Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

Downtempo’s research division recently acquired a Kindle 2 from Amazon, and I’ve been living with it all week — reading William Gibson on the bus, browsing my Sunday paper on it over coffee, and listening to stories from the latest Financial Times in the evenings.

I’ve been an avid reader my entire life, and have been fascinated both by the promise of electronic books, and the amazing slowness at which they have actually evolved. E-Book readers have been around since Sony introduced the Bookman in 1991.

While I was intrigued by the Kindle’s debut, I kept in mind the many attempts to enter the E-Book market over the last 18 years, and didn’t buy one during the initial (and somewhat underwhelming) release. However, when the Kindle 2 was introduced, I was impressed by Jeff Bezos’ continued commitment to the e-book space, and I decided to dive in and try out the Kindle 2.

Overall, I’ve been impressed by the product. It Just Works. It’s easier for me to haul around more books, and I never have to think about which books I’m taking out with me. The battery rarely needs charging, and the latest editions of newspapers are automatically delivered to it as soon as they hit the presses. I’ve heard a growing buzz around the device from people I know in San Francisco, which means that they’re getting some traction from early adopters.

However, there are still a number of shortcomings with the Kindle as a product, and with Amazon’s current e-book strategy. I’ll point out a few of the current ones here:

1. I already own books.

I’ve built a wonderful library of books over the years. Now I’m supposed to buy every book on Amazon again? It’s just not feasible. And unlike the original iTunes Store, where the store was layered on top of my already-available library of MP3 content, the purchased Kindle store content is the only content available (without e-mailing PDF documents to my Kindle, a fairly odd process that would be better handled by a web-based “upload to my Kindle” system.) I suspect that Amazon’s long-awaited Kindle book viewer software application will include Amazon’s first take at an “iTunes for books”, which will include improved conversion and upload functions for Kindle hardware owners.

At the least, Amazon needs to provide free Kindle editions to me of all books I’ve bought from Amazon, or that I can prove ownership of through an MP3.com Beam-It system (remember that product before it was sued out of existence?) for books. Even better, there should be a consumer book scanning company (think ripstyles for books) to convert my home library to Kindle format. (God help us if we have to build our own book scanners.)

In the meantime, I’m keeping my purchases mostly to newspapers, where I’m quite happy to pay for a digital paper given the value I receive from the newspapers I read regularly.

2. DRM is so 1999.

Seriously, Amazon? Given that you control the system for loading books onto the Kindle, it would be fairly trivial to hide or obfuscate the individual books stored on the Kindle so they can’t be easily copied to the user’s computer. As far as I can tell, DRM on the Kindle format does is keep other companies from supporting the Kindle’s book format.

Amazon should have used its negotiating power to get publishers to put out content without the DRM.

3. Usability is good, not great.

Jakob Neilsen has done an excellent usability analysis of the Kindle 2, so I’ll just add a few of my own notes here.

The e-ink screen, while much better for reading than a backlit color LCD screen, still feels a bit like reading your books on an Etch-a-Sketch. There’s something that feels a little too “computer screen” about it, especially when I set it next to even the cheapest paperback book and compare ease-of-reading experiences.

The keyboard feels confusing — I rarely need to “search” a book, I usually do my reading in a linear manner. This feature would be better delivered as a slide-out keyboard or touch-screen keyboard.

4. Book covers are a lost branding opportunity.

One of the great built-in marketing systems for books are their covers — people see what you’re reading and they can note it down for themselves, ask you about it, use it as an excuse to strike up a flirtatious conversation, whatever.

The leather kindle book covers look great, but they don’t tell the world a single word about what I’m reading.

5. Where are the libraries?

The iTunes Store has successfully convinced users that they should pay near-CD prices for music that they cannot resell, and it looks like this expectation has already been set successfully for Kindle users with hardly any debate.

But libraries are another matter. These institutions play vital roles in learning and the community, and it is overdue to have them included in this platform. Imagine being able to access the Library of Congress, or the catalog of your local library branch, from Whispernet! There is a huge opportunity here that Amazon is missing — Kindle for Libraries could be one of the items that pushes the Kindle towards being the e-book standard. As it is, the libraries are already figuring out for themselves how to integrate the Kindle into their borrowing communities, and Amazon seems confused about how to leverage the powerful distribution channel of the local library.

If Amazon wants the Kindle to be the e-book standard, they need to pay  careful attention to how they fit into the current book ecosystem. They’re moving in the right direction, but they need to be making overtures to libraries and existing bibliophiles to show them the path towards the Kindle augmenting (and eventually replacing) their existing paper libraries.