Amazon Kindle is – in its physical incarnation – an e-reading device with an electronic ink display (readable in direct sunlight) which only uses power to alter the content on the display, so you rarely have to think about charging it. Amazon just released a new, lighter, simpler, cheaper version of the Kindle and there is increasing evidence that people are buying it in ever greater numbers, particularly in America.
Sony, along with other manufacturers, were making this type of device long before Amazon, so as a physical concept the Kindle is a fairly unremarkable one; but as the impetus behind a totemic shift in behaviour, evolving a habit conceptually unchanged since the work of Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th Century – how we read – it has the potential to be quite remarkable. Amazon have not as yet ‘pushed’ the Kindle to the same extent this side of the pond, but in the US the Kindle’s success has been truly significant already.
This success has been a function of three main differentiators. The first is that people have become more comfortable buying stuff online and through mobile devices. Amazon just so happens to be the biggest online retailer on the planet – so why not buy e-books from them too? And while you’re on Amazon.co.uk, buying whatever it is you happen to be buying that day, why not pick up a Kindle e-reader, perpetually advertised there on the homepage?
The second differentiator is the Kindle platform. Amazon has turned the Kindle into the platform equivalent of the cuckoo: instead of the platform diversifying, what is offered on the Kindle device (it still just offers books) is offered on everyone else’s device: through the web, on your PC, on iOS devices, Android, Windows Phone or on your Mac. Kindle is everywhere.
And the final differentiator is the price. Amazon have been aggressive in reducing the price of the Kindle e-reader hardware over the few short years of its availability, from an original price of $399 (£250) to its current £89 price point. This is important because until the price of the Kindle began to fall one could legitimately ask the question: why not just pay a bit more and get an iPad? With Amazon following the games console strategy of not trying to make significant profit on the hardware, this point is now mute; at £89 the Kindle will be the kind of thing that many buy as a stocking-filler this Christmas, introducing more and more people to the platform.
So is this the year that everyone gets a Kindle for Christmas? At £89 Amazon are certainly going to sell a lot more of them. But the challenge Amazon faces is the big conceptual one: Can they change people’s reading and buying habits, and furthermore begin to encourage people who didn’t previously buy many physical books to buy virtual ones for Kindle? This is crucial because it is the virtual books that Amazon actually makes money from selling.
Getting the Kindle into a lot of people’s hands will undoubtedly help popularise it – the greater the number of people that have one, the more the convention of using them on the train, or in the car, or on the sofa will grow and the more people will see them as their preferred mode of experiencing information in text form.
Something that might help to get people actively using their Kindles’ would be an expansion of Amazon’s Prime service, which in the UK doesn’t have many of the most compelling features of the US version; in the US you get access to the Kindle ‘lending library’ where you can borrow books, along with Amazon’s movie streaming service, all for $79 per year.
Amazon UK is definitely excited about their new cheaper Kindle device; they think that “at just £89 it opens (them) up to a whole new audience.” But they had no comment to share with us on when the more advanced Kindle devices: the Kindle Touch, along with the colour LCD Android based Kindle Fire, would be made available to UK customers. Until they are the Kindle may not fulfil its full potential on this side of the Atlantic, but on the other hand you may just end up getting one for Christmas this year in any case.
