There now, that wasn't so hard, was it...?

Well, of course it took a long time, but at the end of the day most of the several years between Google's introduction of its book scanning program for out-of-copyright and out-of-print books and the recently announced settlement with the book industry for USD 125 million has been a matter of the book publishing industry deciding to name a reasonable price that would sync up with the realities of book publishing in an electronic marketplace. Since the book industry was barely interested in e-books and print-on-demand a few years ago, it's understandable that the magic number was not readily at hand back then. But now that eBooks are beginning to take off via Kindle and mobile phones via Amazon and other outlets and print-on-demand publishing is beginning to look more attractive as a business model the book industry has some real revenue and traffic data and a marketing plan that will benefit from Google and other partners pushing their out-of-print wares.

In many ways this enables the book industry to monetize fringe content far more effectively via Google partners such as Amazon, in essence validating the value of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory for content that was sometimes discounted by book industry executives resistant to Google's scanning efforts. The settlement is really just a bulk licensing fee to make it easier to administer long-tail revenues, not too different than the industry royalties paid by radio stations. This sets up people to buy books in print and in e-reading devices like Amazon's Kindle based on Google Books "broadcasts" just as premium downloads and CDs are fed by online and broadcast radio revenues. With finding an audience for one's content the greatest challenges for all publishers Google Books has become a powerful browsing engine that maximizes the value of any title, new or old, for an audience that is just right for it.

With the new agreement Google becomes a premium destination as well: you will be able to browse full pages of scanned books covered by the agreement instead of snippets and opt to pay for the full online rights to the book via Google Books - or purchase them for your private online "bookshelf." On the surface this may look like a bad thing for Amazon and it's proprietary Kindle strategy, and certainly Amazon would love for their gizmo to get as much momentum as possible. But as successful as Kindle has been with many core book enthusiasts it hasn't escaped Amazon's attention in all likelihood that the mobile market is exploding and that they are going to lose market share for books in general if they cannot get their inventory onto as many mobile devices as possible.

Enter Google's new Android operating system, which will be able to power any number of mobile and handheld devices - including perhaps, Kindles. As Amazon's portal specialty is shopping support and fulfillment, in the long run Amazon is better off partnering with Google and other platform providers to make their inventory relevant in as many venues as possible. Amazon may also turn up a winner with the Google out-of-print deal for print-on-demand support. Already a growing number of titles at Amazon are produced on a print-on-demand basis anyway, so Google and help to power that capability as well.

So all in all this deal is likely to turn into a content industry love-fest over the next few years, a peace treaty that finally enables book publishers to leverage the vast power of Google's book scanning initiative, thus avoiding expensive or less powerful alternatives and enabling book marketers to accelerate their increasingly aggressive exploitation of online channels for their marketing efforts. I can't say that I didn't say several years ago that this would happen eventually, but for now let's all just be glad that there are better times ahead for book publishers who are learning how to exploit electronic content markets far more effectively.

Labels: agreement, amazon, books, ecommerce, Google, kindle, scanning

Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to a bad cold that caught me unexpectedly, but it was long enough to appreciate the ins and outs of this increasingly popular device.

A Kindle starts up easily enough by sliding a slim switch on the back of the unit, though its being next to a switch that activates the unit's wireless networking capabilities makes this something a bit awkward to do by habit. You have to flip the Kindle unit over to make sure that you're hitting the right switch most time. There are a lot of little ergonomic issues like this in the Kindle, ideas that look good in the design phase that perhaps could have been better thought out in real life. The keyboard of a Kindle falls into that category also, being barely usable for hunting and pecking but with a slippery and ambiguous feel that makes it unthinkable to use it for more than a few must-do tasks.

Overall, though, many of the key features are remarkably easy to use. The unit boots up quickly and its basic page turning functions are remarkably intuitive, with large broad keys on each side of the unit for turning forward and backwards. A Kindle will boot up to where you were last looking at content, so it's not always necessary to bookmark where you were last reading - same when you return to a specific book. There is a small scroll wheel at the bottom of a thin channel that parallels the main screen: scroll the wheel and a kind-of cursor will move up and down next to the screen and allow you to select from pop-up menus or to click on links. I thought that this would be a really inconvenient interface but you get used to it fairly easily. I can see how its steadiness will be useful in bumpy environments like subway trains. So for basic functions and navigation control you can give it a "weird but usable" rating for the most part.

