We recently attempted to explain the new ePub standard and did a pretty good job of simplifying it for the lay audience if we do say so ourselves. However, a reader’s comment suggests we may have oversimplified it. He introduced the concept of “wrapping” ePub in proprietary shell.

What does that mean and why is it important to you?

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard, we explained, was designed to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. We said that Sony was planning to scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of ePub, enabling users to read e-books on any reading device that supports the ePub standard.

Well, yes – and no. Here’s what a correspondent wrote:

“Unfortunately, Sony’s version of ePub, as currently described, will be wrapped in Sony’s DRM, so books downloaded to Sony’s e-reader will not be readable on other devices. ePub does not necessarily mean open, which should be the goal of IDPF and the reading community.“

“DRM” stands for Digital Rights Management, a long way of saying controlled or restricted access to digital content. Proprietary, in other words. Kindle is an example of a proprietary, closed standard.

We referred the question to Michael Gaudet, who frequently unpacks technical complexities for us, and here is what he had to say to our commenter:

What I think you’re asking for is a world with no DRM. While you may see it as unfortunate that Sony isn’t as forward thinking as you’d like, I’m sure Sony and the IDPF are trying to be as realistic as possible in accommodating the ebook market’s suppliers: publishers.

ePub has always been formulated with the anticipation that retailers could wrap it in DRM if they needed to, and many publishers ask for DRM and won’t retail ebooks without it. Each ePub retailer needs to consider how to solve the DRM requirements for publishers and customers, and it’s never going to please everyone.

The biggest publishers who are still actively specifying DRM controls are members of the IDPF and they made these demands in standards meetings for the ePub format, and retailers like Sony and Content Reserve saw what’s coming down the road well in advance of their customers. It would have been suicide for Sony’s ebook store to ignore all the content from publishers who require DRM at this time just because it’s fashionable to bash DRM.

It’s unknown yet whether Sony’s ebookstore ePub implementation will be readable on other devices, but chances are that it can be, depending on the other devices’ software to unlock DRM from multiple vendors. It’s highly likely Adobe’s Digital Editions could support Sony’s ePub in the future, and if that’s possible, then so will other reader platforms that acknowledge ePub.

When customers choose to buy non-DRM books from other retailers that offer them, like Fictionwise, the Sony device is a very welcoming platform for ePub, and I think that’s probably more important than Sony’s store right now. The opportunity exists to read ePubs with or without DRM, and that’s better than where we were a year ago.

Obviously, ePub is not so white, and DRM is not so black. We hope you can live with shades of gray until a true One Size Fits All Standard rules all digital content.

RC

This week, thanks to the retraction of 1984 from Kindle customers and the uproar/apology that ensued, there are a lot of people raising the flag of consumer rights for ebooks. It seems the corporate expectations for control are revealing themselves to be out-of-step with the popular expectations of ownership. But maybe we get the service we deserve. How complicit are we in enabling the controls that irk us?

When we quoted Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, who said “The real issue here is Amazon’s use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users,” we knew that he had touched on a sensitive nerve.

A discussion on the popular site Reddit.com today is a lightning rod for similar sentiment of consumer entitlement: “It’s simple: I want the media I buy to play on all the devices I own. I want the devices I own to play all the media I can buy. If your business intentionally makes device-specific media or media-specific devices I want you to fail.”

But I’m afraid I disagree with Peter Brown and his perspective of the broader implications. And while the Reddit discussion is engrossing, there’s not much being said about one little word.

Liability.

When Peter Brown says Amazon has “unacceptable power,” the truth is that we grant companies this power when customers accept the opaque and deliberately over-protective terms of use that we all too often gloss over to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

How many Kindle owners have read the terms that state:

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Changes to Service. Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon’s failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

(Complete terms of use found here.)

It may seem Draconian, but essentially Amazon is stating that it has rights, too, to protect itself from companies or individuals using its service. Without those protections, Amazon and other companies would have little incentive to partner-up with new technologies that are ripe with the opportunity to exploit, harm, and cause serious problems without strict legalese behind them.

