TheStreet has a juicy rumor that Barnes & Noble, a store where physical “books” in “paper” form are sold to “customers” who stand in line to pay with “cash” or “forms of credit” is working on an eBook reader, possibly in partnership with Verizon.
The rumor has all the makings of a real live product. They may offer book downloads over the air and come in a sexier format than the already smokin’ hot Kindle 2. All I can say to B&N is “Good luck, Sally, because you’re going to need it.”
You will agree that Amazon doesn’t have a first-mover advantage, a concept I believe is bogus. There have been ebook readers since the dawn of time. Instead, it has a first-winner advantage. Just as Twitter>Plurk>Yammer and iPod>Creative>Sony, Kindle will always do better than a BNindle and will, in all ways, do better then the unconnected ereaders that are bound to populate the stores in benighted areas. Amazon wrapped easy ordering in with a huge selection to create a package that the average consumer – and the average computer nerd – could easily understand. Sure, it has some fussiness about it – emailing PDFs to yourself to get them sent to your Kindle a huge pet peeve – but no matter what Barnes & Noble does, the Kindle still stands out as the ur-ereader.
Sony has tried to enter this space with multiple partners for years and while I agree that their products are fine if you’re a big old pirate, I doubt many of us have PDF version of the latest bestseller lying around. Just as iTunes changed the way the average consumer gets music onto their music player, the Kindle changes the way people interact with ereaders. Whereas the old music/book paradigm was, essentially:
1. Find a service that isn’t full of spyware
2. Search for songs/books of dubious quality
3. Worry the police will arrest your unborn babies
4. Download music/book for free
5. Install drivers
6. Reinstall Windows
7. Plug in MP3 player/reader
8. Drag music to player/reader
9. Eject player
10. Discover the music is ten minutes of a twenty second loop of Gwen Stefani singing about Harajuku Girls/Discover that the book is written in German
11. Repeat
The iTunes/Kindle paradigm is:
1. Buy device
2. Buy music, maybe rip a CD, download a book, whatever! Drink a nice glass of brandy, maybe?
3. Play music/Read book
4. Repeat
Which process do you think is more lucrative? This is not the say the BNindle won’t have an incredible ordering system with great hardware and amazing vibrate feature, but there can only be so many sheriffs in town, as Microsoft learned with the Zune, and the second paradigm isn’t easily copied once you’ve bought into a system – and most of the consumers of note, the guys who bought the Kindle 2 just so they could use their perfectly-working Kindle 1 to hold open the back door when they brought in the groceries, are already Kindle-men.
Amazon is a winner here. The BNindle will probably be an also-ran.
How can you be so sure they won’t come up with a ‘killer product’?
Because they are always right. Remember twitter + google?
I don’t know about google.
About twitter, time will tell; let’s wait for the TV+media dust to settle and then we’ll see who uses twitter (my bet is only journalists use it to share stories among themselves)
re: twitter… thought this was funny:
http://theharperstudio.com/2009/04/twouble-with-twitter/
HOLY CRAP!!!! Who the F are you? They have not released a product nor have they shown/leaked a demo and you proclaim it a failure???? Good thing that you are are a rag writer and not in the real world. You justify the concept for stopping all R&D because all existing products are superior.
Hope the cash from Amazon comes in handy.
Mike, your blog is slipping.
Competition is always good.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44350
The added connectivity of the Kindle can lead to Amazon just shutting you down if they think you’ve done too many returns. This guy’s account was reinstated after a polite letter, but I’d rather not be at Amazon’s mercy to be able to manage my purchased content.
Damn, we just discussed this at our Harvard Program – BN was one of the case studies
Damn, we just discussed this at our Harvard Program – BN was one of the case studies
Don’t discount the fact that B&N just bought Fictionwise (they also supply content to the venerable eReader.com).
Sure Amazon has a large library of books right now, but B&N essentially bought their way into competition with a pre-populated library and relationships with publishers.
Not saying they’ll overtake Amazon, but it seems foolhardy to dismiss the concept out of hand.