The eInk display was somewhat disappointing in that the background was rather grayish rather than whitish, which made many illustrations almost impossible to make out clearly and made it a little more difficult to use in dim light. But in spite of this the display was remarkably readable for text - especially when the font size was bumped up a bit. Whew - for those of us who rely on reading glasses or progressive lenses, this is a blessing. There are plenty of great books that I'd love to pore through that have bitsy little print that wears my eyes out very quickly. With a Kindle you don't get print fatigue or the fatigue of looking at a backit screen. With bumped-up font sizes there's not that much information on any given page but the ease of turning to a new page of content makes up for that mild inconvenience easily. I found that I really enjoyed reading materials on the Kindle once I got settled in for a good sit-down.

The early Kindle models now available do provide Web access, but except for a handful of Web sites well adapted to the unit it's largely an exercise in fumbling through awkwardly formatted content - and also a feature that led to the unit freezing twice. A push of a bent paper clip into the unit's reset hole got it back to good order, but this is not a unit meant to replace mobile units with more robust Web browsing capabilities. Still, for a quick sneak peek at the headlines, it beats going back to the PC sometimes. The wireless service was quite good at my home, so chances are it will perform reasonably well with its network connectivity turned on wherever broadband services perform well. However, leaving the wireless connection does drain the batteries far more quickly than normal local -only reading would. In reading-only mode the Kindle batteries last for many days of typical use.

It's certainly a unit that I would consider as a convenience for future book purchases, especially given Amazon's pricing that enables one to purchase both a printed book and a Kindle-compatible copy for one purchase price, or get a Kindle-only copy for an even steeper discount. But what of gift books - or, for that matter, the huge library of printed books already at my disposal? The huge gap in Kindle's market strategy is a lack of "hooks" to keep people attached to their existing libraries and to be able to move on to new books once their usefulness has run their course. There's no real concept of a "used" market for Kindle books, much less the ability to add significant value to them in a way that could be onpassed to others.

More importantly there is little ability to use a Kindle book to activate online content. For example, if I am reading a passage and would like to research a specific person or historical event mentioned in the book, there are no "hooks" to online content that would make that easy - nor any way to store that research with my Kindle book copy for future reference. It's still a fairly unimaginative approach to book marketing. This may reflect the generally conservative approach to book packaging and marketing that still grips many publishing houses, but this conservatism now competes with a demographic curve that is racing against the clock.

Like the music industry print publishers have locked in their future to proprietary technologies to protect existing business models, but in the process of doing so they may have sold away their futures. With an explosion of different kinds of portable devices reaching the marketplace today and the promise of an even more complex array of devices fitting people's lifestyles in the future, why on earth would an entire industry select a proprietary platform to develop their future revenues? In a few years I believe that we will look at experiments such as the iPod and the Kindle much as people today look back on proprietary electronic content services such as Compuserve or the original AOL and ask themselves, what were we thinking?

The future of book publishing will rest on more open publishing platforms that enable book content to move to the contexts and popular devices in which it's valued most far more effectively and that will enable others to add value around a given book independent of its initial publisher. Book publishers already are more aware that their best strengths lie in talent management, providing services that leverage as many aspects of an author's value as rapidly and as effectively as possible through the lifecycle of a given work of authorship. But expect that more nimble companies who see the ability to manage talented authors more effectively through a variety of publishing media to challenge traditional publishing houses over the next few years, especially those who are best able to leveral social media outlets to build and maintain loyal communities of readers and commenters. The Kindle is a nifty little device, but it's just a hint of where the future of book publishing could take us in the not too distant future.

Labels: amazon, books, eInk, fm publishing, kindle, review, Trends, usablity

This year's BookExpo America in Los Angeles featured much of the usual multi-story ballyhoo of years past, with a thinner crowd and thinning expectations for the book industry in general, though with a few bright exceptions. One of these exceptions has been Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, which has become the Pet Rock of the 2008 book industry. Still inscrutable in terms of its limitations (no PDFs, no general Web content) and as awkward as ever, the Kindle is the darling of book-readers on the go who can't afford the space, time or trouble of loading multiple books in their overnight bags and pocketbooks (and yes, one of them might be me when I break my el-cheapo mental barriers).

It's also becoming the darling of traditional media outlets, which have the ability to push print-like materials into a medium that's unbound from print production limits, enabling them to maximize revenues when a title gains its peak value in a very short period of time. AP notes that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book on his experiences in the Bush administration sold out quickly at Amazon in print format but that the book continued to sell briskly in Kindle eBook format, albeit at a lower price. There's some question as to exactly how much Amazon really makes on the book sales themselves (the New York Times claims along with others that Amazon takes a bath on each Kindle book sale), but as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that the Kindle is still in its developmental phase it's likely that book publishers' existing business models are considered a part of the platform's developmental cost at this point.