I think the digital reading experience provided by the Kindle and Amazon cannot be equated with older notions about ownership and traditional physical books. The digital service industry is built around licenses, permissions, and tacit agreements about copyright. What would the Kindle be without its 3G cell phone service (a special license), or the internet cloud functionality of Whispernet, which is a service with terms of use agreements?

When we buy a book in a system comprised of those complex arrangements, what we’re really doing is licensing the book for our use so long as those terms are offered. This isn’t how we traditionally think about shopping for goods. But in the last 30 years, our society is increasingly becoming familiar with this arrangement, whether it’s music or movies or software. It’s renting disguised as ownership. We have a hard time acknowledging that this is in fact happening under our noses while we stick to antiquated ideas of entitlement.

It may not seem fair, especially to those who like to reverse engineer and repurpose everything they purchase, but it is a perfectly valid business objective. However, where the business objective comes undone is in enforcement. DRM and unexpected retractions aren’t the only enforcement companies use. It can get much more heavy-handed.

As Stephen Fry recently lamented about copyright law, the prosecutions used to criminalize young users are obviously both overzealous and unfair in most cases. A single teenager stealing music doesn’t deserve a worse financial penalty than most white-collar criminals with deliberate intent to profit.

The truth is that the intent of most people breaking their terms of use is not to profit, but to enjoy an experience or connection with artists.

But that’s not always the case. It may be the most popular reason, but there are always sneaky deviations. And so enters the legalese of terms of use, which try to foreshadow any and all possible infringements and damages. By inducing you to quickly accept their terms, they try to stave off worse case scenarios that could bankrupt a company with litigation. And there’s the rub: we want the toys and media these companies develop but we must risk that accepting their terms might not be in our best interests. Every time we agree to unread terms of use (and we do, don’t we?), we may be complicit in feeding that beast that can bite us. And what about the free media that has no such terms – are we all willing to take a risk that we trust free media to cause us no harm, with no recourse if it does? It’s a murky problem in these dark days of DRM.

- Michael Gaudet

For years I’ve wanted to do ebooks served efficiently from the cloud and I’m glad Google is finally implementing it with bravado, but I think publishers need to be aware that Google’s plans could have some serious implications for their content in the long run. How will customers use it? What will publishers have to do to compete in a space where Google is both the most popular search engine and a retailer? Do the other retailers who rely on searches or who pay for ad space with Google see it as a conflict of interest? And how do we as a publisher use this effectively to distinguish our needles in the haystack?

Recently, publishing guru Mike Shatzkin began talking about his project to chart the constantly developing ebook space as it relates to all the current devices, including the necessary software, supported formats, and retailers. Google is joining this grid in a big way. I’ll be very interested to see how he lines up all these new and old platforms, particularly if he starts to rank them in terms of profitability based on royalty rates and returns. But Shatzkin has also been making some excellent points that relate to how publishers see this space, namely that the continuing format and device wars make the role of publishers just as important as ever. “The more complicated this world becomes,” he says, “the more an author will need a professional organization.” I understand this because every day at E-Reads we channel our expertise to tailor authors’ content to fit what formats customers are asking for, and they continue to ask for plenty of options.

Google’s ebook sales channel will be the latest flavor. As Google prepares to enter the market, I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be any negative impact on other format sales or if there’s going to be trouble with Cloud City. It’s hard to say until we’ve seen what Google finally brings out. Google will be doing a multifaceted delivery to many devices and future APIs. And the Google ebook platform doesn’t just allow publishers to monetize, it’s even open to author-bloggers. It’s the overdue advent of a paid premium text content system. As competition to services like Scribd, it’s going to be easier than ever for the average person or company to set a price on written content they might have given away in the past, and to compete with traditional publishers.

As Shatzkin and the New York Times have pointed out, Google isn’t really aiming to sell files as much as they will be selling online access to ebooks and texts they’ve inventoried for their popular search engine. In that way, if your device can access Google on the net (iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) you’ll be able to read premium content from your Google book shelf. Future web-applications might even be able to filter and reuse the Google-served content (with permission, of course), and deliver texts in ways we can’t even imagine today.

