Piracy May Be the Kindle DX's Savior

Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s (AMZN) upcoming E-book reader that has taken the original Kindle’s nearly prohibitive $359 price tag and bumped it up to an even more exorbitant $489 for good measure. Granted, the DX has one major improvement: a bigger screen that makes it suitable for textbooks, professional journal articles, and even newspapers. I’ve spent the last few days mulling over the future prospects of the new device, and up until a few hours ago my forecast was looking pretty grim. But then a lightbulb went off over my head: pirates are going to save the Kindle DX.

But before I get to that, let’s address why the Kindle DX is poised to fail.

The Newspaper Strategy

Three major newspapers have banded together for an experimental trial run on the Kindle DX, offering cheaper long-term subscriptions to customers in return for the fact that their distribution costs will be next to nothing. The newspaper angle might be attractive for a few people, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to sell many Kindle DX’s - at least, not without the newspapers subsidizing the device’s cost as part of a subscription plan. Over $500 after taxes, plus paying for the newspaper subscriptions themselves, for convenient access to content that is already available for free online? I just don’t see it happening.

Kindle DX As A Textbook Reader

The other big marketing angle for Amazon is that the Kindle DX is the ultimate textbook reader. This sounds great in principle: students won’t have to lug around massive tomes between classes, and their books may even be slightly cheaper to boot! Unfortunately, for anyone who has ever actually used a Kindle, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be as amazing as it sounds. Sifting through an E-book looking for a certain passage or image when you don’t know its exact page number (some call it ‘random access’) is a strange and unnatural experience. The Kindle sort of makes up for this by offering text search, but this is only helpful if there’s a proper name or unusual vocab term that you can remember in the passage.

But the Kindle’s real weakness is its highlighting and annotation functionality. In a real book, you can mark up your textbook and make notes to yourself in the margins. The Kindle lets you highlight and take notes, but the interface is painful to use with any kind of frequency - E-ink doesn’t lend itself well to quick navigation, nor does the Kindle’s joystick/button interface. From a student’s perspective, the Kindle is badly in need of a touchscreen. And while some students may initially grab the Kindle DX as soon as it comes out for the ‘cool’ factor, practicality (and cost) will rule it out for most of them.

Unless..

Pirates To The Rescue

College textbooks are really expensive. As in, $300+ per quarter (a small fortune for someone with little to no income) for a set of books that you may only occasionally look at and will have no use for three months down the line. If you’re thrifty you can sell those books back to your school and get doubly screwed when they fork over a laughably small return. Selling them online through services like Chegg usually yields better results, but for whatever reason most students still don’t use them.

So why don’t these students, renowned pirates as they are, simply copy the books? Well, textbook piracy already exists. If you know where to look online, you can find many novels and textbooks scanned in their entirety as PDFs. But until now, pirated textbooks were more trouble than they were worth. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain for obvious reasons. The alternative, printing out hundreds of pages at a time, results in an unwieldy mess that also stands out like a sore thumb whenever you pull it out in class.

The Kindle DX changes that. Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook. Sure, students will have to deal with the usability issues I raised above, like slow highlighting. But these books, frustrating as they might be, will be 100% free. That’s $300 per quarter in extra beer money. Most obstacles and morals fade quickly in the face of that much alcohol.

Now, this is an issue we’ve brought up before when the original Kindle came out, and it hasn’t really been a problem. But most of the books people have been buying up until now are available for a mere $9.99 from Amazon. For most people, the motivation simply isn’t there to figure out how to pirate a book. But when you’re faced with a price tag of around $70 per textbook there’s a far greater incentive to find a workaround. It’s easier to find pirated files on campus too - students will be surrounded by classmates using the exact same textbooks so there’s a better chance someone will have a pirated digital version. And there’s always the resident friendly geek down the hall ready to help with any tech support issues.

So the Kindle DX may wind up selling well to Amazon’s chagrin. Amazon is really in the business of selling ‘the blades’ - it cares more about selling books than it does about selling devices (this is why Amazon offers an E-book reader for the iPhone too). Then again, it might just work out for the company after all. Students may take the time to pirate expensive textbooks, shortchanging their publishers. But a New York Times Bestseller? Why, I’d save myself the trouble and just buy it for $9.99 off Amazon.

