I was reading this article in review of the kindle and I had a couple of thoughts about digital distribution and media.1 Now of course, I’m pretty sure that the Kindle is not the end all device for digital text, but I think it gets a lot of things right, and is a good development for technology. Some thoughts:

Reasons the Kindle is a Failure

  • DRM. If you’re not allowing people full access to their files in open formats your not really selling the books. Period. This is a hugely ideological complaint, but here the impact: the prices are too high given that they’re not really selling you the book.
  • Given the above, I think 5 dollars (half of what they charge you now) is probably the most they could reasonably charge for a book and likely something within a dollar of $2 USD is probably ideal. Mass Market paperbacks are 7 bucks, which is lower than the ten that an ebook. More on pricing.
  • The device is overpriced and they nickel and dime you to death for service. Getting books/texts converted cost 10 cents. Certain RSS feeds cost recurring fees. I think either they have to subsidize the price of the device and then have a service contract (that includes credits for a given number of books, possibly tied to amazon prime?) or keep the price of the device high and really give the service away for free.
  • The obligatory complaints about the objects design and interface.

Reasons the (right) next “Kindle” could be amazing.

  • If they fix the price/DRM/etc. problem, sales go up, total revenue goes up, it’s more successful.
  • Given the always on internet, people buy a kindle book for different reasons then they buy a regular book: You buy a kindle book because you have time, you’ve read the first couple of sample chapters and you want to read more. You buy a dead tree book because you see it on the shelf and you think you might enjoy reading it later on. I have lots of print books in my collection that I’ve not read. I think you’re probably less likely to collect digital books in the same way.
  • Digital distribution does away with overstock, and most distribution costs, which means the reasonable limitations on publication becomes editorial/production staff time, and available good manuscripts.2. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be codices anymore, they just won’t be produced in the same way, and they won’t be bought and sold in the same way.
  • If this or some sort of digital reading device becomes more ubiquitous (and cheaper and therefore more accessible to a greater segment of the population,) such a device could be the main way that we we do a lot of our reading of text, and I think it isn’t hard to imagine a revival of greater interest in book length forms as result of the proliferation of such a device.

Just a few thoughts at any rate.

  1. As an aside I think it’s fascinating the way that the author of that post connects (rightly I suspect) the marketing of Kindle to women (though the links are loose, I think chicklit/“pop fiction” is sort of the ideal material for this sort of device) rather than to the typical (male) geeky early adopter types. I think this is fascinating, but it’s not ↩︎

  2. A digression on the costs of traditional publishing: It probably costs 15 bucks to make a high quality hardcover that sells for 25 dollars; so that leaves 10 dollars between the seller (I think markup for books is 35% of the cover price) and the author/publisher so were talking about a few bucks at best. Mass market and trade paperbacks have even lower margins. ↩︎