Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

After my post last month on my initial impressions of the Kindle 2, i’ve continued living with the device and working it.

At first I was fairly frustrated, but then I realized that the current Kindle product is really only intended for a fairly limited set of use cases and target users. The problem is that when people hear the words “e-book”, the first thing that comes to mind is “electronic version of the printed book”. The kindle is definitely not about to fully replace the printed book, but what “Amazon Kindle” means right now in terms of “value” is “Most recent hardcover releases available at $9.99 in electronic format, saving you $10+ over the book’s print list price.”

The Kindle’s persistent keyboard, which is one of the most incongruous features that people notice about it, could perhaps be explained by the Palm roots of several members of the Lab 126 team. (Lab 126 is the secretive Amazon company in Cupertino which designed the original Kindle, and Kindle 2. Looks like they’re having a growth spurt as Amazon continues to invest in Kindle development.)

So what’s missing from the World of Kindle?

1. The Kindle “Product Petting Zoo“

The Apple Retail Stores have done a tremendous job of evangelizing and promoting Apple’s products, while also providing customer education, troubleshooting, and instant (or near-instant) replacement of defective products. The power of this approach became apparent to me not long after the iPhone launch, when I headed into an Apple Store and saw two tables packed with people trying with the iPhones set out for people to take for a “test drive”. Those tables full of people could only help to close a sale.

When I recently took my Kindle with me on vacation, I was out in the sun reading a book on my Kindle. People would come over, ask me “Is that the Amazon Kindle? I’ve never seen one before…”, check out the Kindle, hear my thoughts on the gadget, and then would end up saying “I’ll probably go order one when I get home.” If they could have walked down the street and immediately bought one at the Apple Store, some of them probably would have.

But without their retail stores (and they definitely don’t have enough consumer electronics products on the market to justify their own stores) , what can Amazon do? Barnes and Noble, Borders, and other booksellers wouldn’t be interested in putting out a display of a device which undermines their future book sales, even if they do get a cut of the $270 purchase price. Which brings us to….

2. The Kindle and public libraries

This is a natural fit for so many reasons. If Amazon was able to give a single Kindle to every public library in America (a total of 123,129 libraries in 2009 according to the ALA), with access to all of the Kindle catalog of books for free, they could spark a huge amount of demand among patrons to use the device in the library or check it out and try at home.

One library tried this very experiment, which was embraced enthusiastically by the library’s patrons. “The [Kindle] units are never in the building unless they are waiting to be picked up…nothing but positive” feedback according to a March 2009 ALA article quoting the library’s assistant director.

3. Rich APIs for developers

Amazon does have their Digital Text Platform, which allows authors to self-publish books on Amazon via a web form. This is a simple platform for publishing books in the Kindle Store, which allows anyone to upload their own PDF or text file and make it available for sale (albeit under Amazon’s somewhat murky pricing policy, which apparently gives authors only 35% of the list price of their book [regardless of any discounts Amazon may offer in the Kindle Store]).

However, this is the same company that built web service powerhouses like EC2 and S3. They can offer more, and deeper integration into existing publishing systems. By offering a rich API for their Kindle publishing system, Amazon could allow other publishing systems to make it easy for their users to sell content within the Kindle Store. Imagine if web publishing systems like Derek Powazek’s MagCloud or Blurb.com had a 1-click “Publish this book for sale on the Kindle Store” option. This could be a great pipeline to bring more indie content into the Kindle Store.

4. The “iTunes for books” Kindle desktop application

The reason Amazon started with a Internet/cloud based perspective on books is the same reason that Apple started on the desktop — it’s the environment that they’ve already been developing in, and know the best. Speculation has already begun on Kindle for the Desktop, and it only makes sense that Amazon would do the same. iTunes was where Apple began their control of the online music space, and at some point Amazon will have to enter onto the desktop as well.

By having a simple desktop application that supported all of the same document formats as the Amazon Kindle (Kindle, PDF, TXT, Audible, Mobipocket, PRC), Amazon could allow you to organize your e-books on your computer. Supporting the same type of last-page-read synchronization that already exists between the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle iPhone app would make the reading process even more transparent as the user moves between platforms to read books.

5. Embracing the indie authors

Steve Jobs did a great job of reaching out to the indie music labels early on in the development of the iTunes Store, and Amazon would wise to do the same with micropublishers. I’ve seen a few examples of how micropublishing has started to succeed — the book Four Steps to the Epiphany has been cropping up a lot on the blogs and desks of my colleagues who help shape the future of the web. The publisher of this well-reviewed, $40 book? Cafepress.com. The notion of what a “publisher” does is changing fast, and Amazon could be on the leading edge of publishing if they continue to aggressively evolve their Kindle platform.