Novel Technology
This month, Amazon launched its second-generation e-book reader, the Kindle 2, in what has been lauded as the device's "iPod moment". Yet hidden in the detail was what some might call an admission of defeat. A press release quietly stated that the company was working to let Kindles "sync with a range of mobile devices in the future". Later that day the company's vice-president for digital business, Ian Freed, confirmed on the tech blog Gizmodo that Amazon plans to let mobile-phone users download Kindle books.
Why is this important? Because it is an acknowledgement by Amazon that smart phones, not digital readers like the Kindle, may be the next big thing for e-books. The decision to make the books available to non-Kindle users comes down to one little-reported fact: the iPhone is now the world's most popular e-book reader.
Using applications that you can download for free, iPhone users have been able to read books on their phones for the past eight months. The most popular of these applications - Stanza - has been installed by 1.1 million iPhone users, who, says the Stanza co-founder Neelan Choksi, are downloading between 40,000 and 60,000 books a day. Readers can turn pages by poking their touch screens, and the experience is much better than you might imagine: screen colours can be customised to ease eye strain and, with fewer words on each page, you're less likely to lose your bearings when reading on the go.
The potential for this distribution channel is huge - while the Kindle has exceeded expectations (analysts estimate 500,000 were shipped in 2008), more than 13 million iPhones have been sold so far. Stanza will soon be available on other smart phones, and Google recently announced that it had made 1.5 million public domain books available for phones such as the T-Mobile G1.
Opening Kindle books up to mobile-phone users may be a clever decision by Amazon in the face of an undeniable trend, but it cannot protect them from losing ground in the e-book market. Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, recently called the Kindle a "gateway drug" to buying e-books: the device makes it easier to download books from Amazon than anywhere else, so Kindle users come to depend on the website for their literary fix. But this monopoly tactic doesn't work in a smart-phone market, where devices don't favour one retailer over another and all you need to distribute literature is a server (Stanza, run by four men in Portland, Oregon, already gives users access to 100,000 titles). And if the iPod moment for e-books is the iPhone, how long before Apple wades in?
