’s PR lady can learn a few manners and Jeff Bezos can reaffirm his long-term commitment to books
Yet another CNET-related report says the Kindle will appear on Monday with a $399 price tag. Must be so. An Amazon PR lady named Heather Huntoon hung up on me as soon as she heard I was calling to request a review unit for Publisher’s Weekly for the print and online editions. I’d earlier e-mailed her without a reply. Oh, how I love Amazon’s respect for publishers; what happened to the old-fashioned, "Sorry, no comment"? CNET writes about Amazon courting publishers to get the biggest catalogue of books; but just how much confidence can the book industry have in the business practices of a company that won’t even be civil toward the industry’s most important trade publication? This is the same outfit that forced publishers to forsake PDF for its proprietary Mobipocket format.
Purina Cat Chow via your Kindle?
The irony is that despite the ugly looks of the prototype Kindle, I’m actually quite upbeat on the machine from a consumer viewpoint and won’t let Heather’s Huntoon’s manners or lack thereof influence my verdict when I finally do get my hands on one—with or without Amazon’s cooperation. The Kindle has word search and I love the fact that people can use it to subscribe to newspapers and magazines, too, not just books. What’s more, with all the talk of e-commerce capabilities, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kindle let people order nonbooks on Amazon—everything from washing machines to Purina Cat Chow Indoor Formula.
Bezos down on books in the long term, despite current hoopla?
And that’s the point, folks. Books are just part of the Amazon universe these days, and the ‘tude of Heather Huntoon reflects this. I’d love to hear her comment on some sentiments attributed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Steve Yegge, a former employee at Amazon who now works for Google, said (according to LISNews): "Now Jeff is a brilliant, brilliant man and he did an amazing job of branding” Amazon “as ‘books,’ and then one day a couple of years later, he told us in an all hands—and this wasn’t secret, but it’s important for us to know—he said, ‘We can’t ride on books and music and video forever.’ Why? Because they’re all digitizable. Who buys a CD in China right now? They have to move into hard lines. They have to move into clothes and auctions and all this other stuff. They have to move into services. They have to, right? Because in the fullness of time—and Bezos is quite the visionary—he thinks no one is going to buy books anymore. And if your brand is tied to something that’s dying then the brand is no good anymore.” You can even watch Yegge say those very words.
So, Heather, does this mean that someday Amazon will hang up on books, not just on a freelancer on assignment from PW? More money in cat chow and the rest, huh?
November 16th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Yes, I’m happy to see one more ebook device in the mix, but I find it incredibly annoying that amazon didn’t telegraph their intentions to produce such a device the traditional way. Yes, you can keep a few things as surprises (like the design), but most of us here are trying to decide whether to buy things or wait. I don’t enjoy the feeling of being strung along.
The media blackout sends a message that 1)Amazon doesn’t really have any confidence that this device will work and 2)Amazon doesn’t believe that viral marketing in online media etc really works. Or rather, it seems that they fear “media buzz” for the potential to spread disappointing information. Instead what they will do is pay for a quick glitzy advertising campaign that will be overbudget and hardly effective and vague about features.
Contrast that with Cybook. No real expensive PR campaign, but they’ve been totally transparent about what they’ve been doing and what stage they are at launching. It’s generated excitement on its own. Sony has also done a pretty effective marketing campaign up to the point of asking for input from people.
I generally like Amazon’s way of doing business, and they’ve done a lot of cool things on the social networking side (lists, etc), and maybe this device will turn out to be cool, but frankly, I feel like I am being toyed with.
Let me ask: what’s so hard about putting up a webpage to mention a future project, with status reports and general descriptions of features? Yes, it’s a competitive world, but that doesn’t explain why it couldn’t have provided information about the basic information.
Why not have a blog by the product developers with occasional screenshots? We love reading these things. (And probably almost every blogpost would have been mentioned on Teleread!)
Amazon sometimes seems oblivious to what book readers are about. Back in the 2004 election, it was revealed that Amazon.com had given more money to Republicans than Democrats (or something like that). Bloggers and readers retaliated by choosing online bookstores with a better record of campaign contributions. People who buy ebooks and ebook readers differ from regular Americans in that they actually read books. Because of that, they are more skeptical about advertising and the promise of “New and Improved.” They don’t enjoy the feeling of being given incomplete or one-sided information. They don’t jump to buy something merely because of a flashy ad or celebrity endorser. And they examine multiple sources of information before making a purchase decision.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Wise words, Robert. A more open approach would better serve Amazon and the public alike. You BET I’d have picked up items from an Amazon blog on the Kindle. The Cybook is a great example of a more helpful PR strategy.
I would respectfully disagree with you on one detail–your use of “generally” in regard to liking Amazon’s ways of doing business.
Why? To give one example, I don’t think the mass herding of publishers into a *proprietary* format–at the expense of others–is a nice way of doing business. And as shown by the Toys R Us case, other questions arise about Amazon’s use or abuse of power. I’m also not terribly enchanted by Amazon’s playing down its customer support numbers (at least in the past–I’d want to check).
That said, the company has done many positive things, too, such as increasing the supply of books in rural areas away from bookstores, and you can bet I’m looking forward to trying out the Kindle and reviewing it fairly.
Thanks,
David
November 16th, 2007 at 11:49 am
My guess (and it is a guess) is that there is no hardware device at all, it is a software-only reading platform that can be played on any computer screen, including a phone screen. But perhaps, not compatible with the software reader Amazon already owns, which is Mobipocket’s.
If Bezos sees the future of entertainment media as a purely digitized product, why not go into the serious business of distributing digitized book media along the same model of Audible.com? Amazon has surely had time to study this model. And why would a pure-play giant like Amazon ever need to create a physical product?
Just asking.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
How has Amazon strung you along? Did Jeff Bezos send you cryptic emails alluding to the fact that his company may or may not release an ebook reader? Or is that feeling self induced by the handful of people on the planet who are huge fans of this particular technology and are constantly looking for bits and pieces of information?
Amazon is smart enough to realize that they can significantly change the game in electronic publishing by getting this thing right out of the gate. Publishing their intentions ahead of time either locks them into a timeline that they may or may not meet or subjects them to “vaporware” accusations if they need more time to develop the product. The market is so miniscule at this point, there is no incentive for Amazon to manage expectations of people like us who already own ebook readers.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Maybe they realized that in the brave new world publishers don’t matter.
Do you know the book “Print is dead?”
I think it could be titled
“Publishing is Dead” or rather “Broadcast Media is Dead”
By the way, have a look at Miro internet-TV platform.
Couldn’t magazines work the same way?
We already have RSS news readers, but we often don’t get full articles downloaded automagically, do we?
Especially not for paid content.
Just something to think about…
November 16th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
[...] “We can’t ride on books and music and video forever.” - Jeff Bezos’ interesting thoughts about the future of books in the digital age. And yet more Kindle speculation. [...]