Publishers will do very well in adopting Google as a sales partner for their content, providing they accept that this is a pivotal development that requires them to pay much more attention to marketing etext (both books and snippets, content integrated into different hashes) in the future. This is a natural evolution that coincides with the rise of social data increasingly being served from the cloud and the pressure Google faces to create a semantic Web 3.0 experience that can analyze data more effectively, particularly in valuable resources like books, and serve it up in new ways. And those new ways are going to make the retail space for etexts much more interesting in the coming years.

So what’s to worry about?

For the last few years, Google’s business practice has been to take advantage of digitized books to extend the web’s reference material, and thus add value to their searches and databases (not without some hiccups). Publishers were happy to see that it was driving sales for print and ebooks at retailers like Amazon. It was a means to an end at another location. But when Google starts merchandizing their data cache of library books and publisher content, publishers will have to work harder to make their content stand out at Google’s site, especially older books, to make their upkeep worthwhile financially, seeing as it might be the only stop customers need anymore.

I’m sure Amazon is worried on our behalf. Despite appealing to publishers with a low discount rate, Google sees themselves as retailer agnostic, a mere stepping stone to helping customers get to the content they want, and so in some ways they’ve hobbled Google Books from being too competitive against the other players. You see, like Scribd, for the time being it’s not the best-looking presentation of material that publishers can ask for when you compare it to some of the better formats. I don’t think Google wants to dry up all the other format sales initially. But they may be devaluing the content anyway, unintentionally.

Books Still Need Packaging

Google wants to aggregate literature, which is traditionally stand-alone content, into fast-served web content and that can devalue the market value of authors’ full length literary work. If you just want the words, why pay for bells and whistles? A library doesn’t need curb appeal, right?

Customers are increasingly attracted to biting off smaller chunks of written content if the opportunity is presented to them. That’s not to say that truncated and abridged versions are what people prefer to read, but I think eventually serving books from the cloud will allow Google to break up book content for micro sales, which is what publisher ebook services like LibreDigital have been anticipating. What if you only need the third chapter of a Malcolm Gladwell book? As it already stands, Google makes it easy to filter the content you need from the chaff, and now they’ll sell it to you.

The cloud methodology of serving and selling books will further blur the lines about what a “book” really is. Is it just a lump sum of accessed words? Where’s the sense of unified aesthetic package? Long stories, novels and reference books without packaging don’t compete for attention and pageviews well against attractive blogs, wikis, or streamed video, but book fragments and book widgets will be increasingly competitive. Google Books’ search tools already fragment the larger texts so that customers can quickly access relevant material. Google sees the web as a big haystack for which they map the way to your specific needle. It used to be that most publishers thought they were selling more than just another needle for the haystack.

I wonder how self-aware Google is that they are working at effacing the relevance of a “book” by supplanting it with data nodes on the Internet. Is Google Reader an adequate way to present long-form material and give it the luster it deserves? Publishers need to decide if they are sacrificing too much of the quality in a reading experience just to fit this new format. It’s something I already worry about with ebooks on successful platforms like the Kindle and Sony.

You’re Now Shopping, Not Searching

It used to be that shopping was not analogous to web searching, but the future wants it to be. Does Google expect small publishers to start treating ebook content as if it deserves Google marketing ad words? This is money that large publishers know how to spend for traditional marketing, but it’s more nebulous when it means spending money to distinguish older, backlist content. It doesn’t look worthwhile at this point, but to protect the relevance of the material (even novels) at Google, publishers will have to adopt new strategies, including even more efforts at advertiser sponsorship. Widgets and viral campaigns aren’t enough. Pushing content into Google and various ebook formats can’t remain a relatively passive activity for too much longer: ebooks will need more of their own marketing.

But even when Google directs potential customers to premium content successfully, most people will look for alternatives where they don’t have to pay. That’s the nature of the web. Pirate material and advertiser sponsored Freemiums. Today you can pay $1.99 for the TV episode on iTunes or watch it for free with Hulu. Hulu wins.

