Another Day Another Kindle

We have been away on business whilst the Kindle 3 hit the market. The device was as expected and the reaction and pitch has been interesting to catch up on after the event:

Digital Demographics
Bowker, at a BISG's ‘Making Information Pay’ conference revealed demographic information that claimed that older readers are the biggest buyers of ebooks. The statement caused many industry thinkers to start to ponder about the attraction of large print, weight, ease of handling and much more perceptions. The reality is that older buyers are those that buy books full stop; they have more time, disposable income and much more. Is it surprising they are the ones buying ebooks – No? Some would say that it’s obvious that the grey market is the one with the largest opportunity and its somewhat condescending to find it a surprise.

Newsprint and magazines are going to go Kindle.
Newspapers may be going downhill but that doesn’t mean that the wave of large screen eInk devices have the answer. We now have PC news sites, smartphone apps and the ereader device. We know that Murdoch wants one, Hearst wants one and we assume the public want one, but the operative word may be one not three or four.
One important digital newspaper issue is how do readers want the news presented? Do they want it in alerts tuned to their personal preferences? Do they want it to look and feel like a paper, after all it has taken many years to perfect the user experience? Do they want it in summary with detail on request? Do they want ads or ads free? Do they want a fully interactive experience and animated experience or merely a captured textural one splattered with the odd greyscale image? Do they want colour?

Once we have addressed the format then there is the price or subscription issue? Then there is the issue about geography and getting the news delivered locally wherever you are in the world. We could go on...

Making the ereader bigger so it looks like a newspaper may not be the answer.

Textbooks are going to be Kindlebooks
Students are going to embrace the new Kindle. The logic appears to be that textbooks are too expensive so ebooks will take the market. So we expect the students to carry around a laptop or netbook, a Kindle and a smartphone? As we walk around the streets of Amsterdam this weekend we wonder who has smoked the most weed? Students require more than ebooks and they already have laptops and smartphones so why would they spend on a device that will give them nothing they don’t have today? Cheaper books have to be offset against the device cost. Students have to live and study with an open, connected campus world and will that fit with fortress Amazon? Princeton and other campus may adopt the device to drive their paperless dream but why not simply adopt a netbook and offer the student’s real choice. Some may say that its easy to create a news splash but living up to the logic can be hard.

Finally, the Kindle DX is priced at whopping $489, a higher price point than a Netbook.

Standards
The Kindle does not handle epub and the standard’s world will continue to argue that this the biggest weakness. We agree that an open standard is the best way but we also recognise the power and openness of Adobe’s other protected format Adobe eBook based on PDF. It may not offer everything that epub offers, but is supported by the same DRM services, ereader devices and is cheaper to produce. Amazon’s propriety format is either their Achilles heel or their trump card and until we see what others do over the summer, we believe that it remains difficult call for the independent.

Finally, we are disappointed that Amazon chooses to change the name as we were looking forward to reaching the K9 version in the future, but more on the DX brand later….

Newsprint has Many Challenges and Maybe a Kindle 3

Price Increases

As it tries to grapple with industry-wide a significant drop in advertising revenues and circulation, The New York Times is expected to announce a newsstand price increase in the coming days. The market predicts that the New York Times could increase its price 25% from $1.50 to $2.00 for Monday to Saturday editions and 20% from $5 to $6 on Sundays. A bold move and a bold increase, especially considering it raised its cover price of its Monday to Saturday editions by 20% or 25 cents to $1.50 only last year.

The NYT is not alone in price increases with the Wall Street Journal raising the cover price by 50 cents in each of the last two years and the Financial Times implemented 50 cent increases in US cover prices in 2005, 2007 and 2008. The Boston Globe raised its weekday cover price to 75 cents from 50 cents and is expected to rise to $1 within the city and $1.50 outside Greater Boston. The Sunday Globe will rise to $3.50 in the city and $4 elsewhere.

iPhone Free

Despite charging for its website and print version, The Wall Street Journal has a new iPhone application that is free. The technology platform to enable the app to be charged isn’t live yet and may not be up until the second half of the year! It will be interesting to watch them wean free users onto subscriptions but until then the content remains free on both their Blackberry and iPhone apps and charged elsewhere.

More Closures and Lay Offs

The New York Times is planning to notify federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe and the newspaper could cease to exist within weeks. The paper's circulation has dropped 14% in the last six-month period and is expected to lose $85 million this year. If union negotiations fail to deliver additional savings then the axe may fall and its fate follow that of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Kindle 3?

On the Digital front, Amazon has announced that will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning at a Pace University building New York. What is special about the news conference? First its on the site of the old New York Times offices and secondly its is widely predicted the announcement will launch K3, a Kindle with a larger screen.

Why a bigger screen and why the Pace location? Again it’s widely predicted the K3 is their answer to the newsprint and magazine sector – a larger screen Kindle. Amazon needs to head off Plastic Logic and the rest of the larger readers and try to capture those digital subscriptions today and not wait for others to take them. Are the NYT involved or merely a spectator -we will discover on Wednesday.

New eBook Readers for 2009

Another show, another launch, more announcements and even more speculation on the ebook front. Following hot on the heels of the mobile piches in Barcelona comes CeBIT 2009 in Germany this week. What’s new and what are the rumours?

Boox ebook reader
It sounds a funny name and is from Onyx International in China. The reader is not available today but Onyx are looking for OEM customers for their touchscreen for their 6, 8 or 9.7 inch touch screen sizes. Other features of the Boox eBook reader can includes Wi-Fi, plus the usual technology specification; CDMA 1XRTT, GPRS, 3G, 400Mhz CPU, 128MB RAM, 512MB Flash or more, a SD card slot, 2.5mm headphone jack and USB 2.0 with OTG. The device supports PDF, TXT, HTML, MOBIPOCKET, EPUB, CHM, PDB, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, MP3, and WAV.

BeBook
Dutch company Endless Ideas launched their BeBook reader in 2008, and plan to launch its next-gen BeBook reader at the CeBIT show.

There are no pictures but it is claimed that the new BeBook model will include wireless connectivity, new touch screen navigation and RSS and also be capable of rendering to the new ePub DRM standard in the coming months.

Kindle 3
Having just started to ship the new Kindle 2 last month there are already runours of a Kindle 3 with Digitimes mentioning it in a story about PVI who delivers the display for the Kindle. Apparently later this year we should see a touchscreen Kindle that also with a larger display.

So we appear to be in a device war before we have the depth and range of content and while issues such as DRM, pricing have been resolved. An abundance of readers can only be good for maintaining the noise level but if each is competing for the same spend they could keep the price up or trigger a device price war. Today they are like the early days of CDs too closely packed on price and we need someone to grab the initiative and go for volume based on price. If this doesn’t happen then the alternatives based on netbooks and smartphones will look increasingly more attractive. Also the longer they remain greyscale, the more attractive colour alternatives will look