TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Why the Kindle platform should be opened

By Humayun Kabir

Is Amazon going to open the Kindle platform in near future? The answer is probably “NO.” We consumers lack the ability to get the inside information, but we can guess that the decision to make the Kindle a closed platform was done by Amazon itself, not publishers. Book publishers might have encouraged Amazon to use DRMed. But does DRM per se have anything to do with a closed system? NO. Adobe’s Bill McCoy has recently written:

Kindle is far more closed even than iPod, which started out and have remained primarily players for MP3s, easily made from any audio CD. While Kindle supports a couple of non-DRM publication formats (unfortunately not yet PDF or EPUB), there’s almost no supply of non-DRM commercial content, a situation unlikely to change any time soon.

So what’s ahead? Yes, the Kindle is far more closed than iPod, but far less sophisticated in terms of both hardware and software design. iPhone/iPodTouch has already been jailbroken for third-party programs, but did it hurt Apple? No, not at all. Apple couldn’t even win in the “cat and mouse” game with the hackers. Can’t we expect the same thing with the Kindle? It’ll happen in a month or two. The ability to read more content in different formats is more likely to increase the popularity of the Kindle. Amazon should step forward to open the device as a way to handle more diverse formats, as the readers want, rather than dictating the readers what the company insists on.

Here are some suggestions that Amazon can follow immediately:

1. First step: Be officially able to read DRMed Mobipocket format. That would make it convenient for the readers who already own Mobipocket books. Ripping off the customers is harming the e-book industry.
2. Provide support to read Kindle e-books on the PCs as well—like the Mobipocket Desktop. It’ll give customers more choices without hurting Amazon’s sales. 
3. Lower the prices of Mobipocket e-books in line with the Kindle format.
4. Open the Kindle platform so that other retailers can also offer e-books for the Kindle. Amazon should compete with other e-book retailers in content pricing, rather than locking in the customers with the Kindle edition only. If Amazon can offer lower prices for e-books customers, they’ll be more likely to buy from Amazon and increase its sales revenue. That should be the right business model for the e-book industry to survive. In this respect, I’ll cite Jeff Bezos’ argument on selling used books on Amazon for an analogy. He denies that used books hurt the book industry and authors: “We’ve found that our used books business does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact, the opposite has happened. Offering customers a lower-priced option causes them to visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books while encouraging customers to try authors and genres they may not have otherwise tried.”  
5. Provide direct PDF support and also consider the reflowable .epub format, which could also be a translation option from PDF.