The Book is Dead, Long Live the Kindle App
12th February 2011
In Amazon’s bid to cement its reputation as the premier eReader authority, Jeff Bezos and his cohorts may have just hit the kind of home run that turns noncommittal sideline spectators into bona fide devotees. I’m talking about all the people who, to this point, have watched the explosion in popularity of eReaders with the cold disinterest that audiophile record collectors have for mp3 players. I’m talking about people like me, who have been waiting for something to really sell them on the notion that eBooks might be worth their while.
Amazon’s free Kindle apps do that. And its development is a cunning move that suggests Amazon is not in the Kindle hardware biz, but in the eBook game.
When I was a young man I would shop for pants based on whether the back pockets were big enough to hold a substantial paperback. I carried a book with me everywhere I went. Now, however, these are no longer considerations: Every pair of pants has a pocket big enough for my Droid X, which has the Kindle and Nook and Aldiko apps on it. So I always have a ton of books with me.
When the Kindle first came out, I got one for my wife, and she loved it, but I couldn’t see getting one for myself. Hundreds of dollars for a device that wouldn’t fit in a pocket and only did one thing? Couldn’t see it. Then Amazon came out with its free Kindle apps. I now have a Kindle app on my Mac, on my PC, and on my phone. They work really really well for reading — unlike some people, I have no problem reading for long stretches on a computer screen — and the PC and Macintosh apps will accept e-books in the correct format even when I didn’t get them through Amazon.
I used to buy a lot of fiction through Amazon, but no more. Let’s see: hardback for $16, or paperback for $8, and wait until the UPS guy shows up — and then figure out where to put it amongs the 4,000 books my wife and I already have … or give it to the library, which means I no longer have it available if I want to read it again. Or $5 for the Kindle version, which is available immediately and forever on whatever device I happen to have available at the time, and no worry about where to store them. Not a hard choice.
I can see a circumstance under which I would buy actual paper books: Big ones with pictures and charts, or reproductions of old-time works, or something like that. But regular fiction/nonfiction books? Nope, e-books for me from now on.