At Home with John and Debbie

Amazon has launched its eBook reader, and it’s called ‘Kindle’.

It’s a nifty gadget, and it throws up a lot of questions about what it is we expect from books, and what we can expect in future.

To get the basics out of the way, it costs US$400, for now, it’s about the size of a paperback, with part of the front dedicated to buttons, and the rest dedicated to an ‘e-Ink’ display. I’ve not witnessed e-Ink, but it’s supposed to be as readable as paper — unlike a traditional computer screen it does not flicker, and it reflects light rather than transmitting it.

It does seem that if you’ve got a large electronic document to read, this device goes a long way towards being the ideal gadget to read it on. Without having tried out the device, I’m going to proceed with the bold assumption that it’s close enough to a satisfactory reading experience as to be a realistic alternative to a real book. It’s probably not entirely true, but it’s not an angle I want to explore today.

However, being a good way to read electronic text is only part of the Kindle vision, and not the cash-cow part. Like the iPod with the iTunes Music Store, Kindle is really a conduit into Amazon’s eBook sales service.

Using ‘invisible’ technology the user needn’t worry about, Kindle has a wireless connection to Amazon, allowing it to preview and download books, newspapers, magazines and certain blogs. You can subscribe to the latter three. It’s possible, even easy, to put on content from other sources, but it’s really convenient to put on paid content from Amazon. Like iTunes-bought music, though, the Amazon content comes with usage restrictions, and that’s what got me thinking about what we expect to be able to do with a book.

• Read - the most obvious thing to do with a book
• Keep - people expect to be able to keep books for a lifetime, to revisit any time
• Lend - people expect to be able to let arbitrary friends borrow books
• Give - people expect to be able to give books as gifts, hand them down to relatives, or bequeath them after death
• Borrow - the corollary of ‘Lend’, but also people appreciate lending libraries (indeed, many would consider public libraries to be a vital part of civilised society)
• Sell - people expect to be able to sell second-hand books, or give them to charity shops who will sell them.
• Share - people who cohabit expect to be able to co-own a book (you could consider this to be repeated, informal, lending and borrowing)

So how do these activities work out, if you’ve bought a DRM-limited eBook for your Kindle from Amazon?

• Read - Yes, you can read
• Keep - This is more complicated than it sounds, and if you read on, I’ll discuss it at tedious length.
• Lend - It seems you can’t
• Give - It seems you can’t, although of course you can give an Amazon gift voucher, and it doesn’t seem impossible that maybe one day Amazon would implement a system where you could buy an eBook for someone else’s account. That’s quite different from giving someone a book after you yourself have read it, though.
• Borrow - It seems you can’t. Almost certainly you’ll never be allowed to push a DRM’d eBook from person to person (although see ‘Share’) . There are mutterings about some sort of lending library-like system, in which books ‘expire’, but I really don’t expect that to come to fruition.
• Sell - It seems you can’t sell on a book you’ve finished with. That’s no great surprise. Publishers hate the second hand book market. On a tangent, it is an attractive sales route for the niche-market author.
• Share - Some number of Kindles can be bound to an account, so a family could have multiple Kindles and all read the same book at once, paid for just once. This is a bit like the way iTunes lets you register five computers to the same ID.

The big question is, just how much value do consumers attach to those activities?

Obviously, it varies. If you’re evangelical about a novel, you’ll love being able to lend it to a friend for free. If you’ve a much cherished library of nicely bound classics, you might relish handing it down to your children. If you’ve spent hundreds of pounds on textbooks for your university course, you might be glad of the chance to make some of that back by selling them.

On the other hand, if you bought a certain kind of IT book in 2004, you know it’s all but worthless in 2007, and probably don’t expect to lend, borrow or sell it. If you paid £4 for an airport novel, you might think nothing of ditching it after reading the final chapter.

I think these are significant losses, and I think the only way to compensate for them is by reducing the cost of an eBook compared to a full book. Currently a recently released novel would cost US$10 as an Amazon eBook, which is approximately 20%-50% cheaper than the dead tree version. Time will tell whether that’s cheap enough. At present, of course, Amazon is marketing towards early adopters, and those people don’t really care about the money.

Of course, while there are consumer downsides, there are significant benefits too. For some people, storing books is a problem — people who live in a small flat, or those who lead a mobile lifestyle, for example. Many of us didn’t realise that we wanted to carry our complete record collection around in our pockets, until technology made it a reality. With an eBook reader you could be half way through your train journey, and only then decide which of your dozens of books you want to read today. Those factors are going to be more important to some people than others, and compete with other practical factors such as the device’s attractiveness to thieves or the practicality of reading in the bath.

So what about the ‘Keep’ expectation? Remember I said, and you agreed, didn’t you, “people expect to be able to keep books for a lifetime, to revisit any time”. At first glance there is no problem. Once you’ve bought your eBook, it’s yours to view on your Kindle forever. If your Kindle breaks, Amazon’s stored all the important stuff, so you’ll be able to carry on with a new Kindle as if nothing ever happened.

Except, a lot can happen in a lifetime. What happens if Amazon go out of business? Or, perhaps more realistically, what if in 2027, some other company brings out a new eBook reader that’s just lovely except for one thing — Amazon isn’t allowing it to view their DRM eBooks. This is precisely the problem that looms for anyone who’s bought a significant amount of music from iTunes. There are all sorts of nice devices on the market that play MP3s, but your iTunes library is useless on them. For now, you have to remember that if you buy a real book, it’s yours until it gets lost or damaged. If you buy an eBook from Amazon, you can’t look that far into the future.

As it currently stands, if the Kindle was available in the UK at the current US prices, I probably wouldn’t buy one (by the way, don’t import one — that ‘invisible wireless’ technology that makes the service work relies on a US mobile phone network). If the basic hardware becomes much cheaper, and the content is cheap enough to counteract all those losses, I’d lap it up. I do know that within a short time, I, like everyone else will be using an e-Ink display for something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 16:50 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.