Print Action - June 2009

Kindle, Amazon's related content store had more than 88,000 titles available for download – now above 275,000. The original Kindle, selling for US$399, featured a 6-inch display and a memory for 200 titles (without an upgrade), but was limited to sales within the United States because Amazon’s driving wireless network, known as Whispernet, only works in that country.

Then, backed by a Stephen King promotion, Kindle 2 arrived not so long ago in February 2009. Clearly, over the 18 months between version launches, Amazon focused Kindle 2 developments on improving battery life, which, relative to Kindle 1, was also 20 percent faster at page-refreshing and overall thickness was reduced from 0.8 to 0.36 inches. The Kindle 2 also had 2GB of internal memory, holding about 1,500 books (if anybody ever needed that many books).

Now Kindle DX is set to arrive not only with its 9.7-inch screen but also with the ability to display 16 shades of grey, helping out its 1,200 x 824-pixel resolution. This device, which will retail for around US$489, can also display PDF files natively. It is also the first Kindle to include an accelerometer for automatically rotating pages between landscape and portrait orientation.

The Kindle DX, however, does continue to face some serious limitations that, despite its large online popularity, may limit true market penetration in terms of replacing printed mediums. Apart from Kindle’s proprietary, restricted AZW book format (Amazon’s Digital Rights Management technology) and the unprotected Mobipocket MOBI format, the new reader also supports

downloaded via Amazone’s Sprint 3G data network – where Whispernet resides. (According to Amazon, it takes less than one minute for a book to be delivered wirelessly.) Despite knowing the challenges it faces with network distribution, Kindle readers are still only available in the United States because of the limits imposed by Whispernet and Sprint. There is as yet no agreements with cellular suppliers outside the U.S.

Publisher buy-in

In recent months, perhaps spurred on by the recent crushing of American newspapers, both The New York Times and Washington Post made significant announcements that they plan to offer newspaper subscriptions for Kindle DX users, and to offer discounted subscriptions in areas where there is no home delivery of these newspapers. That is a great model for extending the coverage of these papers. When can I get a copy of The Times (the real Times that is – in the UK), as I have no home delivery of this paper to where I live in the U.K.?

This potentially is a great opportunity for newspaper and magazine publishers to rethink their business models. Still the use of micro-payment models like that of i Tunes has been very allusive for these publishers. The Wall Street Journal in late May announced its plans to introduce such a payment model in the near future. The Kindle is also tied to the Wall Street Journal and top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times. Big-name magazine buy in for the Kindle comes from magazines like TIME, Atlantic

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Kindle DX with its 9.7-inch diagonal screen is better suited for newspaper and magazine formats, as big-name publishers like TIME, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal jump on board.

viewing of PDF documents. While this seems like a valuable file-format compromise, the use of PDF is somewhat restricting as it does not allow a document to re-flow easily to the format of the Kindle and has to be laid out specifically for the device. (Any content not purchased from the Amazon store first has to be converted into either a MOBI or PDF format before reading.)