Adding some Kindle to the Fire ~ Guest Post by Andrew Wrathall [11.10.2009]
Amazon has released an international version of the Kindle, much to the delight of Australian eBook enthusiasts. It was released on October 7th and is available for US $279 (AUD $308).
The Kindle has a six-inch screen using e-paper technology, which displays high-resolution text that appears like print on a page (that is, without a backlight shining in your face) and images are displayed in 16 shades of grey (colour doesn’t exist for e-paper yet). Its battery-life is impressive as the battery is only used when refreshing the screen (i.e. flipping a page). It can connect to the internet through Wi-Fi or via the 3G mobile phone network, where eBooks can be downloaded from the Amazon website and onto the Kindle.
This might be the start of the eBook revolution, but there are still plenty of murky issues for booksellers to wade through. Current physical book parallel importation rules mean that booksellers are unable to import books from the US if the book exists locally, and territorial rights mean that publishers are unable to publish in a particular country if they don’t have the rights to do so.
In general, most eBook websites won't sell certain eBooks outside particular countries because they don’t have the rights. For the time being, many eBooks will not be available for Australians accessing the Amazon website through Kindle. Amazon may decide to sell their whole eBook collection internationally (as it currently does with physical books), but doing this might ruffle a lot of feathers in the Australian publishing industry.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another contentious issue. EBooks are currently downloaded in the proprietary AZW format when buying from Amazon; they work on the Kindle but are not viewable on other devices. Publishers demand DRM to discourage widespread piracy, but DRM angers consumers when such protection locks the file to the one device which will eventually become obsolete.
The most popular eBook format is the open standard EPUB format, used by most e-readers and enabled for DRM. The format is not native to Kindle, but EPUB files are viewable on the Kindle by installing a plug-in called Savory.
Any publisher can sell eBooks through Amazon, as long as they are prepared to give Amazon 65 per cent of the listing price as a commission fee. Publishers can sell eBooks between US $1.99 and US $200 onsite. Amazon has reduced the prices of New York Times best sellers and new releases in eBook format to US $9.99, providing an incentive to buy the Kindle and download the electronic version instead of the physical book. Most publishers keep the eBook price at the same price as the printed book because they don’t want to cheapen the perceived value of their product, even if the cost of digital conversion may be less than the cost of printing.
It’s currently possible to download eBooks from other sites and add them to the Kindle, but it’s far easier to buy straight from the Amazon website; if a book downloaded from an external eBook website is encoded with DRM, it won’t work on the Kindle. It’s also possible to read eBooks on iPhones and on the iPod Touch, using the Stanza eBook reader (recently purchased by Amazon), but it’s hard to read on these devices for an extended period because of its bright backlight.
If Kindle becomes the popular must-have device and has its ‘iPod moment’, we might start to see a monopoly emerging with Amazon as the big one-stop-shop for eBook sales, just as iTunes is for music. Amazon might have some competition from Apple in the near future, however; there have been rumours of an Apple tablet device for reading eBooks since the beginning of 2009. If Apple does release an e-reader or suitable tablet device it could make the Kindle redundant. Before that, however, Apple will have to address both DRM and backlighting issues when adding new eBook functionality to iPhones or any other device it releases.
Andrew Wrathall is a writer, editor, designer, perpetual student and digital publishing guru. He currently works at Bookseller and Publisher magazine.
(Image courtesy of original author [Shakataganai]. This file is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.)
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Comments
Keith — 14 October at 02:57PM
the Sony e-reader seems to be gaining market share. It uses the open epub format so you can file share between devices and looks pretty competitively priced with a number of models available in the US including a wi-fi version. Given Amazon's desire to control everything on Kindle through its proprietary software, I'm hoping the epub format and the Sony e-reader win the day.
Sally Collings — 15 December at 03:29PM
Great news that the rest of the world can now get their hands on a Kindle. However, publishers (and authors holding appropriate rights) can only sell titles into the Kindle store if they have a US address, bank account and tax number. This basically excludes most publishers and authors in other countries – one of the reasons that there is very limited Australian content available on Kindle. At Red Hill Publishing, we test all of our new ebooks on a BeBook - an open source reader available in Aust for $389-499.