What Amazon's ebook strategy really means

I largely agree with the analysis in this essay, but I believe the book market can be more significantly disrupted than is currently being suggested. Here are the significant changes I see:

- Screen technology will improve so that the distinction between e-paper and conventional displays becomes irrelevant. I really think the retina display on the iPad is good enough for most people in most situations, and that the iPad will be a significant rival to the Kindle in the ebook market.

- Currently ebook readers are very limited in what they can display, due to their display technology and limited processing power. This limitation will disappear (see above -- the iPad)

- When the above occur there is no need for a special ebook format. An ebook is just a website. We have a huge investment already in creating websites which makes the cost of doing so virtually zero. Creating a book will require far fewer people (maybe an editor, some marketing assistance, and a few days of a graphic designer's time).

- Once we realise that an ebook is just a website, we can get away from the idea that a book is a single homogenous entity. Why not sell a chapter at a time, and use the feedback to improve subsequent chapters, in the same way we use A/B testing (or hopefully, bandit algorithms [http://mynaweb.com -- my startup]) to improve sites? Why not sell multimedia packages of text, screencasts, etc for technical books? (This already happens.) This gets away from the stupid model of paying advances that publishers currently use.

- People will need a discovery mechanism, but we already many of these for the Internet in general. Maybe new ones specialised to books will emerge. In this more open world it will be harder for anyone to get a monopoly.

So, what have I missed?

There's enough ideological fervor about reading that someone is likely to provide this service for free.

Har. Nice article and a well-made argument. However I suspect that the big 6 are going to accept a world without DRM the same way as the MPAA and RIAA before them: kicking, screaming and fighting until the last breath to prevent anyone from staunching the massive gaping wounds they've inflicted on themselves.

In an ideal world, a world where media companies do what's best for themselves and their customers, I think publishers would act as you've predicted, for the reasons you've said. But instead I'd wager they'll standardise on some other format, or maybe a few (incompatible, of course) formats, announce some token partnerships with uninspiring hardware manufacturers, and generally mill about without any kind of strategy.

Meanwhile Amazon starts quietly disintermediating its way through the publishers themselves with its self-publishing programme. It starts to look pretty compelling, especially with mushrooming ebook sales. A few medium-big authors make the jump and start crowing about their awesome royalty rates. Publishers freak the hell out. The standard ebook price drops to $5. Repeat until everyone else is out of business.

Frankly, I think the only hope is an indie renaissance a la Bandcamp and the recent wave of DRM-free comedy. A compelling online publishing startup that knows how to appropriately wield its "we're not Amazon" cred could get some serious traction. Most authors I know are pretty savvy, and extremely wary of an Amazon monopsony. Unfortunately, they have to go where the money is, and the available options seem to be dwindling.

Ahem: apropos that 2007 post of mine, I will stand right behind it. Back in March 2007, it was right on the nail.

In case you've forgotten:

- In March 2007, most book titles from the big six were not available as ebooks at all.

- Kindle did not exist. (Launched November 2007)

- Those ebooks that were available were usually priced at the same, or higher than the equivalent paper edition "in order to avoid cannibalizing sales".

- We had a systematic problem with proliferating, rival ebook file formats: ePub wasn't a standard yet (not until September 2007 - that blog entry was from March '07), Mobipocket was still out there and competing with weird shit like Aportis Doc and iSilo for the PalmOS market, Microsoft was still performing CPR on .LIT format, and so on.

- Sales of ebooks amounted to less than 0.5% of the total sales of books. The big six were ignoring them, basically.

- The iPhone as an app platform did not exist. (The original iPhone was announced on January 9th, 2007, but was to only run web apps. The app store lay in the future.) Android didn't launch for another year, and the multitouch big-screen smartphone (capable of running an ebook reader app) simply did not exist.

- Cheap ebook reader devices ... are still a minority pursuit today, even though the price has pushed down to just under $99; the real breakthrough has been the [free] ebook apps for Android and iOS which turn every smartphone into a potential ebook reader. Back in March 2007, a typical e-ink ebook reader cost around $399 (something like the Sony PRS-505 or the Irex Iliad) and the nearest thing to a smartphone you could buy had buttons and a stylus. Not to mention an eye-stabbingly bad screen (anyone else remember having a Treo 650 with a 320x320 pixel display and being so happy because it was an improvement over what they had before?).

I will plead guilty to not having predicted the disruptive effect of iPhone apps in March 2007, sold from an app store that Steve Jobs had pretty much ruled out. How about you?

I've considered it, but automating all formatting is still troublesome and dealing with documents written in Word, of all things, is already a mess.