Will Books Become Paperless?
By Evan VanZelfden - Feb 13 , 2008
Could Amazon.com kindle a fire that will burn the printed book market to the ground, or will they, themselves, flame out in the end?
Much lamentation has occurred in newspaper circles about the slow death of newspapers. Mostly, they blame the Internet. Much lamentation has occurred in magazine circles about the slow death of magazines. Mostly, they blame the Internet.
In television circles, they simultaneously blame the Internet while firmly believing they can harness the Internet for some purpose. As the most technologically advanced of the media conglomerates, televisions feels entitled to the web, though they remain unsure of just what to do with it.
But what of book publishers? Books are certainly the medium with the most history. The technology behind printing and binding may have changed over the years, but the end product is remarkable consistent—until the rise of e-books.
When Internet service was first being sold to unsuspecting consumers, they were promised many benefits from what those early salesmen termed “The Information Superhighway.” One promise was that the entire contents of the Library of Congress would be available online, in fully accessible text format.
Apocryphal as those claims turned out to be (so far), sources like Project Gutenberg did provide thousands of public-domain e-texts for free. The problem was that it’s a strain to read an entire volume on your computer screen. And even with a laptop computer, it’s simply not portable enough.
As the Pocket PC, Palm Pilot, and other personal digital assistant devices become more popular, so did the release of e-books for those formats. Unfortunately, the screen sizes were insufficient and readers had to scroll endlessly through text—the digital equivalent of having tiny pages.
Sony, a Japanese electronics company, announced the Sony Reader in January of 2006. By September of that year, it was selling at $350 per device. Backed by publishers, it offered a back-catalog of 10,000 titles. Some reviewers hailed it as the ‘iPod of books’ because of the similarities between the iTunes music store and Sony Connect, where readers could purchase virtual volumes through their computers, and transfer titles to their Readers.
The main virtue of this device, however, was the screen technology. Six inches in size, it promised “electronic paper” with four levels of grayscale, one-hundred sixty-six dots-per-inch, and viewability in direct sunlight—something that can be difficult with even the best of traditional LCD screens on phones, laptops, and PDAs.
And in an unexpected move, Amazon.com recently released a device similar to the Sony Reader called the Kindle. But the largest Internet bookstore made one key improvement with Kindle—connectivity. Using the Sprint wireless network, users can browse for free and download titles directly.
With pricing being an important initial factor, new releases cost around $10. Classics are about $2. Newspaper subscriptions range from $6 to $15 per month. And magazines and blog subscriptions range from $1 to $3.50 per month.
On November 19, 2007, the Kindle sold out in five-and-a-half hours, at a price of $399 per unit—some $50 higher than the competing Sony product. It offered a back-catalog of 88,000 works. A Newsweek cover story the next week called Kindle “the future of reading.”
And for the publishing industry, the ramifications are startling.
Amazon’s marketing efforts state that it “reads like real paper” and users can access all their favorite newspapers and blogs wirelessly. Even battery life has been taken into account. “You can read War and Peace in a single charge,” say the promotional materials.
Strangely, Amazon didn’t expect the success they’ve had so far. In a quarterly earnings call last Wednesday, the company’s president, Jeff Bezos, said, “Kindle is, in terms of demand, outpacing our expectations, which is certainly something that we are very grateful for.”
He noted the manufacturing side was scrambling. “We’re working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week, so that we can get back—our goal is to get into a situation as quickly as we can where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately,” Bezos told the investment bankers.
Bezos did not comment on just what impact a widely used digital book reader might have on the paper-and-ink business of book publications. Production would be quicker and easier, of course. And the price of books would drop along with decreased production costs. But other changes would also overtake the marketplace—instead of walking into Barnes and Noble, customers would simply read sample chapters on Kindle and various Kinkle-like devices and make purchases on those devices from just anywhere.
Which means that marketing becomes the pre-eminent concern of bookbinders turned virtual. So will the book industry be just as surprised when their market goes from physical inventory to virtual commodity, and will a $400 Kindle have more sell-outs and remain in demand? Amazon was quite pleasantly surprised, recently, by the sell-out of all their inventory of their introductory Kindle—and you might be next.
“We are super-excited by the very strong demand,” concludes Bezos.
