The Bookseller.com

4th July 2008

Damian Horner was a founder of Mustoes advertising agency and is a freelance marketing consultant.

Easy does it

06.12.07

You may have already dismissed the Amazon Kindle as just the latest in a long line of technological breakthroughs that heralded the supposed end of the book. The dire fortunes of early e-readers have given observers great grounds to be complacent but the Kindle is different. Indeed, this may be the one . . .

Let’s leave aside the carping about how reading on a screen will never be as good as reading on a page. The vast majority of people already read far more on their PC screens than they ever do in books. If anything is the “norm” it’s reading electronically.

Let’s also park the debate about how much people love books. There are as many people who don’t read books as do. If anything, the problem is that we don’t love books enough.

Finally, let’s not get too worried about trying to change people’s behaviour. Books are just a delivery system and it is fascinating how changes to the delivery system attract new users. Just look at the younger, chiefly male profile of Audible.com’s consumers versus the typical older, female audiobook listener.

Whether we like it or not the world is changing and so are people’s relationships with the written word. So why might the Kindle succeed where Sony’s Reader is faltering?

It is easy to get distracted by features, but history shows better products don’t always win—just witness the triumph of VHS (the worst format) in the early video technology wars.

For guidance about the prospects of the Kindle, we should examine Apple. Not because of the iPod, which was a great design, but because of the iTunes library and store. Many were amazed that Apple, a company with no music pedigree, could attain a dominant position in a completely new sector. They managed to do it by knitting together the hardware and the content. They made it easy for “normal people” (as opposed to techies and teenagers) to find the music they wanted and get it onto their MP3 players.

It is this same connection between the player and the content that makes the Kindle such an attractive proposition. Basically, consumers don’t have to think about it. As soon as you combine the words “new technology” with “effort” most people are put off. They’d rather wait until something easier comes along because they know it will (an example of inertia as a force for change). Kindle closes the loop and makes things simple. That’s why it’s completely different to anything that has gone before, and that’s why I want one for Christmas.

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