The Kindle Con | Frontier Economy

The Kindle was indisputably one of the gadgets of the year, a fact underscored by the announcement by Amazon that during their peak Christmas sales period they sold more electronic books than physical ones(although this comparison must be tempered by noting that most of those electronic books were in fact free).

But for all of its current success as the leading platform for electronic books, there are many things that the Kindle only appears to do.

The Kindle doesn’t reproduce books. Any computer can reproduce books, just as any computer can reproduce any kind of digital information. In fact, the Kindle goes to extreme lengths to not reproduce books. Rather than a printing press, it’s a device built to make sure that only one printing press works, safely stored in Amazon’s data centers.

The Kindle doesn’t distribute books. Whenever you buy a book for your Kindle, it’s the Internet what’s carrying the weight of making sure the words reach you. As communication devices go, your Kindle is a step back from pretty much every other Internet-capable portable device you have, because it heavily restricts who you can connect to, and for what.

What the Kindle is, though, is a rather nice display device for certain kinds of content. It has a convenient form factor, its usability isn’t bad, and has workable connectivity hardware. But Amazon refuses to sell it to you without a full set of handcuffs, chains, and other constraining contrivances designed to make sure that, of the infinite ways in which you could use it, you are only “allowed” a few. Of course, those are limited almost exclusively to “buying things from Amazon.”

That the Kindle is a commercial success shows how long it takes for our habits to catch up with our technology. Before the Internet, when selecting, reproducing, and distributing texts required a significant infrastructure, our access to them was accordingly constrained. Getting a text to a reader involved, besides the author and the reader, a complex set of intermediate businesses, including editorials, printing shops, distributors, and bookstores.

Given the presence of the Internet, creating a copy of a text and distributing it requires… nothing. Zero. Of course, it still takes time and talent to create the original text, but no-one in the editorial and book-selling business, and certainly not Amazon, is in the business of writing. They are the middlemen, and middlemen very aware of the fact that most of the services they sell — selecting, reproducing, and distributing — can be obtained for free elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that since the Internet explosion, people have been reading more than at any other time — and no thanks to editorials, bookstores, or even Amazon.

The Kindle is Amazon’s attempt to lock readers into a pre-Internet, centralized, heavily mediated economic model for access to texts, through a nice piece of hardware that comes with a lot of strings attached. They aren’t the first to try this strategic move, and it probably will work for long enough to make financial sense. But the Kindle is a dead end in the long term, because it’s ultimately based on the premise of charging both readers and authors more in exchange for less.