Original post

Comments

[imlaughing:]

You are kidding right?

You think somebody is going to spend $500 to buy a device to read a pdf that they stole. Are you not aware that computers are quite capable to displaying pdf documents?

May 10 07:44 PM

[John100:]

The point about how piracy may save Kindle is an interesting one that sort of makes some sense in a larger context. It is still kind of odd that it costs as much as a laptop for most consumers (not counting students subsidized by Amazon or schools).

If they indeed properly take care of tables, graphics, annotations, that would make this a very powerful tool for textbooks. The impact on traditional newspaper is less clear, unless Kindle can have a very low price point.

I don’t have a Kindle but checked one out from a friend. The screen is very neat and unlike most standard back-lit LCDs. If you get a chance, check it out. Kindle’s display is VERY cool and more comfortable for all-day reading.

In any case, it is awesome that there is another, larger screen, Kindle coming out. It is pretty exciting that Amazon is putting a ton of effort into revolutionizing and popularizing eBooks.

On the note about Amazon, I came across an interesting table that shows Amazon’s discounts in various categories.

It is at www.uberi.com

Maybe someone will find it useful too, or at least somewhat amusing…

May 11 02:09 AM

[raytayzmd:]

...they just get dumber and dumber!...the "Newspaper Strategy" argument presented is valid-- for anyone with tunnelvision!...on the other hand, anyone with an IQ greater than a gnat might realize that there are OPPORTUNITIES:

"On the internet, media companies have developed an unfortunate habit of destroying – or allowing others to destroy – value in their products. So when a device comes along that promises to create value for media businesses, it is worth celebrating. It leads to a different, and altogether happier, set of problems: how best to capture the value created, and how to share out the goodies among the various players in the digital media value chain.
"
...from:

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/46b...

..."pirates to the rescue"????...they just made the announcement and ALREADY you think they need someone to rescue the Kindle?...everybody dissed the original Kindle...yet its sales are far exceeding even Amazon's expectations...and they haven't even begun to market the thing worldwide!...gosh, I guess SOMEBODY must like them for SOME reason!...oh, and then there's a hundred dollar price difference for the bigger Kindle...why, someone might have to go without a couple of tanks of gas or maybe pass on a few frappachinos to make up that difference...I suggest going to the Kindle website and study ALL of the features and then TRY to apply just a LITTLE creativity to come up with the WEALTH of possibilities a Kindle would offer a student...just IMAGINE having ALL of your textbooks plus ALL of your reference books at your finger tips...IMAGINE being able to search through ALL of them as well as through the entire Kindle store AND the web for information....IMAGINE being able not only to add annotations to text but able also to edit, delete, and export your notes at your lesiure...IMAGINE being able to highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use...IMAGINE future development -- perhaps a day when you will be able to search for and check out books out from the library without leaving your home...and maybe not having to worry about returning them because they simply expired on your device...wouldn't THAT be nice?...when I think back to my college days, I literally could spend all day writing about what I COULD have accomplished if the thing had been available then!

May 11 01:02 PM

[raytayzmd:]

...I also came across this post on the Wired website:

"The new kindle is awesome. What’s even more green is a) the amount of books it saves us from and b) nobody really talks about the publishing side - authors can publish directly to kindle. If you take a look at something like Ian McGrady’s book, it’s totally hypermodern: a guy read a blogpost about The Gospel According to John, then got the text from WikiSource, then posted the new book to Kindle. Kindle readers may actually be a more elite audience because authors with very specific messages may be able to reach their hyperintelligent audiences with hyperlinked, whisper-net books."

...think about the possibilities...students might be able to make money publishing their own study guides geared to specific courses at specific colleges or by specific professors...and professors may be able to write their own textbooks to suit their own needs and then be able to modify them according to classroom experience...the possibilities are simply mind boggling...and I'm not even bothing to mention the thousands of acres of forests that will be spared in consequence...or the vast quantities of air and water pollution spewed from paper and ink manufacturers...etc, etc, etc...

May 11 01:42 PM