Maybe the time for integrating books into the Internet is overdue, but it’s divesting old social structures of their roles in book sales. The internet has increasingly been jeopardizing the influence of print culture, shaping a new discourse of short and snappy bite size reading experiences. Or maybe this is the happy start to a better future. Either way, publishers have their work cut out for them. Luckily, there are two strong groups who are proactively supporting publishers. First, public libraries are adopting ebook technology and are contributing to the ebook landscape in their efforts to survive the paradigm shift. And the IDPF has been helping publishers to rally around an open standards future with the ePub format. The increasing pervasiveness of the ePub format at retail points will be important for customers once the competition among devices and sales channels really heats up. After PDF, with all its limitations, the ePub format is the best-looking and most future-proof format you can buy.

And even the iPhone is demonstrating that users still choose to have it both ways: old-school (long form ebooks) and new school (short-form cloud-served micro content). Thanks to strong support from graphically inclined developers, iPhone ebook apps allow publisher content to flourish a bit better as “books,” especially titles that can sell themselves as stand-alone applications (such as with Iceberg Reader). These ebook apps set themselves apart and overcome the bias against long form content with excellent graphic presentation, and appear “special” to the readers and customers, and all this distinguishes the content much better. And that’s what matters to a publisher. Its why many of us love what we do. We strive to distinguish good content as a relevant experience for readers.

Michael Gaudet

As we’ve been expecting, today Jeff Bezos announced the new Kindle DX, a $489 large screen (9.7″) e-book reader modeled after the Kindle 2. The DX is the first big step in Amazon’s effort to create a platform for newspapers, textbooks, and other large scale documents. While developers such as Plastic Logic and Hearst are still preparing their large format devices, Amazon has beat them all out of the gate with a device available this summer in the U.S. (exact first shipping date is yet unknown.)

Besides the larger screen, the Kindle DX offers some special improvements: 3.3GB of storage, wide screen reading (rotate the device sideways), native PDF support (it’s unknown if Amazon will support DRM for this format), and resizing/reflowing based on how many words per line you want. Other features remain similar to the Kindle 2, such as 3G Whispernet wireless service, USB charging, and the 16 shades of grey.

Importantly, Amazon has been working to ensure new content is available from newspaper and text book publishers. New arrangements with the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle will offer special rate subscriptions that will subsidize the cost of the DX. And Princeton, Arizona State University, Case Western, Reed College, and the University of Virginia will all be piloting programs serving text books to students with the Kindle DX. Hopefully, when more information about this initiative comes out, we’ll see what Amazon’s foray into the $9.8 billion text book market has in store for students at other universities.

The Kindle DX is available for pre-order now, although its price is $120 more than the Kindle 2, which continues to sell well. Many people who’ve already purchased the Kindle 2 may be feeling annoyed that the new model boasts the extra screen real estate and PDF support, but perhaps the higher cost pushes the Kindle DX farther out of reach for most casual customers. The premium will be worth it for those people who work extensively with large PDF documents, and when Amazon’s text book pricing is revealed it may actually represent a big savings for students. Those who use the device over a number of years will probably get the most savings. However, at the rate that the technology is developing, the Kindle DX might not have the long legs you’d expect to justify its cost, especially when students might want to wait until a color device and more text books are easily found at retail to begin their investment strategy in an e-book device. University book stores will have to find a way to compete, and digital text books also means no used texts or selling-back for students. But we have to start somewhere. It might just be that the DX is an appetizer for things to come.

- Michael Gaudet

Starting on May 4th, Kindle will now be charging users $0.15 per megabyte for files they email to their Kindle via its wireless connection (Whispernet). This is up from the $0.10 charge for files without any size limit. Is this literally nickle and diming? Well, not exactly. I think it’s likely a protective move because the fees that Amazon is paying to maintain the service are more than they anticipated. Any file’s cost will now be determined by rounding up to the nearest megabyte. It remains free to transfer the file yourself via USB.

I hope this is not the slippery slope of charging more for Whispernet services as time goes on, because one of the best successes of the Kindle has been how popular its wireless service is (for example, see this XKCD comic).

But the good news is that now Amazon is supporting RTF and DocX files for their conversion process (albeit “experimentally,” so that they don’t guaranty it will be perfect), whereby you email a file to your Kindle email address and Amazon converts it to a Kindle compatible file (emailing it back to you for free, or to your Kindle for $0.15 a MB). DocX is Microsoft’s latest Word format, which is a default for newer versions of MS Word, while RTF is the old standby and the format that E-Reads uses to maintain many manuscripts in our archives. Good on them for pushing the format envelope a bit more like Sony has been doing.

