That projection comes from a survey of Web users that Internet analyst Imran Khan commissioned last month. Khan’s survey found that 37 percent of respondents were familiar with the Kindle. And of that group, five percent said they already owned one of the devices, and another 15 percent said they expect to buy one within the next year. Extrapolating those results for the U.S. population, Khan figures that Kindle ownership will hit 10 million in the next 12 months. (Click chart to enlarge)

OK. But what if Amazon (AMZN) dropped its proprietary ebook format, a supposed weakness that competitors Sony (SNE) and Plastic Logic are trying to take advantage of by agreeing to use an open, common standard? Won’t matter that much, say Khan’s respondents: Only 15 percent of people who say they don’t plan to buy a Kindle cite format issues as a concern. I’m surprised the number is that high.

On a related note: Whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to work with the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO) to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its jumbo-sized Kindle DX reader?

When Amazon unveiled the DX in May, it briefly mentioned plans to sell the $489 machine at a discount to people who bought subscriptions to the Times, Post or Boston Globe, but didn’t say much more than that. Details were supposed to be released “this summer.”

Now we’re midway through August and we haven’t heard a peep about the program. What gives? I asked Amazon, the Times and the Post, and none of them had anything to say–save for a comment from a Post rep who said that the subscription-plus-discount offer would be “a small experiment.”

That said, even at this reduced price, the Amazon Kindle still costs $299 more than Kindle for Apple’s iPhone, which I’ve found to be a compelling way to read books. After six or so novels, I have no complaints about eye strain, screen size or glare. And honestly, I think I’m reading more now than I ever did before simply because I always have the book I’m currently reading in my pocket.

Anyway…

Today’s price cut makes you wonder if this presages a similar reduction for the Kindle DX, which at $489 could really use one. A bit too early, I suppose, since Amazon (AMZN) hasn’t yet announced pricing for subscriptions to the Washington Post (WPO) and New York Times (NYT). We’ll see, I guess.

It’s progress, at least: Amazon (AMZN) had much longer outages, multiple times, when it rolled out the first Kindle in 2007.

Amazon doesn’t say a peep about things like actual sales numbers, so no idea how many of these things it sold in the first few days. I would guess, though, that the company didn’t expect gangbusters sales of the device, for a couple of reasons:

• Newspaper and magazine readers are one of the major target markets for the gadgets. And publishers, including the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO) are supposed to offer discounts on the machine for (some) digital subscribers. But unless I missed it, no one has actually rolled out any discount programs yet.
• The really big market for the DX will be college students, but it’s going to be quite some time until you see many of these on campus. There’s not much point to buying a DX for school until you can get your textbooks on it, and that won’t happen until schools (and, crucially, faculty) buy in. But Amazon is conducting a test with just six colleges, and a few hundred students, this fall.

One bit of good news for folks who absolutely have to have a DX in the near future: There should be a few more in stock in the next couple weeks, when folks like me who got a review copy for 10 days need to return them.

Amazon’s Kindle DX finally has a release date. It will arrive at market nine days from today. In a brief announcement issued this morning, Amazon (AMZN) said its new e-book reader, which boasts both a larger screen and price tag than its predecessor, will ship on June 10 with orders prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis.

According to Amazon, the DX will save the newspaper industry–or at least momentarily reverse its declining fortunes–and revolutionize the college textbook market as well. But with a price tag of $489–$130 more than the Kindle 2–that may be bit of a stretch.

We’ll see on June 10.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090522/the-amazon-kindle-youll-never-see/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090511/kindle-hikes-book-prices-and-adds-to-my-ambivalence/ http://allthingsd.com/20090511/kindle-hikes-book-prices-and-adds-to-my-ambivalence/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 15:49:46 +0000 Dan Gillmor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11644 Just when I was coming to terms with my ambivalence toward my Kindle e-book reader, Amazon and the publishers have gotten greedy.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the device since I bought my first one about 9 months ago. As a frequent traveler and voracious reader, I’ve found the Kindle to be nearly ideal. I never have fewer than a dozen books in its memory, and they’re always things I want to read.

