The title of this post, the latest in a seemingly unending stream defending Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader from hordes of misguided critics, was almost the exact same title as my June 20 post: The Kindle is for readers, the Kindle is for readers. The subject of today’s push back is a John Conley posting that I see only on Tim O’Reilly’s blog but which may have originated elsewhere.
To summarize, Conley is another Apple fan predicting that Apple will utterly destroy Amazon in the e-book market if and when the Cupertino gadget maker finally gets around to addressing the e-book reader market. I’m as big a fan of Apple products as anyone and dearly enjoy my Macs and iPods. But, unfortunately for Conley and others who make this argument about an Apple e-book reader, a successful reading device needs to be a hit with avid readers, not with avid gadget lovers. One meaty quote from amidst his post:
Amazon desires to be the Wal-Mart of Web distribution, but they have no value added other than price. Apple provides the connectivity, software, platforms, and most important, loyal customers. If and when they decide that ebooks are a viable driver or requirement to meet the needs to their tens of millions of incubated users they will dwarf the efforts of any other ebook service provider in the market and the publishers will readily come to them with content. (They will also not make the mistake of asking the publishers to provide the content in some proprietary format.)
As usual, almost everything underlying this latest Apple e-book fantasy is exactly backwards. Millions and millions of the most active, most book-buying, book-loving consumers on earth are customers of Amazon — it’s very best customers, in fact. That’s the huge market that book publishers need to access to make a go of e-books. It’s all well and good that Apple has “tens of millions of incubated users” but what they’re incubated to use are laptops and iPods and other gadgetry. The users may be super-active Internet surfers, have huge collections of digital pictures and know all the ways to win at “Age of Empires.” Whether they buy and read a lot of books in print is another story. Steve Jobs own sense of his customers seems to be that “people don’t read anymore.”
The next fallacy in Conley’s piece is that publishers will flock to Apple if it unveils an e-book reader. Yeah, right. So when Apple recently added rentable movies to the iTunes store, the movie studios flocked to Apple because it has this huge customer base? Not exactly. And when Jobs decided it was time to sell DRM-free music tracks, the music labels flocked to Apple to get to the huge customer base? Nope (Gee, who did they flock to? Amazon!). And when it came time for NBC to renew its agreement to sell the most popular downloaded TV shows like “The Office” and “Battlestar Galactica” over iTunes, of course the network renewed on Apple’s terms? Nope.
It seems Apple’s initial success with the iPod/iTunes model, whereby a lot of profits flow to the hardware maker, has spooked the big content creation corporations. I’m not saying I endorse the publishers’ view or agree that they’re acting even in their own long-term best interests. But as a simple prediction of what would happen, it’s really hard to see them going along with another Apple digital sales effort. They’ve snubbed everything Apple’s come up with lately. They don’t want to see a repeat of the iPod/iTunes scenario and so they’re not playing along with Apple, giant customer base or no.
Finally, there’s always the derogatory and wrong-headed descriptions of the Kindle’s economic model, its value equation for customers and its feature set. Keep in mind that an avid book buyer will save a lot of money buying e-books from Amazon, while being delighted and instantly gratified with the huge selection of e-books available wirelessly from any airport terminal, beach chair or living room sofa. Check out some of my earlier posts, such as here and here, for more on that debate.
And finally, don’t forget that Amazon is a great technology company that’s written its own software to run a massive web site reliably and which helps you find what you want when you want it and then lets you buy it fast. Apple, by contrast, was sorely lacking these kinds of online service and reliability skills in its recent MobileMe debacle.
Please feel free to leave your own take on the Kindle and Apple in the comments below. There’s plenty more wrong with Conley’s analysis and I’ll jump back in if people want to get into it in more detail.
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