Canadian Marketing Blog

The Kindle. Yawn?

I’m still catching up on my year-end reading. You know, all those magazines that come out with their Year In Review issues. They’re stacked on my nightstand like so many left over holiday cards, begging to be read or recycled.

The best of the bunch is the Newsweek with Obama on the cover. It had a brief mention of something that caught my eye -- Jeff Bezos’ brainchild, The Kindle. It’s described on Wikipedia as “… an e-book reader, an embedded system for reading electronic books (e-books), launched in the United States by prominent online bookseller Amazon.com in November 2007.”

Most reviews are glowing. You can carry a whole library around in your briefcase. Amazing. Apparently, it’s even been endorsed by the big “O” (Oprah, not Obama), making it to her Favourtie Things List of ’08.

You can’t get it in Canada yet. But when I asked several of my U.S. friends how the Kindle has captured the imagination of our neighbours to the south, the response was something close to a tree falling in a forest.

So here are the tough questions: With a nod to Malcolm Gladwell, why hasn’t it tipped? Why isn’t it, according to my U.S. friends, dotting subway cars and park benches and restaurants like ubiquitous iPhones, iPods, and dare I say it, real books? Where are the cool commercials with U2 or Feist singing its praises? Why aren’t there spoofs about it on YouTube? Why aren’t the “Millennials” snapping them up? And will Canadians be a better market for the Kindle when it does arrive on our shores?

Perhaps the secret is revealed in Newsweek’s backhanded compliment… “Amazon’s electronic reader is awesome, but the early adopters skew old, while kids opt for point-and-click.”

That excerpt is interesting for two reasons. Early adopters? The Kindle has been available since 2007. Would the iPhone be considered a success if it took this long to capture the imagination of its intended audience? I'm not talking about just dollars and cents here. There was the day before the iPhone launched in Canada. And there was the day after, when it seemed everyone on the TTC had one or was looking over the shoulder of the person next to them who had one. Can an e-book reader capture the imagination in the same way as an “e-music player”? There's a very specific difference today between capturing the collective imagination and selling units. Arguably, the former is much harder to do and predict than the latter.

And ‘skews old’? I guess Oprah viewers don’t influence the zeitgeist anymore the way some think they do.

The day will come when Canadians will be able to get their hands on a Kindle. The question is, will the “right” target audience (Millennials?) want one?

So from a business perspective, can Amazon continue making and selling them if they remain the technological equivalent of a television series like “NCIS”? It’s there, and by some measure successful, but does anyone care?

Forget the Kindle. I have a Sony ebook reader and i can't put it down. I tell everyone how much I luuuuvvv it but then again I was already considered a bookworm.

The Kindle doesn't need a computer to get content. It is currently sold out, so somebody is buying them. :P

I bought one for my wife after the Oprah deal and they sold out the following week. If you don't read books that often, it is hard to understand the attraction.

kindle books can be MORE expensive than their paper back alternative. There is just something wrong about that!. Its great hardware, but the content cost just seem whacky? either its free to print a book, or Amazon has found a way to make even more $$

Seems to me that if I wanted to read a book (I'm more of a current events kind of guy), I'd want to read it on my iPhone.

Kindle is an e-book reader, and one that is better than others only to the degree that it can directly download books from Amazon without being connected to a computer.

E-Books and their readers are gradually becoming more common. They have not tipped for the same reason many other technologies do not tip: there is no common standard for content. I have a Cybex e-book, and the content available to me is different from the content available to ebony (Sony) and people who have Kindle, as well as several others. Each platform has many titles available and there is some overlap. However, as Sony discovered (Beta), a technology requires a single agreed upon platform, and this will be determined in the end not based on any single content provider, but on the implicit or explicit cooperation of multiple content providers. In this case, I think this more or less eliminates both Sony and Kindle which have their own proprietary book-formats restricted to the content they produce or distribute.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. As anybody who uses an e-book will confirm, it is such a logical and powerful tool that it is inevitable that it will tip eventually. We just don't know when or where.

There's this to contend with too.. people just don't like the screen as much as the iphone's. If you had to buy one device which would it be?

http://www.commoncraft.com/common-craft-kindle-books-better-iphone