As someone who believes we should often interact with media instead of passively consuming it, however, I don’t think much of the Kindle for any purpose other than reading a narrative. And given what a disaster “digital rights management” (DRM) is becoming for scholarship, culture and ultimately freedom, the device’s restrictions on how I can use what I’ve purchased are deeply troubling.

Still, I’ve been using it with some degree of satisfaction (as have enough other people to have helped boost Amazon’s stock price, so as the holder of several hundred shares I’m slightly better off in that way, too). The second-generation model improved nicely on the first–among other things, fixing some user-interface quirks, letting me charge it via a USB cable, and boosting the battery life.

The books I load onto the device fall generally under the casual entertainment category. I buy a Kindle book the way I buy a movie ticket (or did before going to theaters became such a crappy experience).

These are books, like most movies, that I’ll read or watch once and forget about. A physical book is more like a DVD–something I want to own and enjoy again and again.

So the kinds of books I tend to buy for the Kindle are the sort I’d often pick up at an airport newsstand, namely mysteries, thrillers and semi-trashy novels that I’d sometimes leave in hotels or airplane seat-back pockets once I’d finished them. (I also subscribe to several magazines, and consider it a favor not to see the advertising.)

Once I got accustomed to reading e-books, I started doing something that had been out of character in the analog era: buying new books that, in print, were available in hardcover only. Why? The price, typically $10 (okay, one penny less), was right. In fact, my new-book purchases soared.

But not for long. In recent weeks, Amazon (AMZN) or the publishers (or both) have done their best to deter me from buying the latest releases. Prices have gone up, way up.

Now, I often find books for which I’d have gladly paid $10 listed at $14 or $15. I save these to a list I keep on the Amazon website, called “Too expensive for Kindle,” and periodically check to see if the price has dropped. So far, not yet on any of these.

Hiking prices this way creates a bad deal for the customer. Amazon’s price for a new hardcover is typically just a couple of dollars higher. This means I could buy the hardcover, read it and donate it to my local library, and–after the tax deduction–come out ahead. I’d do even better taking the book to my local used-book store and getting cash.

But I almost never buy new hardcovers of books I don’t expect to reread or use as a reference, because a) I’m kind of cheap; and b) I can stand waiting for the paperback. So if prices stay high, I stay away.

Now, sellers have every right to charge more for popular books, especially when they’re new. This is basic supply and demand. But when the price only makes sense for people who consider the ultra-portability of an e-book paramount, that’s a turnoff for other potential buyers.

As a customer I also understand supply and demand. My demand is extremely elastic, and in this case it’s snapped.

Last week’s introduction of the Kindle DX was framed in many ways by different constituencies, but I was taken aback by the praise heaped on the device by several newspaper people, including the CEO of the New York Times Co. (NYT) (in which I also own a small amount of stock). Newspapers aren’t going to fix their considerable woes with Kindles, and anyone who thinks so lives in a fantasy world.

The DX, with its bigger screen, strikes me as potentially useful in several ways, possibly including the textbook function that Amazon hopes to jumpstart with the help of several universities (including the one that employs me). But if textbook publishers don’t radically cut prices on the outrageously expensive books they sell, they will find themselves creating a strong incentive for precisely what they don’t want: unauthorized copying.

I suspect the DX will prove most useful in more prosaic ways. For example, it could be a nearly ideal container and viewer for technical documentation–thick manuals that need periodic updating, where the cost of printing is prohibitive and the bulk of the books is daunting for the user.

Will all of this be made moot by the widely anticipated Apple (AAPL) “NetPad” or whatever it’s going to be called? I refer to a device that looks like a larger version of the iPod Touch, which would be a wonderful mobile multimedia player, among other likely capabilities.

I doubt it. If you enjoy severe eye strain, reading books on a back-lit, glossy display is just the ticket. The passive displays on Kindles, the Sony (SNE) e-reader and other such devices are much better for this kind of reading.

