Firmware upgrade as a Kindle 2 sales-promoter: New tweak to help DRM-trapped K1 owners move books to K2?
One hassle with proprietary, DRM-tainted formats is that you never know if your next e-book gizmo will be able to display books you’ve already bought. No ownership for real, just rental! Amazon realizes this. That’s why it’ll lean on Kindle owners to upgrade to K2, shown in these photos leaked to MobileRead.
A hint of Amazon’s captive-customer strategy comes unwittingly from the blog of Stephen Windwalker, author of Kindle-related how-to’s and a good guy— who regularly shares a wealth of info for free. He writes:
As you may already be aware, Amazon has been building up a huge backlog of Kindle orders over the past three months. The company’s plan…is to contact these back-ordered customers in the next few weeks to offer them the chance to upgrade their order to a Kindle 2.0, at relatively small additional cost (about 10% of the existing Kindle price).
Naturally, interest in the Kindle 2.0 is going to spiral upward over the next few weeks. If you want to be one of the first in line for a new Kindle 2.0 when the units begin to ship, the best thing to do today is to order a new Kindle from Amazon’s main Kindle buying page, if you have not done so already. [Not everyone would agree with this, if the price of the new machine will be $359 when released on Feb. 24, as reported in MobileRead. Will some new buyers cancel their orders to get the $359 price if they'd otherwise pay 10 percent more? Then again, the people who say in line and upgrade just might get their K2s faster. - D.R.]
One thing that Amazon knows is that one of the biggest sources for Kindle 2.0 orders will be previous Kindle 1.0 buyers [italics added]. That’s the main reason the company is presently in the middle of a firmware upgrade (1.2) to streamline synchronicity between multiple Kindles assigned to a single customer account. It is also the reason the company recently opened its own Marketplace features to allow easy after-market sales of Kindle 1.0 units by Kindle owners. (Just in case you would like to sell your KIndle 1.0 to help finance your Kindle 2.0, it’s just as easy as selling a used book on Amazon Marketplace, and you may even turn a profit!)
I hope this information, which is based entirely upon my personal knowledge, opinions, and expertise rather than any information provided directly to me by Amazon insiders, will be helpful to you.
Detail, in case this isn’t clear already: The opinions on the Kindle and proprietary DRM—piled atop unencrypted Mobipocket—are my own and not Stephen’s. At any rate, I think Amazon could compete even if the Kindle weren’t so bloody-proprietary. It’ll be interesting to see if the new K reads ePub without translation. If not, and if you’re a publisher, you should know that Jeff Bezos is slowly chipping away at your bargaining power, not just Amazon customers’. Amazon is strengthening the already-strong link between content and proprietary tech. Bad news! And for indie writers, among others—given Amazon’s less than optimal terms.
Acknowledgment: Yes, the original Kindle can read nonDRMed books and titles in a variety of formats. But I daresay that most books of most Kindle owners are in the Kindle’s proprietary-DRMed format.
February 7th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
The 1.2 firmware (for Kindle 1) is now available for download. It includes image zoom, which is nice, but it also includes “Greek characters and monospace fonts”. This probably means that the Kindle 2 won’t include ePub, because the only reason for adding monospaced fonts is to better support technical ebooks without taking the obvious step of switching to ePub.
February 7th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Great hint, Alan, thanks! – David