May 7, 2009
Kindle book pricing, and the Kindle DX
Short article in Wired a few weeks back about Kindle users protesting prices higher than $9.99 for digital books. It's as if users are valuing the books as just pure digital bits. When you buy books at a bookstore, you have some visual justification for why some books are more expensive than others. The book may be thicker, with more pages, or with glossy heavy stock paper with beautiful photographs, or an expensive leather binding. The varying form factor for books has allowed that industry to get away with much more pricing variation than, say, the music industry, where most CDs and LPs are shaped exactly the same, or the theatrical exhibition industry, where going to the movies costs the same regardless of what movie you're seeing and how much it cost to make (on an absolute basis, the cost variance for producing one movie versus another is much larger than in books and music). To the viewer, many elements of the moviegoing experience are the same regardless of which movie you're seeing: they are about the same length, shown in theaters that are shaped, for the most part, the same, with screens of roughly comparable size. That along with years of uniform pricing have pretty much ensured that the only theaters that can get away with varied pricing are ones offering a unique experience (e.g. a price premium for the massive curved screens of IMAX, or a price discount for the really old movies offered at second-run theaters).
With books for the Kindle, you have few visual cues to distinguish the value of one book from the other. And so it's understandable that users might be inclined to think every digital book should cost the same. In one sense, they're right, as the digital cost of storing one book versus another will not vary by much at all.
What is missing, of course, is the understanding of all that has gone into the production and marketing of that work, or a linkage between the quality of the book and the price. The uniform price that Apple placed on songs in the iTunes music store at launch ($0.99 per track) removed price variance as an element of the shopping decision, for better or worse. That is now a mental anchor, and any deviation seems, well, deviant.
As a retailer, Amazon and Apple have roughly the same costs for whichever digital book or song they sell, so I can understand their interest in standardizing the pricing and encouraging impulse buying with the simplified decision structure. I can also understand why a publisher or music label would prefer pricing variance, to better account for their costs in acquiring and marketing the different books in question.
As for my Kindle 2
I can understand and accept product obsolescence and early adopter risk in technology, in fact I'm well-versed in it what with iPods and iPhones and digital SLRs and laptops getting replaced by newer, higher-performance models every half year to a year, but the Kindle 2 barely started shipping 3 months ago. I feel like Kindle 2 buyers should have either received a heads up that the Kindle DX would be coming or that we should be offered an option for trading in our Kindle 2 for the DX. The Kindle DX seems a bit pricey to me at $489, not a slamdunk purchase, but one of my biggest issues with the current Kindle 2 is its screen size, and I would have liked to have known the DX was coming at this price point back when I was making my Kindle-buying decision back in February.
Amazon rarely disappoints me, but today it did.
Posted by eugene at May 7, 2009 12:57 AMI have the first Kindle, and apart from the TRS-80 era design in general, by far my biggest "ask" for the Kindle 2 was larger screen size. When the 2 came out with the same screen, I passed. Then the iPhone app came out, and now I find myself reading far more on my iPhone than on my Kindle. Leaving me scratching my head, and distrusting my own intuition on what features I really needed.
After giving it some thought, I think the desire for a bigger screen was really an attempt to get at a more fundamental underlying issue. On a Kindle, I can't flip back and forth like I can in a physical book. In fact, the Kindle has made me realize how much I do that. For fiction it's not a big deal. But for non-fiction, I've realized that I very often flip back to an earlier chapter, a diagram, or some series of points earlier in the book. And I do that by using whatever inexact and human algorithm we use for such things. Flip back to the approximate area in the book where I think the thing was, then scan every few pages to look for visual cues that indicate I'm getting close to what I'm looking for. There is just no analog to that on the Kindle, and I think I was naively assuming that a larger screen would at least let me flip back and forth more quickly. But I don't think even the DX screen would help much--it won't replace the process of flipping back through a bunch of pages quickly until your eye catches something that looks familiar and related to what you are looking for. We need a new set of user actions that replaces the series of "flipping back" steps that we use with physical books. And for text books I think that will be even more critical, so I'll be interested to see how the DX is received on campuses.
To your point on the lightening obsolescence issue, I think Amazon is considering this larger format to have a very different set of customers, rather than the next version in a progression of better machines. But anyone who wants a large screen and more storage space isn't going to see it that way.
Posted by: Andy at May 7, 2009 6:14 AMYou're not alone: http://www.businessinsider.com/cnbc-host-furious-about-new-amazon-kindle-2009-5
Amazon was going after a different target market with the DX (college textbooks). It wasn't thought of as an upgrade to Kindle 2.
Posted by: varun at May 7, 2009 12:20 PMYou may both be right in saying Amazon thought the DX would appeal to a different customer set. But to me, it's not obvious that a larger screen would only appeal to people who want to read textbooks.
Also, they tout the improved readability of newspapers and journals with the DX, but magazines and newspapers were part of the sell for the Kindle when I bought it, too.
Really, from the regular Kindle to the DX, the size increase doesn't really change the portability of the device that much. Even the 6" Kindle is too large to fit in a pocket, so with either Kindle, I'm carrying something in my hand or in a bag.
Varun, the article you link to says the CNBC anchor should have known a larger screen Kindle was coming, but the article they point to with that link only says a college student-based Kindle is coming, not that the screen would be larger. I only heard about the larger screen rumor last week. I didn't think it was common knowledge in the public.
The only pocket-sized Kindle is the iPhone app, the free one, which, yes, announced only shortly after I bought the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2, iPhone app, and DX, all announced within 3 months of each other, but not at the same time. It's that timing that bothers me. If they'd announced all 3 at the same time I wouldn't feel misled now.
I'm all for multiple models of products. The iPod comes in Touch, Classic, Nano, and Shuffle, and you can choose which fits your needs best. But looking at the iPod lifecycle timeline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_iPod_models) they've always left a good period of time between model announcements. I can choose to skip a generation or more if I know roughly what the refresh cycle is. With the Kindle, I thought the intra-model wait to the next Kindle would be more like that between the first and second Kindle.
Oh well. Buyer beware.
As to your point about flipping around in a book, Andy, I think some sort of high-level timeline of a book's contents, almost like chapter thumbnails on a DVD, would be helpful for many of the books. I tend to use table of contents as that rough high level index, but you're right in that it puts you at the mercy of the quality and granularity of that high level guide.
Reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle, with its copious footnotes, makes me think that what would take ebooks to another level is dense clickable cross-references within the text. If you read about a topic on one page, you should be able to quickly pull up all the other pages in the book that discuss that topic. Introducing hypertext like that would make non-fiction books more browse friendly. The Kindle does seem better suited to linear reading for now.
Posted by: Eugene at May 7, 2009 9:38 PM