- Michael Gaudet

Lexcycle announced yesterday that they’ve been acquired by Amazon, which either comes as good news to you if you like industry consolidation, or bad if it worries you what Amazon might be planning (eg. the curious case of Mobipocket). However, Marc from Lexcycle was quick to dispel some of the fear by way of his blog:

“We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.”

Lexcycle Inc. has been of the little Davids of the ebook world. They are a little group that set out to build an ebook reading application for the iPhone and they quickly fostered a great following. Their free application, Stanza, has been one of the break-out hits among ebook enthusiasts, allowing people to use their iPhone to gain access to unfettered free e-books on the net, while supporting major formats like .pdb and mobipocket (non-DRM only). They were also able to wrangle Fictionwise.com & eReader DRM support, including shopping for ebooks (so you can buy E-Reads titles) through Stanza via its online catalogs (with a special Stanza account). And most importantly, they’ve been rallying support for ePub. Stanza has one of the best implementations of support for the darling new standard.

But rather than attempting to defeat one of the roaming giants of the digital frontier, Amazon’s Kindle, it seems that they’ve allowed themselves to be gobbled up. Amazon surely noticed that Stanza was more popular than their Kindle application for the iPhone. So, what will happen? Could it mean Kindle support (finally) on Stanza? Or is it a way of competing against (and potentially blocking) Barnes & Noble, who now own Fictionwise?

In the minds of many Stanza fans, Stanza should be an open ebook reader and open sales platform, where all sorts of vendors can feed various formats, DRM’d or otherwise, and allow everyone to compete fairly. This is contrary to the strict boundaries that Amazon uses to protect its sales. But I think the agenda at Lexcycle has always been to give people a great tool to read, and that’s why working with the very powerful (and wealthy) Amazon is still a means to that end. I think that’s how Stanza was envisioned at its onset, so I’m not necessarily worried yet. Both companies have been responsible for the growing acceptance of ebooks in the last year. These are all people who genuinely care about the ebook experience. They could be a good fit.

- Michael Gaudet

Last week, our distributing partner Lightning Source announced their pilot program with the Espresso 2 Book Machine (see the press release here). E-Reads is proud to be one of the first publishers in the program, which will see our titles available to the “ATM for books,” alongside offerings from Wiley, Hachette, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, and the University of California, among others.

We’ve always hoped that in the future we’d see mini-POD machines out in physical bookstores, making hard-to-find titles quickly accessible to customers who’d otherwise make special orders.

“Since the introduction of print on demand over a decade ago, I’ve dreamed of a day when the technology would be refined and reduced to in-store scale,” says E-Reads President Richard Curtis. “At last it’s here and I’m overjoyed at this significant moment in the evolution of the book industry. Now you can visit a bookstore, order a book online, and pick your copy up after a leisurely cup of coffee.”

Thanks to Lightning Source and On Demand Books, the Espresso 2 is the first time E-Reads has been able to make in-store book printing possible for our customers. The advance press materials will tell you that the Espresso 2 is a very practical and small machine that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. With a really fast optional Xerox copier and a short book, it gets the job done in about 5 minutes.

Last month, we took a quick trip to SoHo to see the offices of On Demand Books, where their prototype Espresso 2 print-on-demand machine was being demonstrated for publishers and retailers.

What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype’s pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine’s sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries).

Whitney Dorin, On Demand Book’s director of Business Development, made two copies for us on the spot, expertly checking on the process and helping the paper along (pictured above). The results were perfectly acceptable paperbacks, but everyone acknowledged that even though the covers look great (“They’re the most expensive part of the printing process,” she said), they don’t quite feel like your typical mass-produced covers because the heavy cover stock isn’t gloss or matte coated. In a best case scenario, many large scale print-on-demand operations give special attention to the covers and may even print them in advance, but the Espresso 2 is only a fraction of the size of those machines, so for now it looks like simple covers are a necessary trade-off.