Give me a new e-Ink reader with WiFi instead of Whispernet and a lower initial cost (since you wouldn’t be subsidizing the 3G cell connection) and I think a lot of people would be interested.
Also, Fictionwise supports the open epub format. Have to convert that for the Kindle.
Jason,
While you are right that the kindle is a huge success, you are wrong that another device can not become another success. The reason is that you are completely ignoring the issue of cost. The Kindle is still a $359 product and out of reach of many people who will not buy it due to the price alone.
Now the Kindle’s price is most likely that high due to the Whisper network that it comes with but in all reality do most consumers need it? Not really. People have been doing fine with regular iPods having to be connected to a computer to be synced and I would say that the say would apply to a book reader. I would actually say that on a book reader it is less important since it still takes a while for a book to be read.
I have always said that Amazon should have gone the route of Audible.com who gained a lot of customers with their monthly subscription that subsidized the device itself.
If B&N (or anyone else for that matter) came out with a device that was in the $100 price tag, I think that they would be able to be as successful as Amazon as well. I believe that it would actually be better for the consumer because another successful device would push publishers further into agreeing on a standard format and that would create competing e-book stores which would drive down the prices of the books and allow authors to self publish to all devices. The Kindle is very very very bad at bringing in PDFs (I have one and tried bringing it many of the eBooks that I purchased in PDF format and the results are not usable).
Another thing to consider is that all B&Ns have wifi in their stores. Why not have a device with WiFi connectivity and not Cellular connectivity? That would definitely drive down the cost. Connectivity would be simple because the firmware of the device would have the network’s setting and connectivity already setup with it just like T-Mobile devices have the T-Mobile Hot Spot info built in.
Jim
Fully agree with Jim. I’m not for the US, so the only option was sony eReader. It’s a great device and lack of connectivity was never a problem [if anything, the problem is finding the time to read the books]; The reader is good for books; reading blogs + newspapers on it is slow and painful
I use a Kindle2. I like it a lot, but there is more room for improvements and innovation.
My primary gripe is it uses to the vendor lock-in strategy when buying books in the Kindle format. I won’t be able to use them on any other device. Grrr… DRM? Fine, who cares. But locking me into this hardware platform rubs me the wrong way.
There is room. The game is not over. B&N could still come up with a winner. The eReader industry is just starting to taking off.
The Fictionwise/Ereader store had around 50,000 titles to Amazon’s 265k or whatever, and Amazon’s growing faster.
Also, Ereader doesn’t support Epub, nor do most publishers, (there are perhaps 5k epub titles from Penguin in the wild.)
It’s an interesting possibility, if only because B&N might keep Amazon honest… but last time Barnes & Noble went up against Amazon, they lost about $300 million, as I recall.
Lost 300 when?
I don’t know a single friend or colleage that owns a Kindle – and I work at a very large tech company. I would say that Amazon actually has little advantage over this and based on what I’ve seen of the Kindle, am actually not that impressed. If BN can drop a color e-reader + wifi/3G/In-Store at a cheaper price point I can’t see why this wouldn’t be a success.
My reason I won’t buy a Kindle is simple. Price. If someone can make a similar product in terms of specs and drop the price then I would happily buy 1 or 5.
The only people that I have seen using the kindle and retired people who fly a lot.
I wanted to comment on how wrong the blogger is, but the existing comments are satisfying.
The Kindle is so overpriced there is certainly a big opportunity for competition.
Saying a RUMOR of an effort is going to fail is a waste of breath. Duh.
Should we stop time now, people? Everything’s perfect.
This would have been a better article if they’d spent some time talking about the validity of the rumor rather than giving a weak lesson on new product strategy.
But maybe I don’t understand the different purposes of CrunchGear vs. TechCrunch? CrunchGear’s articles always seem more opinion-based rather than journalistic.
Barnes and Noble? Aren’t they struggling badly financially? Where did they come from?
I am not sure how being an also ran is a bad thing. You list also rans as winners in markets. ipod beating out Creative and Rio. Amazon beating the Sony reader.