Silicon Valley Insider's back-of-the envelope model for Kindle sales noted that if the Kindle business scales as quickly as Apple's iPod/iTunes business scaled it's possible that Amazon could be enjoying more than USD 740 million in combined Kindle device and content sales by 2010. That's highly speculative, especially given that there had been more than a decade of well-established consumption of music via online portals before the iPod came along to become a cool fashion tool for content amongst the young. Book publishers face a far tougher proposition of moving beyond a graying population of book enthusiasts still young enough to value technology as a status symbol towards younger generations that have yet to discover books at all in a big way. A whole generation of college students is now coming of age that has not ever turned a paper page on a regular basis. So Kindle's ability to grow rapidly beyond its early adopters into iPod-like growth is still in question.

That may suit book publishers just fine in the short run, given their need to maintain a pricing structure that covers the 99 percent of their sales still done in print. But now that they have locked themselves into a proprietary DRM-secured format for Kindle content they have in essence handed Amazon the keys to the paper mill for electronic content. Certainly Sony's eBook platform provides a "Brand X" that will generate the illusion of consumer choice in eBook reading, but with the extensive infrastructure and branding of Amazon people wanting to purchase content rapidly for their eInk-displayed content will have but one real choice. If in fact eBook sales rise rapidly enough to push Amazon into a position of dictating book industry pricing, then book industry executives may be wondering why they didn't consider the music industry's death at the hands of iPod's proprietary 99-cent downloads as a lesson to have been studied more carefully.

Fortunately the book industry has the opportunity to adapt to these changes in relative slow motion compared to the music industry's fast-forward realization that Apple had stolen their business model. In doing so book publishers may want to consider how music companies are learning to benefit more from broader artist management services as a supplementary line of business. As noted in The New York Times recently Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Productions has been formed as a unit to produce and profit from live performances of music and artist fan items other than CDs. Thinking of the good fortune my friend David Meerman Scott has had on the speaking circuit in the wake of his runaway hit business book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" (available as a Kindle book also, of course), how much more could his publisher have profited from his management as a speaker as well as from his imprinted word?

At the same time book publishers are becoming smarter about benefiting from the value of book content in pre-print communities as well. My own relationship with John Wiley & Sons has enabled content from my own forthcoming book "Content Nation" to be posted online and publisher programs such as O'Reilly's Rough Cuts are well into developing pre-print subscription communities for tech book consumers that act more as knowledge exchanges than peeks at books before publication - artist management for art still in the making, if you will. So although there are certainly exposures that publishers face via Amazon's proprietary eBook platform they are already developing more diversified revenue channels to maximize the value of their content.

Future iterations of the Kindle are no doubt going to change the shape of this debate significantly, but for now it's probably good that the intense interest in Kindles from a relatively narrow band of book readers is probably going to grow more slowly than some would think. It opens the possibility that book publishers will be able to develop an approach to eBooks that will open the marketplace to far greater competition amongst technology platform providers - and more opportunities for more ways to package and sell content on eBook platforms.

Although the Kindle itself is proprietary it is using the Sprint telecommunications company's broadband wireless network in the U.S., a strong network with standardized communications technology that could easily accommodate any number of services providing downloads of eBooks and other media. Enabling any media service to provide subscription or on-demand downloads into any device at a cost lower than typical broadband Internet services via such a network might accelerate a market for competitive platforms before Amazon gets to flood the market with cheaper Kindles at a not-so-distant future point in time. Here's hoping that publishers of books and other media jumping in the Kindle bandwagon think carefully about who should be in control of their distribution mechanism before locking themselves into being curators of content proprietary to emerging mobile platforms.

Labels: amazon, broadband wireless, eBooks, kindle, publishers

At a business meeting recently I encountered an Amazon Kindle device in the hands of a prosperous executive eager to show off his new gizmo. It was...pretty much what I had expected. Its eInk display technology makes for an easy-on-the-eyes reading surface, through not super-bright, and the monochrome display has all the charm of an under-engineered Apple Newton. But the device as a whole impresses one as more easy to handle than photographs would imply, with a nifty little sidebar LED display blipping away as pages load to give it that Star Trek feel for those folks who need to be reminded that this is a neat-o device. The keyboard is about as bad as I had expected, but given the Blackberry era that we're living in most people who are already mobile fanatics will probably find it to be plenty easy and familiar enough for the rare times that it will come into use.