Most of the printing components of the Espresso 2 seem modular, so that upgrading a machine to faster capabilities can be done relatively easily. Dane Neller, the CEO of On Demand Books, showed us how the Kyocera copier on the back could be swapped out for a Xerox 4112 copier capable of 110 pages per minute, accommodating books up to 830 pages long. Dane was very pleased to say that they had done all the work necessary to bring the printing costs down to a level where it was possible to see the machine pay for itself in about 9 months with daily printing.

Print-On-Demand technology really has come a long way in the past decade thanks to the hard work of Lightning Source and On Demand Books. It’s hard not to get grandiose visions of every school and bookstore having an Espresso printer, finally turning the page on hundreds of years of distribution problems for publishers. That revolution might be closer than you think.

- Michael Gaudet

The other shoe dropped for the Pirate Bay today (news here, and for the first act, see The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For a Generation of Blackbeards). The four co-defendants were each found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement in a Swedish court. The court’s documents say that the Pirate Bay co-founders helped promote theft and so they’ve each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total). If the judgment stands, maybe the next files they’ll be looking to share in secret will be in a cake.

Sweden had already been strengthening its reputation for being hard on piracy since they recently began requesting that local internet service providers log all the IP addresses of computers involved in file sharing starting at the beginning of this month. Consequently, Swedish internet traffic has fallen by over 30% (see this BBC article). If something similar were to be enacted in the U.S., it could be decried as further infringement on our right to privacy and it wouldn’t be tolerated well at all.

Much is going to be made about this Swedish court decision and the forthcoming appeals in the short term, but it’s hard to predict if the outcome is really going to deliver much of a blow to file sharing in general until the stigma of copyright transgressions is something that’s educated effectively to scoffing young users.

The Pirate Bay is akin to a fleet of off-shore gambling boats floating in international waters. Even while the main defendants are caught up in Swedish courts, the operations can and probably will continue under the supervision of other affiliated groups. And it’s not like the Navy can escort our copyrighted materials. So, while this news is fresh validation for the media rights holders, it’s still not the end of the battle.

- Michael Gaudet

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

Yesterday was one of those days when the stars aligned for Amazon’s Kindle PR team. All the major tech blogs published multiple articles on the Kindle 2, coinciding with the recent deliveries of the new device into people’s homes and offices. And then today, even a few more articles shuffled out of the gate.

The Kindle 2, as pictured dissasembled by iFixit.com

The Kindle 2 has some serious opponents, namely the editors at Gizmodo, who have been eager to take the e-book reader down a peg because it’s not yet their dream device, but all press is good press in the end. Here’s a round-up of some of the best and most colorful blog writings about the Kindle 2 in the last 2 weeks.

The Kindle 2 at Blogs Round-Up:

Review Matrix of Kindle 2 (USA Today vs. Wired vs. NYT), by Gizmodo, Feb 25th, 2009

Jeff Bezos chats up the Kindle 2 with Jon Stewart, by Engadget, Feb 25th, 2008

Amazon Kindle 2: a full review, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 25th, 2009

10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to, by TechCrunch, Feb 25th, 2009

Kindle 2 Unboxing and Hands-On, by Engadget, Feb. 24th, 2009

Kindle 2 Stripped Naked; Chip Is Faster Than iPhone’s, by Wired, Feb. 24th, 2009

Designing the Kindle 2, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 24th, 2009

What’s the average age of Kindle owners?, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 24th, 2009

Kindle 2 dissected, found to contain space for a SIM card, by iFixit, Feb. 24th, 2009

Kindle’s text to speech feature voiced by “Tom” Cruise?, by Engadget, Feb. 20th, 2009

Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader, by Wired, Feb. 9th, 2009

And more from Gizmodo’s War Against The Kindle 2:

First Kindle 2 Destroyed, Showing Extended Warranty May Be Worth It, by Gizmodo, Feb 25th, 2009

Giz Explains: Why There Isn’t a Perfect Ebook Reader, by Gizmodo, Feb 12th, 2009

Why Kindle 2 Isn’t a Big Step Forward For Voracious Readers, by Gizmodo, Feb 9th, 2009

- Michael Gaudet