This week, Apple quietly released Amazon’s new Kindle application in their iTunes Application Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch as a free download. There was some buzz, but not a lot of amazement from the iPhone community. In the Kindle community, there weren’t any big parades, either. But while it might seem superficially like Kindle is just another ebook reader for the iPhone, and one that’s not as full featured as Stanza, the Amazon Kindle app is probably more important than the new Kindle 2 for the future of E-Book sales at Amazon. This is a little application that represents the future of E-Books: wirelessly syncing your purchased library across multiple devices, letting you jump from device to device as easily as possible, picking up where you left off every time. And in one day, it opened up Kindle E-Book sales to almost 20 million Apple customers.
The Amazon Kindle iPhone application can read any Kindle E-Book that you’ve purchased from Amazon. It uses the phone’s 3G or Wi-Fi connection to connect with Amazon’s “WhisperSync” network services, by using your Amazon login identity and password to look up an inventory of all the Kindle E-Books you’ve purchased, and it allows you to re-download any or all of them for reading on the iPhone. If you have a Kindle 2, it can synchronize where you left off reading on the Kindle when you pick it up again on your iPhone (and vice versa). iPhone users can buy Kindle E-Books using the Safari browser on their phone, or going to Amazon.com with any other device, and once the book is added to your WhisperSync Amazon E-Book inventory, you can access it on any Kindle or iPhone. And that’s the trick we’ve all been waiting for. Allowing more than one device to keep track of Kindle books and to do reading is an Amazon service that has been a long time coming, but one that’s probably going to attract many more customers to Kindle E-Books.
Platforms and Device Multiplicity
This sort of device multiplicity is the heart and soul of many popular “platform” applications, like Twitter or Facebook. User activity takes place not only on a home computer’s browser, but at work, in desktop widgets, cell phones, and their netbooks or laptops. People use all sorts of methods to participate in a service, even though the experience changes from device to device. What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content. Bookstores, libraries, schools, the internet. Amazon used the first Kindle device generation to build their platform’s first user base and gently ease them into an E-Book service that will continue to grow.
Restricting E-Book reading to just the Kindle device was important for Amazon initially to create a small niche market of evangelist users, but it was no way to sustain long term growth for E-Book sales when the majority of E-Book readers are experimenting more and more with different platforms. Fictionwise (now a part of Barnes & Noble), who were among the first to create an E-Book service for the iPhone with the eReader software, demonstrated that E-Book platforms are successful because users read their content across many devices, and now Amazon is taking the ball and running with it. In the near future, I expect to see Kindle applications for Google Android phones and maybe even your favorite flavor of operating system (Mac, PC, or Linux).
Is it going to hurt Kindle 2 sales? Probably not. The user experience is still quite different enough on the iPhone to make the Kindle 2 much more attractive for leisurely reading, because of the larger screen size and eye-comfort of Amazon’s device. Hopefully, it’s going to entice people to trade-up to a Kindle device and keep investing in Kindle formatted E-Books. It’s adding value to the brand and every Kindle E-Book purchase.
Growing Pains or Limitations with the Kindle on iPhone
Right now, the Kindle application for iPhone is not as full-featured as the Kindle or Kindle 2, and for good reason. Amazon doesn’t want the Kindle on the iPhone to cannibalize Kindle device sales – it’s got to encourage Kindle 2 sales by hinting at what you’re missing. There’s no dictionary look-up, text-to-voice, note-taking, store browsing, and all the other bells and whistles. And the page location (instead of page numbering in the traditional sense) is still hard to decipher for newcomers. But at least there’s a scroll bar to fast-forward (albeit imprecisely) around. Quite simply, all you can do is read the text, change font sizes, jump around with a scroll bar or interior bookmarks, and sync. Compared to other E-Book software for the iPhone, this is very anemic. But maybe the most important part of the Amazon platform strategy is that Kindle on iPhone is crippled from reading non-Kindle books, because Amazon does not allow WhisperSync to carry a bookshelf of user created content, or content purchased from other sources. You’re only able to read and sync your Kindle E-Books.
In January, I wrote that MobiPocket (owned by Amazon) was missing from the iPhone, even though it could have been a breakthrough, and maybe now we know why it disappeared. It was too threatening to Kindle as a platform. MobiPocket is a format that allows E-Book content to be distributed from sources other than Amazon or MobiPocket, particularly without DRM encryption. With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon now has too much invested in the Kindle format to risk losing any Kindle compatible E-Book sales to other distributor channels, and so it has to suppress MobiPocket as best it can, or at least not offer them any free rides, if it wants to nurture Kindle E-Books. And the Kindle platform on any device has to stay consistent to this rule. Kindle for iPhone is a lot of what I wanted in a MobiPocket application, particularly WhisperSync, but even though I respect Amazon’s attempt to build Kindle E-Books sales, I’m not happy that it prohibits user generated content.
Competing iPhone E-Book apps, particularly Stanza, grow in popularity because they try to be agnostic to any given platform or format. Smart readers don’t like to be forced to buy from only one sales channel or stick with just one format. And pirate E-Books are also another reason why “open” E-Book reader software will continue to thrive. Although the Kindle device can read non-DRM MobiPocket files or converted texts, users are responsible for putting these files on their Kindle themselves, using USB or email transfers (or an SD memory card, if you have a first-gen Kindle). Unfortunately, there may be a very good reason Amazon keeps the system relatively difficult for non-DRM books: Amazon would be opening itself to a world of copyright hurt if WhisperSync allowed anyone to upload and store pirated material with Amazon’s servers. A policed WhisperSync is very important to build Kindle E-Book sales.
Will there be a Sony Reader on the iPhone?
The competing E-Book reader devices from Sony have a much more open approach to accepting content (ePub, PDF, RTF, etc.), but now Sony will have to be more adept at sharing Sony DRM E-Book content with other devices if it’s going to stay competitive with the Kindle platform. What’s just as problematic is that the Sony Reader must be physically tethered to computers or memory cards to move files, which make them harder for users to manage their purchased E-Book content, and this makes wireless synchronizing like WhisperSync seem almost magical in comparison. If Sony could build their own E-Book wireless sync service that also allowed non-DRM user content to be hosted in the cloud, they would be a formidable foe to Amazon, but it remains to be seen if they can put those resources together.
The fabled end-of-the-rainbow for any E-Book platform is the ubiquity of all the content (both user generated and publisher sales) to be accessible and synchronized to as many user devices as possible, while preserving a comfortable reading experience with generous perks like note-taking, review tools, some sharing, and bonuses like custom dictionaries and writing tools. Even though it’s a slow climb, we’re getting there. Now that Amazon is on the iPhone, it finally looks like the biggest distributor is admitting they have the same dream, too.
- Michael Gaudet