Amazon's recent acquisition of spoken word distributor Audible for a hefty USD 300 million price tag underscores that Amazon is only at the very beginning of its journey into mobile content platforms. As it is there are a fair number of publications available already on Kindles, but in spite of its still waiting-list-only sales status after a rousing round of Christmas holiday sales it's not clear that we're seeing the beginning of a stampede to Kindles any time soon with its hefty price tag and slow production schedule. This makes it harder for Kindle enthusiasts to turn their love for the device into sales any time soon. That's probably just as well, given that more beefy functionality is required in the device to make it more universally appealing. It's a bit reminiscent of when U.S. Robotics first introduced the Palm Pilot, a trendy device that sparked the PDA fad but one that lacked a keyboard, a factor that opened the door for more traditional input interfaces from Microsoft and RIM's Blackberry.

While an intense media blitz and Jeff Bezos' personal commitment to the product launch helped to kick Kindle into a well-hyped introduction, I sense that my take from last Fall is still pretty much on track. Kindle is largely an effort by Amazon to go to the "King Gillette" model of making sure that there is a nifty handle (read: mobile platform) on which to sell razor blades regularly. It works for Steve Jobs over at Apple, the thinking goes not doubt, so why shouldn't Amazon have its own content device-cum-captive content channel? Well, why not indeed - at least for now. Kindle will help Amazon to cater to publishers trying to find new walled gardens for their content in an increasingly open digital world, but at the end of the day the value in content is not just in one-time sales but in being able to build a relationship with a content brand or author over time in whatever context an audiences desires that relationship. Kindle will do very well for publishers still in the "we publish things" business but for those who are beginning to realize that they are in the business of providing valuable experiences to audiences Kindle may turn out to be a platform that's more of an experimental bridge to a more interactive and profitable future.

Labels: amazon, eBooks, eInk, kindle, mobile

The image of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the cover of Newsweek clutching his new Kindle as if it were "the new, new thing" is designed to get us thinking that the new portable device from Amazon is going to revolutionize the way that we use books, etc.

In short, it's not.

The article in Newsweek is filled with gushing praise for Bezos' efforts to "revolutionize" book reading as we know it, but little of what it promises requires a Kindle to make it happen. As the article acknowledges eventually:

In 2007, screens are ubiquitous (and less twitchy), and people have been reading everything on them—documents, newspaper stories, magazine articles, blogs—as well as, yes, novels. Not just on big screens, either. A company called DailyLit this year began sending out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks.

In other words it's fair to say that the cat has been out of the bag for books on mobile platforms for quite some time and that from a book perspective there's not much new to say about Kindle other than it's another new device for eInk technology and a good way for people to view Amazon-scanned books in a proprietary viewer. Other than that, you're looking at an Apple Newton with built-in wireless that costs $100 more than a comparable eBook reader from Sony.

Ah, but that wireless. Probably the most interesting things that the Kindle can handle have less to do with books and a lot more to do with other content and marketing opportunities via its wireless capabilities. The Kindle will be able to download newsstand content such as newspapers and magazines as well as books via a wireless system that can use both wireless hotspot technology and broadband wireless. While at launch time the downloads are going to be coming from the Amazon online store, there's the potential in this platform to be a device that could interact with "bricks" environments as well as "clicks." When the Newsweek article says:

Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process.

it means Amazon's Kindle Store online site. Not exactly Buck Rogers stuff.

But what if instead the Kindle were a device that you could use to point at items in a retail store to learn more about them and then click on the Kindle to enable immediate purchasing of either a physical or virtual version of that item? What if you were reading an interesting eBook at your favorite coffee shop and then picked up a hard copy of it at the counter from their print-on-demand machine while you ordered up your second latte? Or, better yet, if you're in Toys 'R Us you could browse online reviews of toys and games on your Kindle and use in-store electronic purchasing via the Kindle to speed up the checkout process. Given the enormous investment that Amazon has in retailing all kinds of manufactured goods you'd think that they'd focus on how to improve margins across their entire catalog of merchandise via an electronic gadget.

Given the premium price tag for one of these units it's not clear that there's going to be much of any thunder at the cash register for Kindles this holiday season. Consider this a modest step by Amazon to get into the mobile platform business in a way that could position it in a very interesting way over time as an alternative to Microsoft, Apple and Google - a positioning that would make Amazon more attractive as an acquisition target for a publisher-friendly online service. Say, like, Yahoo? With Yahoo's brand-friendly approach to content, it would be a natural fit. So consider Kindle less of a revolution in eBooks and more of an evolution of Amazon towards a marriage that can bring its investors to a new level in the marketplace via acquisition.

Labels: amazon, broadband wireless, eBooks, eInk, kindle, mobile