I have seen a fair amount of discussion online about Amazon’s Kindle device. Most of the time, the Kindle is dismissed, for any number of reasons. People cite the high price for the unit, the preference for a nice paper book in your hand, short battery life, and so on.
These criticisms remind one of people calling out "get a horse" to early owners of cars. Kindle will win, and it’s going to win big time. And I will tell you why.
There are many types of books out there. Some are worth a lot of money, some are worth nothing. Here is what is going to happen someday soon: somebody is going to write a book. But this will not be a normal book. This will be a book that you absolutely have to read. It might be a book on how to get 200 miles a gallon in your car, it might be a book explaining how to install a cold fusion reactor in your basement for $9.99, or perhaps it might not be scientific at all… it might be a text and video account of Paris Hilton having a wild sex romp with a recent governor of Alaska. I can’t necessarily predict what this information will be, but it will be so valuable and so pertinent in either social or economic terms, that price will be no object. If you wish to remain at all “in the swim” economically, you will have to have this information, even if it requires buying a $200 device to read it.
At this point, entered Jeff Bezos. He is going to recognize the value of this information. While every other publisher and or a news organization will offer the author/owner of this information $10 million for the rights to publish it, Jeff Bezos will offer $30 million. He will win the bidding war for this information, because it is worth more to him, and it is worth more because he will publish it… exclusively on Kindle.
All of a sudden, people who have had no use for a Kindle will find themselves buying a Kindle. Instead of being an extremely rare gadget, it will be owned by millions of people, and will start to become a viable method of distribution. (An historical precedent is people buying TV sets in the 50's just to watch Milton Berle.)
Now at this point, let’s get a little closer to home. Let’s say I am about to publish the fourth edition of one of my not-quite-so-important books. My current mathematics tell me that if I sell a book for $20, on average, counting in the resale of used copies of the book on Amazon (curses), something like five people will read that one copy of that book. So I am making (more or less) four dollars per reader of my intellectual property.
At this point, Jeff Bezos comes to me and says, “Justin old pal, why don’t you publish your book exclusively on Kindle? Everybody has one, and you’ll get six dollars, not four, for each person who reads it… you’ll increase your income by 50%.”
What I forgot to mention is, future Kindles will no doubt have a special one-Kindle-one-reader feature, where either your thumb print or your retina is scanned by the device before it will turn on and play anything. Voila, no more sharing of books.
Simple force of economics will result in fewer and fewer books being printed on paper, as the current policies and copyright laws essentially allow piracy of intellectual property if it exists on paper and ink. Authors will be forced to publish exclusively on kindle, as that will be the only place where they can get paid for the use of their work.
Oddly enough, while I always thought that information being in a digital format would make it easier to pirate that information, in fact the opposite is true; if it’s in the digital format, you can create delivery devices that prevent piracy much more effectively.
(Oh and by the way, one of the biggest costs associated with a book is the printing cost. With Kindle, that all goes away, requiring less risk and up front capital. When enough people have Kindles, certain experimental books will come out first on kindle, then, like first run movies, a few months later might be available in an advertising-laden paper edition.)
I have made a lot of arguments about how authors should get a piece of the action when their book is resold online. This has fallen on deaf ears; people like cheap books and they assume that the recently created "easy access to cheap used books" phenomenon of the internet will last forever. It won’t. The lack of real protection of copyright for paper books means that eventually there will not be any paper books. Think about all the paper format credit card statements and bank statements that no longer come to you.
Pardon my conspiracy theory brain here, but can it be that the reason used paper books are so cheap and so readily available on Amazon is so that it will drive authors of new valuable information to publish exclusively through Amazon on Kindle? I’m not ready to believe that they are that smart, but I’m not ready to deny it either.
Sigh… I love seeing my books in print on paper. But I really cringe every time someone comes up to me and says “Justin, I loved your book so much I loaned it to 25 different people and they all loved it too.” On the medium of paper, I can do nothing about this. On Kindle, I would have gotten paid for each use of my intellectual property. Much as I prefer being independent, Mr. Bezos will be offering copyright protection and profit that the paper book world does not. So I, and others like me, will have to use his offer of protection.
There will, of course, be paper printed books for the foreseeable future. But they will be of the public domain/pushing a political agenda/promoting somebody or something variety. Fine. But the most valuable information, the information you’re willing to pay for, will only be available to those of us who possess the new electronic literacy. It will not be enough to just know how to read. In order to read the most important and valuable books, you will have to own a Kindle– not because it is a superior system per se, but because it offers better enforcement of copyright law.
© Justin Locke