One size does not fit all in the emerging world of devices. Then again, one carry-on bag doesn’t hold all devices. For now, however, the Kindle has a place in mine.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO) deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown wondered whether Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, on his trip to the Bay Area this week or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination. At least one of his reasons for being in the area was to give a talk at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. BoomTown liveblogged the session and attempted to determine Ballmer’s soul-mate status. Given some of the acquisition rumors flying around this week, BoomTown decided to conduct a little experiment. Would the same sort of “Brangelina”-esque mystique apply as well to the combination of two incredibly hot tech companies? Would it create the same hysteria, and sell as many magazines (figuratively speaking)? (Non) results on BoomTown.

MediaMemo had a Kindle-ish kind of week. Amazon (AMZN) unveiled the latest iteration of the device on Wednesday in New York, and MediaMemo was there to liveblog the whole thing, including the crazy demo, during which the location’s facilities prevented Jeff Bezos from demoing pretty much anything. Also, Bezos forget to mention the fact that Amazon will be conducting a Kindle pilot program at six colleges starting this fall. Forget about getting your hands on one, though–only five students per school will be carrying their textbooks around in a Kindle instead of a backpack. MediaMemo’s advice for cash-strapped students once the devices do become available? Wait three years until the price drops. $489 is a lot to shell out on a student’s budget.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch had some news this week during the company’s earnings call (besides earnings)–he believes that while the state of the economy is still dire, “the worst Is over.” He also noted that although he plans to extend WSJ’s online pay model to his strongest properties soon, News Corp. will not be selling any of its content via the Kindle, as some of its competitors will. All this and more on MediaMemo.

On Thursday, Digital Daily liveblogged a press event hosted by Google (GOOG) in advance of its annual shareholder meeting. Some of the topics covered? Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, the econalypse, YouTube, netbooks, China, antitrust issues and the Apple (AAPL) Board. CEO Eric Schmidt was most forthcoming about the Federal Trade Commission’s just-opened inquiry into Google and Apple’s overlapping boards: When asked if he’d resign from the board, he replied that the thought “hasn’t crossed his mind.” Elsewhere, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison probably ruined a few people’s mornings over at IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) when he told a Reuters reporter that part of his plan for Sun (JAVA) is to create an integrated hardware and software solution, effectively making their competition a little bit steeper. As such, it will be extra interesting to see how the little matter of Sun and a possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act plays itself out in the courts. Details on Digital Daily.

Over in Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed Quickoffice, a program that brings some full-fledged word processing capabilities to the iPhone, but has its limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using Macs and PCs together on the same home network, backing up and transferring Outlook Express data and whether it’s possible to find a GPS program for the iPhone that will speak its directions. In the Mossberg Solution this week, Katie Boehret reviewed the Sidekick LX and found it a little out of touch with its market. More in-depth discussion, of course, on the section of the site containing Walt’s columns.

More next week. RIP Dom Deluise.

The Kindle DX, displaying a page from The New York Times (NYT), is demonstrated at a news conference Wednesday.

Airlines say Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader are like any other portable electronic device, and thus must be turned off for takeoff and landing. Still, this does not sit well with some fliers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Barclays analyst figures that Amazon will be generating some $700 million a year from the oversized Kindle by 2012. Overall, he says, the Kindle line will be a $3.7 billion business then.

I still think observers are underestimating the amount of effort it will take to get colleges–which move about as quickly as a DMV line at lunchtime–to adopt the Kindles. But let’s say the gadget does make headway with administrators and faculty. Who’s going to shell out $489 a pop for a gadget when that money could go to essentials—like beer.

For starters, let’s assume that the devices will see a big price drop in three years, just like every other consumer electronics device. It’s also possible that Amazon (AMZN) works out student discounts with college campuses in the same way that Apple (AAPL) used to many moons ago.

But even at $489, Anmuth argues, the Kindle DX would pay for itself in less than three years since it could (theoretically) save students $195 a year in textbook costs.

His math:

Of course, these numbers only work if you don’t have to replace your Kindle periodically because it falls victim to a beer bong or whatever else the kids are up to these days. But what do I know? I graduated from college in the pre-email days. Maybe the young people of today take exceptionally good care of their consumer electronics…

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, you see, neglected to mention this during his presentation this morning on the Pace campus. But I’m glad the Pace people were out there pressing the flesh. Because in doing so, they got to explain to me exactly how the Kindle will show up on campuses next year.

