Kindle, Reconsidered

A while ago, I made my case (LINK) against the Kindle and its ilk. The ranks of e-book readers continue to swell, with the iPad being one of the splashier entrants. Interestingly, book publishers were among the greatest cheer leaders for the iPad (they dubbed it the "Jesus Pad") largely because they hoped that it would deliver them from the clutches of Amazon. Amazon has dominated the e-book market and its pricing power is so great that the $9.99 price for a new book became the de facto standard. Publishers hate this and indeed believe that this price is unsustainable. One of the key reasons that they were willing to sign up with Apple is that Apple is willing to allow publishers a say in the price of the e-book.

The emergence of all the new readers has had the predictable effect of dropping prices on existing readers. The regular Kindle is down to $189 and I am sure a $99 Kindle is not far away (Christmas?). And in many ways, this is mostly what Amazon expected - they don't have much interest in dominating the e-book reader market - all they care about is e-book sales. A clever part of this strategy has been to have readers for Kindle format books on every popular device, including the iPad. The most recent Kindle app has been for Android powered phones, which is what I use. This is really the trigger for this post.

Despite not owning a Kindle, I have lots of Kindle books in my account - the explanation is simple: my BIL in India uses my Amazon account to purchase books for his Kindle. So, as soon as I downloaded the (free) Kindle app for my Android phone, I had immediate access to a whole bunch of books. I started innocently enough - browsing through a few pages of Born To Run. Then I started on an Harlan Coben ("Caught") novel, not really expecting to actually go through with it. But before I knew it, I was hooked and the quick page changes required ceased to be an issue. As Bezos has famously claimed, the physical form of the "book" vanished. What remained was quick and convenient access to the book I was reading, never having to remember where I had left off. I finished that book in short order, then another one by Greg Iles ("The Devils Punchbowl") and briefly flirted with "90 Minutes in Heaven" before deciding that it was too cult-ish for me. Started a Jonathan Kellerman novel ("Bones") only to realize that I had already read it (most of these thrillers are like confections - high in excitement, low in retention) and have since moved onto a Jeffery Deaver book ("The Broken Windows"). All in the space of less than 10 days.

So am I a convert? Hardly - many of my beefs about the Kindle are still relevant, but the minor epiphany here is that what I was railing against was the notion that e-books are superior to books, magazines, and newspapers as we know them. I also didn't believe that the reading experience would measure up. But in reality, if the material is interesting enough, it almost doesn't matter what the medium is - this should have been obvious earlier. Then the undeniable convenience takes over. But, another caveat is needed - the Android app is not the first Kindle app I have tried. I had previously tried it on my laptop and on our iTouch. In both cases, I didn't read more than a couple of pages. What is different this time is that my phone is always accessible - I was already carrying it and now being able to have immediate access to my book made a lot of sense. I would often kill time playing some inane game on my phone - being able to read a book is so much better. So, there you have it - e-books do have their place!