Kindle for IPhone/iPod Touch: Dominance is Within Reach
Well, if "ebooks are a big part of the Grand Unified Apple Media Strategy, and have been from the beginning", as I said about a year ago in this blog, it is past time Apple made their move. Time, tide and Amazon.com waits for no man, not even Steve Jobs. A game-changing move by Amazon has put them within reach of utter dominance in the ebook field. If Apple intends to do anything there, they'd best do it now.
Amazon.com's release this week of the Kindle app for iPhone and iPod Touch has brought the massive Kindle library to the Apple core constituency, and the Apple faithful are holding the door open and waving welcoming banners.
Amazon.com shares in large measure Apple's "good guy" image, and Jeff Bezos is a CEO in the Jobsian mold — charismatic, visionary, and willing to take a risk when the potential rewards are high. Even so, the CouchGuy thought the Kindle was a misstep for the company. Why in the world would a company that makes money from delivering anything you can imagine to anyone who desires it want to create and sell hardware? Far better, methinks, to keep that "everything, anywhere" theme going and carry over utter dominance in the physical bookselling realm to ebooks by using your muscle to make ebooks available to everyone on any device. To me, the Kindle looked too expensive and impractical to be a mass market device. I couldn't believe that the really smart people at Amazon.com were counting on hardware-locked ebooks alone. As it turns out, they were not.
Perhaps Bezos and his team had this in mind all along, or perhaps they simply came around to the idea that the Kindle itself was not going to provide the market penetration that the iPhone and iPod Touch already had. I rather suspect the latter, as the new Kindle iPhone/iPod Touch app has the smell of something cooked up when Amazon realized, just before the release of Kindle 2, that there were just too many Apple handhelds already out there, and that too many people were not inclined to buy an expensive one-trick pony when they could get what they wanted in ebooks from a device almost everyone already owns.
The structure to buy and view ebooks on Apple's handhelds quickly and easily was already beginning to pick up speed. Stanza is certainly a great app with growing ties to a host of sources of good reading, and eReader Pro is a great piece of software, if not as conveniently connected to electronic bookstores. But a really deep and broad library of easy-to-buy hot titles wasn't there for those apps. It took Amazon.com to provide that, and now they have made that library available to those who (like the CouchGuy) aren't about to buy an expensive dedicated device to do one thing when the Apple device I already own does that and so much more.
Not that the Kindle hardware doesn't have a solid niche market. For those who want to spend the money, it is a lovely substitute for a hardback book, capable of being taken almost everywhere the book itself can go. (The CouchGuy isn't brave enough to take one into the bath with him, but then he wouldn't do that with a prized hardback edition, either.) Indeed, the Kindle suffers from some of the handicaps hardback books have, too. It can't be read in the dark, it isn't really very convenient to carry, and it doesn't do color or moving pictures.
The Kindle's best advantage over print is a big one, though — it is the Omni-Book. Whatever book you want to read, it can become, in a matter of minutes. Indeed, the lifetime cellular wireless connection that allows purchasing books instantly anytime, anywhere is enormously compelling to a compulsive reader like the CouchGuy. But even for me, it isn't compelling enough to get me to lay out that kind of cash when I already have something that is almost as good for reading and a heck of a lot more useful in at least 999 other ways. (I think I have nearly that many apps on my iPod Touch, anyway...)
Those who loudly cry that they wouldn't be caught dead reading from the iPhone's smaller screen — well, that's why there's a Kindle. You want to pay the premium and carry one more device, you can have the size. But despite the minority who say that size is all that matters, I expect the iPhone reading experience is plenty good enough for most folks. After all, many people said they'd never use an iPhone to surf the web for much the same reason — and yet website statistics show that Mobile Safari has become a major player among browsers in record time.
(We won't even talk about what an Apple release of a slightly larger iPod Touch device — say the size of a common paperback book or a DVD case — would unleash. I cannot imagine that they won't go there, sooner or later. Probably sooner.)
Amazon.com would have been foolish indeed to bet it all on just Kindle hardware purchasers alone. By expanding their reach to other portable devices (starting with the most popular and universal portable devices around capable of creating anything close to a Kindle-like experience) puts Amazon.com just a few steps from dominance, and most of those steps are really easy to fix with a tweak or two. If Apple had notions of dominating ebooks like they dominate music, they may be too late.
Amazon has the library needed to attract a broad audience. The iPod Touch/iPhone software can potentially make that library pay off with sales far greater than the Kindle alone could generate. Indeed, I expect that sales to iPhone/iPod Touch users will dwarf those to Kindle owners in a very short period of time.
The Kindle app needs some tweaking in terms of presentation and features as well. The wide page margins make the pages look a little goofy and cause anything rendered in the larger font sizes to justify poorly. Amazon's software people need to look at Stanza a little more closely to see how it should be done.
But what Amazon must have for the Kindle Store if they want it to truly be unbeatable is a more convenient way of buying books from the iPhone/iPod Touch itself. The Kindle Store is not all that easy to navigate and purchase from, even on a normal desktop or laptop computer screen — not in comparison to the iTunes purchasing experience, anyway. Apple is the Grand Guru of making human/computer interfacing easy and compelling. Amazon couldn't even come close to iTunes while selling downloadable music that was cheaper and without DRM restrictions. Why? iTunes is fun and easy to use.
Delivery on the Kindle Store is fine — as soon as you open the Kindle app, anything purchased that has not yet been downloaded is moved to your iPhone in a jiffy. Purchasing — not so much. When you move the web-based Kindle Store to the small iPhone screen — well, even the intuitive and simple pinch and stretch and scroll of Mobile Safari can't make it work. At best, it is frustrating and tiresome to navigate the Kindle Store in Mobile Safari. Often, it is downright dangerous to your pocketbook, as it is far too easy to accidentally hit a 1-Touch purchase button while you are just trying to pinch open a page to be large enough to read the text. People aren't going to put up with that.
Apple's terms and conditions for iPhone apps apparently prohibits apps that directly enable purchase and download media files of any sort. Too bad. The existing Amazon.com iPhone app is a (barely) adequate interface for searching out and purchasing, and you can search for Kindle Store goods there — but purchasing is disabled.
There is a way around this, however. Apple cannot prevent Amazon from opening a mobile-formatted Kindle Store that is accessible from the web using Mobile Safari. The Kindle app already downloads new purchases automatically — all you need is a cleaner way to search, browse and buy, and that can be done with a web interface optimized for the iPhone screen.
However Amazon approaches the problem, they must solve it to sew up the market. What has made the iPhone App Store such an incredible success is ease of use. Yes, the App Store can be improved — but it is still light years ahead of any other similar purchasing interface. The ability to buy on impulse drives sales like nothing else. Marketing professionals have known this for decades, but no one has put it into practice for downloadable products as successfully as Apple.
Apple could still beat Amazon in this space, but it would have to move fast, decisively and ruthlessly to do so. If they don't already have deals with most of the major publishers in the works, it is probably too late. Unless...
Apple could do what they did with audiobooks and embrace that which is already in place. Amazon.com owns Audible.com, which is already Apple's official iTunes supplier for audiobooks. If Apple were to give the same status to Amazon's Kindle Store, and incorporate Kindle Store purchasing through iTunes and a co-branded Kindle app — well, that would work out very, very nicely for everyone — Apple, Amazon and — especially — the consumer.
There you go — the CouchGuy finds the Best of All Possible Worlds for you yet again! Apple, Amazon, readers everywhere — you don't have to thank me. But if your gratitude runs in the direction of iTunes and Amazon Gift Certificates, what kind of ungracious CouchGuy would I be to say no?
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