Amazon is, tacitly at least, positioning its Kindle ebook reader as the “iPod of reading.” While as a handheld device tied into an online store, it bears some resemblance to Apple’s blockbuster, that’s where the similarity ends. The Kindle enters a market that is entirely different from the one the iPod entered back in 2001, and the market difference, more than any aesthetic or functional shortcoming, is what will likely spell the Kindle’s doom.<\/p>\n
Digital music players were well-established when the iPod appeared. Sales of MP3 players were still fairly modest, but they were growing rapidly, indicating that a real market existed with real consumer demand. There is no such market for the Kindle. Every ebook reader up to now has failed, doomed by consumer indifference. The iPod was not pioneering a virgin market; the Kindle is.<\/p>\n
The market for digital music players existed in 2001 because the content for the players – the digitally compressed music file – was already ubiquitous. Thanks to Napster, millions of people had stuffed their hard drives with MP3s and had installed jukebox software to manage them. What was required at the time was a simple, stylish way to make all that music portable, with a seamless connection between the PC jukebox and the portable device’s software. That’s what the iPod-iTunes system provided. The DRM, or copy-protection, embedded in the files that eventually came to be sold through the iTunes store was a non-issue for customers because they had a ton of easily shared DRM-free MP3s that worked just fine on the iPod.<\/p>\n
There is no big, readymade supply of content for the Kindle. It arrives in your hands naked and empty, and the only way to fill it (other than through a kludgey and largely useless process of mailing Word documents and photos to a special email address for an extra charge) is to buy fairly expensive books and subscriptions through the Amazon store. This is where the price of the Kindle and the copy protections on the Amazon content become deal-breakers. People would pay $399 for the iPod because they could get pretty much unlimited content for free. (Indeed, to underscore that fact, the iTunes store didn’t even open until nearly two years after the iPod debuted.) And people knew that even if the iPod was pulled from the market or a better device came along, they wouldn’t sacrifice their music. It was safely on their PC hard drives, in a readable and transportable format. Even the DRM-ed iTunes Store tracks could fairly easily be recoded as DRM-free MP3s.<\/p>\n
So the Kindle, unlike the iPod, has a huge mountain to climb. Amazon has to create demand not only for the device but for the content that fills the device, and it has to do that while presenting would-be buyers with the specter of a big upfront expense, ongoing outlays for every piece of content, and substantial risks related to obsolescence and failure, of both the device and the content format.<\/p>\n
For the Kindle to be the “iPod of reading,” it would have had to have been preceded by a “Napster of reading.” And, of course, it wasn’t. Which probably tells you something about the difference between songs and stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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