Kindle Hikes Book Prices and Adds to My Ambivalence
May 11, 2009
by Dan Gillmor
Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Just when I was coming to terms with my ambivalence toward my Kindle e-book reader, Amazon and the publishers have gotten greedy.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the device since I bought my first one about 9 months ago. As a frequent traveler and voracious reader, I’ve found the Kindle to be nearly ideal. I never have fewer than a dozen books in its memory, and they’re always things I want to read.
As someone who believes we should often interact with media instead of passively consuming it, however, I don’t think much of the Kindle for any purpose other than reading a narrative. And given what a disaster “digital rights management” (DRM) is becoming for scholarship, culture and ultimately freedom, the device’s restrictions on how I can use what I’ve purchased are deeply troubling.
Still, I’ve been using it with some degree of satisfaction (as have enough other people to have helped boost Amazon’s stock price, so as the holder of several hundred shares I’m slightly better off in that way, too). The second-generation model improved nicely on the first–among other things, fixing some user-interface quirks, letting me charge it via a USB cable, and boosting the battery life.
The books I load onto the device fall generally under the casual entertainment category. I buy a Kindle book the way I buy a movie ticket (or did before going to theaters became such a crappy experience).
These are books, like most movies, that I’ll read or watch once and forget about. A physical book is more like a DVD–something I want to own and enjoy again and again.
So the kinds of books I tend to buy for the Kindle are the sort I’d often pick up at an airport newsstand, namely mysteries, thrillers and semi-trashy novels that I’d sometimes leave in hotels or airplane seat-back pockets once I’d finished them. (I also subscribe to several magazines, and consider it a favor not to see the advertising.)
Once I got accustomed to reading e-books, I started doing something that had been out of character in the analog era: buying new books that, in print, were available in hardcover only. Why? The price, typically $10 (okay, one penny less), was right. In fact, my new-book purchases soared.
But not for long. In recent weeks, Amazon (AMZN) or the publishers (or both) have done their best to deter me from buying the latest releases. Prices have gone up, way up.
Now, I often find books for which I’d have gladly paid $10 listed at $14 or $15. I save these to a list I keep on the Amazon website, called “Too expensive for Kindle,” and periodically check to see if the price has dropped. So far, not yet on any of these.
Hiking prices this way creates a bad deal for the customer. Amazon’s price for a new hardcover is typically just a couple of dollars higher. This means I could buy the hardcover, read it and donate it to my local library, and–after the tax deduction–come out ahead. I’d do even better taking the book to my local used-book store and getting cash.
But I almost never buy new hardcovers of books I don’t expect to reread or use as a reference, because a) I’m kind of cheap; and b) I can stand waiting for the paperback. So if prices stay high, I stay away.
Now, sellers have every right to charge more for popular books, especially when they’re new. This is basic supply and demand. But when the price only makes sense for people who consider the ultra-portability of an e-book paramount, that’s a turnoff for other potential buyers.
As a customer I also understand supply and demand. My demand is extremely elastic, and in this case it’s snapped.
Last week’s introduction of the Kindle DX was framed in many ways by different constituencies, but I was taken aback by the praise heaped on the device by several newspaper people, including the CEO of the New York Times Co. (NYT) (in which I also own a small amount of stock). Newspapers aren’t going to fix their considerable woes with Kindles, and anyone who thinks so lives in a fantasy world.
The DX, with its bigger screen, strikes me as potentially useful in several ways, possibly including the textbook function that Amazon hopes to jumpstart with the help of several universities (including the one that employs me). But if textbook publishers don’t radically cut prices on the outrageously expensive books they sell, they will find themselves creating a strong incentive for precisely what they don’t want: unauthorized copying.
I suspect the DX will prove most useful in more prosaic ways. For example, it could be a nearly ideal container and viewer for technical documentation–thick manuals that need periodic updating, where the cost of printing is prohibitive and the bulk of the books is daunting for the user.
Will all of this be made moot by the widely anticipated Apple (AAPL) “NetPad” or whatever it’s going to be called? I refer to a device that looks like a larger version of the iPod Touch, which would be a wonderful mobile multimedia player, among other likely capabilities.
I doubt it. If you enjoy severe eye strain, reading books on a back-lit, glossy display is just the ticket. The passive displays on Kindles, the Sony (SNE) e-reader and other such devices are much better for this kind of reading.
One size does not fit all in the emerging world of devices. Then again, one carry-on bag doesn’t hold all devices. For now, however, the Kindle has a place in mine.
Comments
You think YOU’RE cheap?
I have purchased maybe $50 worth of things from the Kindle store. There are still a lot of public domain things out there I need to catch up on and some of the best science fiction was written before we realized that faster than light travel wasn’t likely to ever happen (never mind Star Trek).
