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Is Kindle the answer or does it just raise questions? E-mail
by Stan Beer   
Monday, 19 November 2007
As the success of J K Rowling will attest, reading is still one of the most popular inter-generational pastimes. Now Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is attempting to do for books with a product/service called Kindle what Steve Jobs has done for music. Is the analogy between Kindle and iPod/Itunes valid or are there enough significant differences to cast doubt on Bezos' dream?

Many of us these days, myself included, do much if not most of our reading online. However, few of us go online to read a novel or non-fiction classic. For those, we're still happy to spend a restful hour or two browsing the shelves of a local bookstore or a Borders. Or if we know the title we want, we may go online and order it from Amazon.

The way people buy books today used to be the way people bought music. That of course is no longer the case. CD sales are plummeting in the wake of music downloads, led by Apple's iTunes online store and the iPod portable player, followed by a plethora of competitors.

Could Bezos and Amazon succeed in disrupting the way works of prose are distributed in the same way that the music downloads industry has disrupted the way music is distributed? Perhaps but there are still too many unanswered questions to give an affirmative answer.

Books are a centuries old tradition far more entrenched than music recordings. There are shelves devoted to them in family homes. They get passed down from generation to generation. First editions and signed copies from famous authors have intrinsic and often significant monetary value. Books generally don't get copied and pirated.

So what makes Jeff Bezos think that his new product Kindle can be a game changer in the reading industry?

 
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