International Law

How Disruptive an Innovation is Kindle?

Image via CrunchBase

Bob Sutton writing at his website wonders about how disruptive the Kindle technology is.  Here are his thoughts, after seeing more of his associate sales on Amazon be Kindle books.

"The new forthcoming version of the Amazon Kindle has got pretty good reviews.  Predicting the future is impossible, but I saw one possible scenario when I looked at my sales as an Amazon Associate for this month (I am not getting rich off this, but the hundred or so bucks a month that I earn is nice and I enjoy spending it on Amazon). 

Of the six books that people bought by connecting to Amazon through Work Matters yesterday, four were for Kindles. 

And, looking at the month to date (through February 14th), people bought 39 traditional books and 11 for Kindles.  This is horrible sample to base any decision on, but it is instructive to ask "suppose this is the future?" 

As science fiction William Gibson once wrote (if I have this right), "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed." 

Sutton doesn't explicit state it, but the Kindle to reading books is as the one click button was to buying books.  It took Amazon awhile, but eventually its one click technology turned book buying into an impulse buy, with unfortunately a long wait for the product.

Kindle makes the booking buying experience even faster: one click on Amazon, and download whenever, wherever.  Further, it turns books into software - new editions can treated like updates.  Minor revisions are free, but you pay for major revisions.

I predicted that the text book industry would be the first to be revolutionized by the Kindle, but not in the way you might think.  The text book market is hard because of vigorous resale market for used text books - which just tells you that the students were only renting the books in the first place.  With Kindle and digit rights management, you have the ability as the publisher to either sell or rent the textbook to the student.  The used text book market should be destroyed by Kindle.

Read more about Kindle: Amazon's Wireless Reading Device

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on February 16, 2009 (boomark / email).