My main frustration with Kindle is that there is clearly a lot of technology there that has been disabled or crippled. There are speakers in the Kindle 2 and the sound is actually quite good, but you can only start and stop music play and have no control over play order, no way to list the files or manage them in any way while actually using the device. You can do “clippings”, but then what? My clippings file is huge and fairly useless both on the Kindle and when downloaded to my PC. It’s just an ever-growing flat file of run-together text. I have experimentally checked my e-mail and even sent an e-mail message using the primitive web browser. My sense of what the device is capable of tells me that it would be a simple matter (maybe a script or something) to allow a clipping to be used in a blog entry.
OK, I know they have a secret deal with Sprint for the wireless service and there are costs associated with transmission of this data. But those costs when averaged out are fairly low I am sure and they (Amazon) do charge for transmission of content other than their own to the device. If they come out with another update to the device that doesn’t allow for the use of WiFi as an alternative delivery mechanism then the people at Amazon are truly clueless. It’s actually puzzling why it wasn’t part of the original, or at least the K2.
I’ll make this prediction, with a fair degree of confidence… If Amazon doesn’t uncripple the Kindle soon, Apple or someone else will come out with a device that will render it quickly obsolete. So far, the screen (which is nice for readability (in well lit areas) but not so nice for speed of update, color rendition, or reading in low light) is the device’s primary strong point. Nothing else it does is particularly unique or noteworthy. Amazon will hide functionality of this device at their peril (compare with cell phone companies crippled phone software prior to the iPhone). As was the case with the iPhone, tagging along later crying that you’ve really unleashed the capabilities of your device NOW doesn’t work so well once a NEW product is out with those features from the get-go. Ask Nokia and Palm.
Posted by Mac Beach at May 11th, 2009 at 12:47 pmI understand the problem for buyers.
The problem for authors/publishers is two-fold:
* Amazon is still taking 55% discount. That’s the discount they take on physical books–which makes (more) sense, because there are (more) costs associated with physical product–inventory counts, warehousing, distribution, mailing. It makes less sense on digital products, since most of those costs go away.
From the publisher’s perspective, unfortunately, we still have most of the same costs, with the exclusion of printing. Digital books still need to be envisioned, they still need to be researched, they still need to be written, they still need to be edited. They still need a ‘cover’ even though it’s not physical–nobody will buy a book, even a virtual book, if they can’t see what it ‘looks’ like. They still need to be marketed and publicized. Though there’s no physical distribution, it still requires (significant) staff time to “Kindle-ize” the book and turn its digital format into something the Kindle can handle. So aside from the printing costs–which for the average 250-page book is about $2 when purchased in small-publisher quantities–you’ve incurred all the same costs, and you’re still giving Amazon its 55% discount.
The one thing you’re saving on (presumably) is returns, since it’s unlikely that you’re going to be having to refund money for returned ‘books.’ But that very advantage turns out to be a disadvantage in disguise–which is, quite simply, how does one ensure accountability of sales for a digital product? Yes, there certainly are ways to do this, involving locked pdfs that must be registered to be activated and such. And no, Amazon has not built anything like this into the Kindle. Publishers, quite simply, are supposed to trust Amazon’s bookkeeping and accounts, and there is no–repeat, no–way to verify this. So this week at least seven people have told me they’ve downloaded my “Publishing Game” books on the Kindle this week–and I haven’t yet gotten a check from Amazon–I have no idea how much that check will amount to.
If readers could push Amazon to accept a lower discount, and to work towards locked/registered books, the prices could come down dramatically. But right now, it’s hard to know how that could happen…
/Fern
http://www.PublishingGame.com
Posted by Fern Reiss at May 11th, 2009 at 4:26 pmhttp://www.AssociationofWriters.com
By the way, one of my $50 in purchases was “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. Only, it turned out to be a critique of the book rather than the book itself (there was no way to tell from the Amazon description). They fairly painlessly credited my card and asked me to erase the book from my device (which I did). There didn’t seem to be any true automation to this, other than it disappeared from my Amazon “archive”.
As far as specially preparing a book for the Kindle, my understanding is that there is some DRM capabilities to the device, but I haven’t tested them. One gripe I have is that few books being prepared for the device (including the ones I’ve paid for) have a table of contents that actually works. There is either none, or something that looks like one, but is non-functional. So to get to Chapter 37 of a large work you have to resort to string searches or make guesses using Amazon’s inane alternative to page numbering.
Since HTML is one of the formats you can load directly onto the device (after ridiculously renaming the file to .txt) why oh why don’t they support the use of internal links (using #) that would allow anyone to easily build their own TOC. Yet another example of the “closed for no good reason” that these products are often saddled with.
Posted by Mac Beach at May 11th, 2009 at 8:25 pm