In a word: Barely.

Just 50 Pace students (out of a 12,000+ student body) will get Kindles next fall, says Geoff Brackett, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs. Brackett says he believes the other five schools trying out the gadget–Case Western, Princeton, Reed College, Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University–will get a similar number.

So if you’re geared up about the thought of using a Kindle DX when you come back to campus next fall, think again (or use whatever connections you have): Only about 300 students will be testing out the machines.

OK. So how will those students actually use the Kindles? There are lots of details to work out still, says Brackett. For instance, there’s the matter of footing the bill: He thinks Pace and Amazon (AMZN) will cover the  $489 cost of the machines, but the students will pay for any Kindle texts. But that’s not yet set in stone.

Another big issue: Which classes and curricula will be able to use the Kindle DX? Also unknown, at least right now. One of the things that will make integrating the Kindle into academia a slog is that in addition to the schools and students, individual faculty members, who assign reading for their classes, will have to sign on as well.

So even for this initial test, Brackett can’t say how many classes will offer Kindle-compatible courses. But he’s optimistic. “A typical undergrad takes five classes,” he says. “If we can get three or four of those on the kindle, we’ll be in pretty good shape.”

The takeaway: The Kindle DX, or some version of it, holds a lot of potential for the college setting. It makes a lot more sense, I think, than the notion of a Kindle as a newspaper-saver. But it’s going to take a very long time to get there.

I also talked to Amazon exec Ian Freed, who provided very little detailed information, but also managed to convey the same impression: Unlike the earlier versions of the Kindle, Amazon seems to be launching the DX with lots of hedge words, like “early” and “experiment.”

Perhaps that’s because I spent most of my interview time asking him about price, price and price. But see for yourself, below. Apologies for the brief iMovie caption glitch in the first few seconds of the clip. Also sorry about the overly close shot of Freed, who was a good sport about the whole thing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090506/kindle-on-campus-fall-2009-will-you-be-one-of-the-lucky-300/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090506/newspapers-please-buy-a-kindle-unless-we-can-sell-you-a-paper-instead/ http://allthingsd.com/20090506/newspapers-please-buy-a-kindle-unless-we-can-sell-you-a-paper-instead/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 16:12:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7051 Even under the best of circumstances, Amazon’s new Kindle DX wouldn’t “save the newspaper business.” But both Amazon (AMZN) and the newspapers are holding back from doing all they can to make sure the DX helps as much as possible.

Here’s why: The yet-to-be-described subsidy the papers plan to offer to Kindle DX buyers who agree to long-term subscriptions will only be available to a fraction of subscribers–those who can’t get home delivery of the print edition.

From Amazon’s press release: “The New York Times Company (NYT) and Washington Post Company (WPO) are launching pilots with Kindle DX this summer. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post will offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.”

Since the New York Times is available for home delivery throughout most of the U.S., that means that the majority of its American readers will have to pay full freight–$489–for the gadget. I suppose you could circumvent this if you lived, in say, Minneapolis, by agreeing to subscribe to the Boston Globe instead, which you can’t get delivered at home there. But what’s the point?

My assumption here is that the terms were set by the Times and the Post, which presumably don’t want to cut into print circulation. This makes sense if you’re focused on the very, very short term, since the print editions–both via subscriptions and the ads they contain–still deliver the majority of newspaper revenue for both companies.

Then again, that business isn’t going gangbusters for any of the papers involved. The Times, for instance, spent the early morning hours today hammering out a labor deal that will allow it keep the Globe in business.

The easy way to improve the offer: Copy my corporate colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, and offer a bundle online/offline subscription. But once you start doing that, you get into interesting billing issues, which is going to be fodder for another post.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll try it. Since everyone involved is careful to point out that this is an “experiment,” etc., it’s possible that the papers could reconsider the offer sooner than later. Which I hope they do: It’s a nice-looking device, and it would be a shame if no one ever used it.

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