It just takes a good design to win. I hate itunes, is a horrible piece of software because of how slow it is and the limitation of how to load an ipod.
B&N needs to prove they can do better, better design, size, software, selection and price. Plus having outlets for people to use them could be quite a boon. Having someone in person telling me they like something and express enthusiasm about a product is much different than reading one.
I find this “review” very one-sided, and probably written by someone who actually is NOT using e-books for research, or other work-related projects.
The point about how difficult it is to obtain ebooks on-line for non-Kindle readers was true in the past, but is becoming less true day-by-day.
Google has about 2M books on-line, and the internet Archive has about 1.3M available. Both .pdf and text formats can be downloaded from each site.
Within the past two weeks, Sony and Google have announced the availability of over 500,000 Sony-formatted books (free and legal) available via the Sony e-Book Store, available from the Google inventory. The idea that you have to “pirate” books for non-Kindle readers is bogus!
All-in-all, maybe 2.5M books available in one format or another, on-line, at prices ranging from free to 20+ dollars.
The fact that Barnes and Noble is getting into the business is great–a further endorsement of arrival of the e-Ink and e-books in general. The author of this article misses this point, big time!
Here is a video of my thoughts on my Sony reader:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08e-2kvSzA8&feature=channel_page
There are a number of other videos about e-books and the paradigm shift from paper to e-books on this Youtube channel, should you be interested in the opinion of someone who is actively researching, using Google and the Sony e-book Reader as primary tools.
If the price comes in at half what the Kindle costs (rely on volume sales), they will kill the Kindle.
The Barnes & Noble reader will deal a hard blow to the people that walk up to their nearest B&N and pretend it’s a public library that happens to stock brand-new books.
I think this is an important move for Barnes and Noble. Competition with Amazon.com was one thing, but now there is technology that threatens to make their stores obsolete.
Certainly the market for physical books won’t disappear, but I can guarantee you that it will shrink to the point where it won’t support brick and mortar stores of the size and prevelancy that currently exists.
They are smart and prescient for adapting to market trends as the curve is still gently sloping. If they wait until the curve starts nosediving, they’re going to go bankrupt.
There are other companies that specialize in other products that need to pay attention to future trends and start the process now to adapt their business models.
Good job, Barnes and Noble.
You have it completely backwards. BN has a huge library of books. It may even have some of them in an electronic form, which would clearly be a plus. So it has an easy way to beat out the ridiculously over priced Kindle: offer an adequate reader at a good price. Half or less of what the Kindle costs and they win. Period. Sell it for $20 and they’ll conquer the world.
I don’t actually believe they’ll take that easy route. That would be too smart and too likely to work. But the path exists. Someone just has to take it.
Wayyyyyy too early to call the kindle the winner long term. We’re still in the first inning of this ball game. Don’t count out BN or any others yet.
This device is perfect for the era we are heading into. We are only getting knowledge from / spending all of our time with electronic devices, why not make a cool one that gets people reading. Great product.
I’m late to this party, but this guy is a trend follower and technologically challenged. I personally wouldn’t own an iPod. A standard MP3 player is even more simple the proprietary Apple Apps. You don’t download bogus music any more from questionable sites. That is so 2001. In fact, your beloved Amazon will allow you to download exactly the music you want from their site, and you don’t need any special software to do it. Which makes it superior to the Apple product. Here’s how the process is supposed to go.
1. Download your music from Amazon.
2. Connect your MP3 player (any brand) via standard USB cable.
3. Drag and drop.
Done.
I’ll tell you another secret. You can get your music from http://www.walmart.com too. How ’bout that? It’s legitimate also.
Don’t bother commenting on future technologies. You have no credibility in this area.
I’m a very long time Kindle owner. B & N may come out with a pretty good product but they haven’t shown much of an ability to be light on their feet yet.
It’s interesting that Amazon has reversed the King Gillette idea…the cheap razor and expensive blades. Amazon has an expensive reader and cheap books.