Kindle Fire and multimedia eBooks

[Tom]

No big surprises from today's launch - except the price $199 is $100 lower than expected. But since it relies on the Amazon's Cloud, which is not available in the UK, it will not be available in the UK in the near future. Big pity. But today's launch set me looking for examples of multimedia eBooks. Jean-Pierre Isbouts wrote a book called
From Moses to Muhammad which sells on Amazon for £14.00 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moses-Muhammad-Jean-Pierre-Isbouts/dp/1450017509). He has also done a multimedia enhanced eBook version which sells for the iPad (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/from-moses-to-muhammad-enhanced/id409918977?mt=11) for £8.99. I would get it if I had an iPad but you can see what it looks like on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ntgCZsPx40). It looks a little clumsy to me, given the National Geographic quality of the photography, but I like the mix of text and video and I like the price and I like the thought of 'owning' it without losing shelf space. From an author's perspective there are other attractions (1) no second-hand book sales to compete with new sales (2) a much-higher royalty, depending on what deal the author has struck (3) no need to put up an extra bookshelf. I put 'owning' in quotation marks because I cannot re-sell the book or even give it away. And when Apple goes bust the book disappears. COULD Apple go bust. Yes: very few companies live for 100 years.
Note: Enhanced eBook is gaining ground as the category name for this type of product.

[Will]

It's a decent looking product, price point is very good, and will be a winner and able to compete with iPad I think. Video of presentation here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15096655) by the way.

One thing though: I don't want the company taking control of my content... they could well be gone in 20 years. In 2000 AOL was seen as indestructible company, in 1995 Netscape etc... look at those now. All my iTunes videos/music is on my PC or external HDD. I like that. I just copy it to new PC, also on external HDD... I will have all my books on my Kindle I'll ever read so not too worried about that, but really don't like the Cloud model for content.

Would I get a Kindle Fire... maybe not. I think I'd still choose an iPad due to my being currently tied in to the iTunes store/Apple model. I've an iPhone/Apple TV and it all works nicely together. I buy a fair few TV series, and HD movies on iTunes also. I like it. I will stick to Amazon for the books though, but my Kindle is fine for now - thought may upgrade in the future as needed...

[Tom]

Apple has the knack of turning customers into lovers of its products so maybe they will people will not move away from the iPad. But I can see every school kid needing a $199 eReader and parents thinking the Kindle is better suited to their needs than a luxury product with a reputation in the games market. Ditto students and ditto the man on the bus to Clapham. My guess is that Amazon will do very well with the Kindle Fire and even better with the eInk/touchscreen version they have been working on for years. There is no possibility of 'an iPad killer' on the horizon, any more than downmarket cars can kill off upmarket cars. There is room for both. But after posting the above comment I began to read that nonfiction enhanced eBooks are not flourishing, yet.

[Tom]

PCW has a good review (http://www.pcworld.com/article/240801/amazon_kindle_fire_first_impressions_solid_but_lim ited.html) of the Kindle Fire's limitations but there is no reason for them to limit the success of the device. My impression is that Amazon wants to be the GM of the tablet market, in the sense of having a specialist tablet for every level and niche. Perhaps by this time next year, there will be a tablet which comes free with a 1-year subscription to Amazon Prime [quite possibly yesterday's Fire] and, at the other end of the scale, a Cadillac Kindle with colour eInk, USB port for keyboard, decent camera, 500 gig of memory, 3G, Skype, slot for making toast, automatic back-scratcher etc.

[Will]

I definitely see Amazon succeeding, no doubts about that. But not at the cost to the iPAD. They do deserve a pat on the back for being a retailer who positioned themselves well for the future, and for when retail dries up a little - not that it ever will fully dry up. People will always buy DVDs/books in physical format.

That 8GB limitation is pretty harsh. That's just (over) two HD movies, or six to seven regular format ones. Not counting music and such like... One thing that's quite worrying from that review: "I was startled to see how visible the touchscreen grid was at certain angles; some things we just shouldn't be able to notice."

