Does the Kindle have a problem?
Kevin Maney certainly thinks so. In an op-ed in the Atlantic, he lays out what he feels is “the Kindle problem” There is a dichotom, Maney believes, between high convenience and great experience: things are usually convenient but not all that great, or great but not all that convenient. In trying to be both, the Kindle succeeds at neither.
While Amazon did sell out of Kindles in 2008, it hadn’t actually made that many of them. In fact, according to the market research firm In-Stat, the entire e-reader market consisted of just 1 million units in all of 2008, and Amazon nabbed only a slice of it. By contrast, Microsoft sold about 1 million Zune music players from mid-2007 to mid-2008, though the product was widely considered to be a failure.
It is interesting to note that, as I previously blogged, Apple has sold approximatel 35 million iPhones or iPod Touches, at least 10 million of which are iPhones. By putting a Kindle Reader onto those, Jeff Bezos expanded his potential market for sold books by over three thousand percent.
But Maney takes no notice of iPhones or iPod Touches as potential reading devices, concentrating on the competition from Google Books + Sony Reader and the announced Asus “Eee-book readers”. He also mentions the Forrester Research study on price points.
Maney thinks that Amazon should concentrate on convenience and price point. All the same, the market is still fairly young and undeveloped. In the next few years, anything could happen. And if the success of e-book readers on the Apple iPhone is any indication, convergent devices are likely to come up and eat dedicated readers’ lunch.
September 16th, 2009 at 1:13 am
Sadly, Amazon doesn’t seem that interested in bettering the reading experience on the iPhone or other portable devices. They’re trying to approach digital reading the same way Apple approached digital music even though the two are not parallels. Digital market places have matured since Apple’s iTunes hit the scene and people interested in digital texts make up a more limited consumer base. Amazon can’t win this battle for consumers by favoring the Kindle device. They have to improve the software for the iPhone and make more applications for other operating systems (both on mobile devices and otherwise). Amazon recognized its need to expand to a larger audience, hence the iPhone app. They stopped there, however, seemingly because they wanted to emphasize the Kindle even though it’s an unjustafiable purchase (both because of its price and being a dedicated device) for most consumers. I think Amazon is getting cocky because they’ve gotten the most press and hence are the top dog in the e-reading biz right now. However, with Sony and B&N pushing interoperability between multiple devices and Adobe’s DRMed ePub format becoming more popular, Amazon may soon find out that the most press doesn’t always translate into the most sales.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I agree… Amazon must concentrate on Kindle readers for other devices to be successful in the long run. The Kindle reader should be relegated to a niche market at most, and at best, it should be phased out in favor of other makers’ devices that are capable of reading Kindle books. That would get Amazon back out of a hardware market that they’re obviously not very good at, and let them concentrate on selling books.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:28 am
B&N has the best multi-device strategy. They have already announced Desktop, iPhone and BlackBerry readers. All based on existing eReader software obviously. If they can get Palm Pre and Android versions out soon, and also get the expected unaffiliated EInk vendors on board (Astak, iRex, etcetera), then they are the only serious competition I see to Amazon. There is already eReader for several other phone O/S’s, but these have not been upgraded to B&N and I wonder if some will have to be dropped in the expected switch to ePub.