The Kindle 2 is a "fundamentally better experience" than inked paper did. Jeff Bezos—Amazon's founder and C.E.O.—has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence."
Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group/Newsweek
The Kindle is the logical evolution of a 500-year-old analog technology that terrifies the $24 billion book-publishing industry already faint from Amazon’s growing dominance.
The newspaper industry, says Russ Wilcox, an entrepreneur from Harvard Business School and founder of E Ink in a brilliant article in this week’s New Yorker by Nicholson Baker
was a hundred-and-eighty-billion-dollar-a-year business, and book publishing was an additional eighty billion. Half of that was papermaking, ink mixing, printing, transport, inventory, and the warehousing of physical goods. "So you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally," Wilcox told Baker. "There's a lot of hidden forces at work that are all combining to make this sort of a big tidal wave that's coming." The economic pressures are immense."
On June 12th, Gizmodo announced that the Kindle DX, just started shipping on Amazon to extend it’s e-book reach to include textbooks and periodicals, which it will test-market to college students.The DX was sold out before the end of the week. “Either people really love that DX, the Gizmodo team quipped, “or the Earth only produces enough resources to sustain manufacturing a few units at a time.”
The Gizmodo report underscores the obvious fact that the Kindle has gripped the public imagination like it’s, well, like it’s a new iPod or iPhone release, The Kindle, now in it’s second iteration, is the first book-industry hit of its kind, selling hundreds of thousands of units since its introduction in November 2007. It’s the first with built-in wireless 3G connectivity, making it possible to download whole volumes in less than a minute — more than 1,500 books can fit on a single machine — with titles often less than half the price of a traditional hardcover.
Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos’ rvision is “to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.” Wall Street analysts estimate that Amazon sold a half-million Kindles last year and projects its total e-book revenue, which includes sales of books and devices, to reach $1.2 billion by 2010. There are currently 275,000 titles are available in the Kindle format, including nearly all 112 books on The New York Times best-seller list.
It’s obvious that Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry.
With its first-mover advantage, Apple rapidly built iPod and iTunes Store,creating a new platform standard that wrested control of the digital-music distribution system. Should Amazon succeed, they could marginalize book publishers, phasing them out completely, treating them as the latest victims of creative destruction orphaned by a new technology.
In the new world of e-books, publishers could team with authors and multimedia producers to create e-books that go far beyond linear text, incorporating a blend of text, video, audio interviews, 3-D maps — an entire ecosystem of content built on top of a technology that was perfected in the 16th century.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Image credit: The New Yorker/newyorker.com
Source:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker?currentPage=1
http://gizmodo.com/5288615/kindle-dx-sells-out-in-two-days Image credit: Gizmodo
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/137/the-evolution-of-amazon.html
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