[Tom]

I think that the plan for the Fire is to be a bottom-of-the-range Kindle which can be given away with a Prime subscription. A weeny bit of RAM will be enough for this - so that there are lots of extras to be packed into the higher-end models now in the pipeline.
I have not seen Bezos speak before. He did not seem to be much of an idealist (!) but he did seem to be a hard-headed business man, even a chess-player with a long term strategy. The Google boys, by contrast, seem to have perhaps too much idealism and fancy for their own good. Jobs has idealism and business nous in equal measure. So my guess is that in the medium term it is Amazon which has the most growth potential. Watch out Walmart.

[Will]

Jobs also has a reality distortion field around him.

[Tom]

Nothing can detract from the fact that he built the world's largest company (briefly) in his own lifetime. Maybe we all need some reality distortion.

[Will]

I'm not knocking anything; I am a huge fan of his. But there's no doubting he could sell snow to the Eskimos. It goes back to some of his presentations, where the things he was pushing were kind of mediocre - you know, the boring aspects of products, shuffle feature of songs and suchlike - and somehow people applauded the loudest at those moments. Hence the 'reality' distortion field aspect.

[tomjeatt]

All my iTunes videos/music is on my PC or external HDD. I like that. I just copy it to new PC, also on external HDD... I will have all my books on my Kindle I'll ever read so not too worried about that, but really don't like the Cloud model for content.

This is a very interesting point Will. I'm not sure how it would work, but I'd only be comfortable with paid-for items living in the cloud if it could be synced with a folder in the same way as Dropbox. On the other hand, if iTunes moves to a subscription model, that becomes a whole different issue because you are only licensing content. I pay £10 a month for Spotify - which allows local storage so you can listen even without WiFi/3G - which has nearly every album on it that I want (no Peter Gabriel, no Warp). If Spotify go belly up I haven't lost anything really, and I've gained a lot. Any my entire mind-set is different - it's the same as paying a monthly subscription to Lovefilm.

[David]

On the other hand, if iTunes moves to a subscription model, that becomes a whole different issue because you are only licensing content. I pay £10 a month for Spotify - which allows local storage so you can listen even without WiFi/3G - which has nearly every album on it that I want (no Peter Gabriel, no Warp). If Spotify go belly up I haven't lost anything really, and I've gained a lot. Any my entire mind-set is different - it's the same as paying a monthly subscription to Lovefilm.

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to own physical copies of any media - it just takes up space. I predict that most services will move to a subscription model like Spotify, with everything available to all subscribers and where the media itself exists only in the cloud.

[Tom]

Spotify have individual contracts with artists and, one assumes, pay royalties according to the number of times a track is played. This could be a good deal for book authors and may even give publishers and agents a chance of earning a few crusts. Amazon are making Spotify-type deals with libraries which seems unfair to me - they should be made with authors or publishers. Since Amazon are moving towards a monopoly position in the 'book' publishing industry we can expect big profits and bad practices: if they have the opportunity then company law almost forces them to behave in this way. Amazon are killing off (1) bookshops eg Borders (2) publishers (3) competitors (Barnes and Noble was up for sale before Amazon Fired the new Kindle at the Nook.

[Tom]

MORE PREDICTIONS PLEASE! The first motor cars were designed to resemble horse-drawn carriages. From Moses to Muhammad which you can see at looks like on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ntgCZsPx40) is obviously conceived as printed page with bells and whistles. So what graphic form might a second generation enhanced eBook have? MORE PREDICTIONS PLEASE!

[Will]

The delight lies surely in the fact it could take, quite literally, any graphical form.

Whilst there might be a natural evolutions of design, in a similar way to how many web sites evolved to an almost Wordpress blog-style layout (per Web Designers Idea Book Volume 2 (http://dmdthebook.com/books/volume-2/)) you could end up with designs from multimedia-based styling themselves upon late 90s interactive CD-ROMs and webpages, to novel presentations, like that of say the Elements App (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At5zvd4lgSo) on the iPad/iPhone.

[Tom]

Thank you for both links. I can see a Wordpress-style working for books on smartphones and the Elements App is very well done.