The week after Borders closed its last stores, Amazon is growing its tentacles by launching a new Kindle and adding video to book titles. The fall of the book store chains – Barnes & Nobbles is also for sale – happened so quickly this year that it shook the publishing industry.
We heard about it for years and argued whether it would really happen or not… Digital books have taken over their printed ancestors. Amazon announced last May that e-book sales surpassed printed sales for the first time. Books have been around for thousands of years and are not going anywhere. Below is a hilarious video from Norway showing the "first help desk".
The issue of keeping written records digitally over a long time is actually very real. Bits of information can be altered or lost over decades. Data must encrypted, servers duplicated and storage updated with new technologies to maintain integrity of the content. The invention of the press in Germany in the 15th century spurred a democratization of knowledge beyond an educated elite with vast social implications.
Today's convergence of media on various mobile platforms is taking over the skepticisms of the mass that was not comfortable with a digital reading experience before. The flexibility offered by the combination text, images, soundtrack, and video is simply too strong to decline. Imagine all the possibilities available now at our fingertips in mobile formats such as the iPad2.
Amazon’s new Fire Kindle is more of a tablet and directly competes with Apple’s IPad2. It comes at half the price of a tablet and only with Wi-Fi connection. It is a good fit for consumers. Amazon is also competing with Netflix with its large catalog of videos and Jeff Bezos hinted this week that he sees Kindle more as a service. It will be interesting to see if they end up bundling Kindle devices with service subscriptions, much like mobile carriers with smart phones.
My favorite Kindle is still the lower-end Kindle for its power efficiency. For books that have a short-term usage, like text books and easy-to-read best sellers, it makes a lot of sense. Not only it saves paper; it also saves money for the consumers. The reading experience has improved a lot as well, and I see them popping up in air planes for leisure when I travel. Why buying printed books that take a lot of space in a carry-on?
I am not talking about our favorite books. Books that we like to touch and read –- and read again at home -- will continue to find a solid audience, a bit like vintage vinyl records. What about used text book stores on campuses. They will die. As College students went back to school, Amazon also launched this summer a text-book rental service on Kindle. It is also available on Kindle applications on tablets and smart phones.
Book-stores may end up looking like those vintage record stores where we like to listen to old classics. Borders did well in its days by offering an experience where you could enjoy a sip of coffee, and a variety of literature and music. But Starbucks extended from a pure coffee experience to a relaxing personal experience by offering music and newspapers as well. Starbucks was also one of the first chains to offer easy payment with smart phones in the US.
The brands that engage the consumers the most beyond their core expertise and manage tightly their cost structure will continue to do well. The others will die. Digital books also offer new possibilities. The same way computer animation provided a new genre a movies, we can imagine how illustrated books could go to another level of entertainment. It is all about capturing our imagination.
We remember the first album of the Beatles or Michael Jackson that we bought. We can still remember how they felt, how they made us look cool in the eyes of others. Today, kids talk about their latest downloads on the iPod that, with iTunes, saved the music industry from peer sharing. Today, the music rock stars of the seventies are being replaced by the high-tech entrepreneurs.
It was clearly captured in the movie “The Social Network”. “What is cooler than a million dollar?” asks Sean Parker dating a Victoria Secret’s top-model to a fresh-out-of-school Mark Zuckerberg. “A billion dollar” he answers himself as a way to “stick it to the man” that would make Jack Black jealous in “School of Rock”.
Hackathons have a flair of jam sessions. Electric guitars are being replaced by tablets, rock stars by high-tech entrepreneurs like the character played by Ashton Kutcher in Two-and-Half Men. We will still use traditional books the same way we continue to use acoustic guitars once in a while. We are "sticking it to the man". But who is the Man? Especially, when online vendors and social networks track our every purchase and every friend...
Barnes & Noble is entering eBook battle with new $249 tablet. The New York based firm is competing Apple and Amazon and tries to avoid the fate of Borders
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/11/barnes-noble-fights-kindle-fire-with-249-nook-tablet.ars
Posted by: Olivier Jerphagnon | November 07, 2011 at 10:44 AM