Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s 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 unwieldly 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.
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depends on the subject
Maybe this is connected to Jeff Bezos’ recent selling of Amazon stocks? See:
http://www.thed...know-something/
The original premise of this article was that Piracy of textbooks would be an element in the landscape that would increase the purchase rate of the Kindle.
It think it will help slightly – but there is a take on Textbook Piracy and the Kindle that I’m surprised nobody has brought up yet – The Kindle will make Piracy more difficult.
Right now, there is a large market (and growing) for PDFs of textbooks. PDF is a fairly open format that can be printed, read, or otherwise viewed on many platforms (including the Kindle DX)
Moving the data onto the AZW format will not eliminate piracy, but it will make it inconvenient enough to be an outlier.
Textbook Publishers who are currently having their textbooks scanned and OCR’d aren’t going to be at _more_ risk with the Kindle, as long as AZW isn’t trivial to break, and, in fact, they might have more protection – particularly if they make use of the added audio capability of the DX.
With that said, I’ve read around 60 books between my Original Kindle, K2, and Kindle-on-iphone (The kindle-on-iPhone is getting a lot of use, more than I would have ever guessed). The K2/OriginalKindle get a lot of workout while camping, at burning man, on the beach, or during picnics – anywhere outdoors where I’m planning on doing several hours of reading.
Reading on Laptops is painful because:
o I tend to get distracted by the Internet
o Hassle to carry laptop _everywhere, all the time_. I keep my laptop bag with my, but bringing it down to the breakfast table, or by the pool is kind of pain.
o Doesn’t work in a bright summer sun. Kindle actually works _better_ the brighter the light.
But, with all my kindle fanboy love, I have to emphatically state that it completely sucks for textbooks and technical books.
I’ll have to try the DX before stating a strong opinion, but I suspect it will have the same failing as the Kindle/K2:
o Page turning/Random access sucks – way too slow.
o Too low resolution, too few shades of gray for detailed diagrams.
I’d say 60-70% of textbooks can get by without color, as long as they have high resolution and about 64 shades of gray (16 doesn’t cut it, 32 might, 64 would probably be okay for that class of diagram that doesn’t need color)
Interesting enough, the elements that make tables/netbooks a poor substitute for a Kindle for light fiction reading (battery life, ability to read outdoors) – might not be as much a problem for textbook reading, in which you have more structured interaction.
I”m betting that the Touch Pads will give the Kindle a run for their money in the Textbook Department, but that the Kindle will continue to be a strong performer in the fiction arena.
If Kindle DX is lucky it will be able to survive on the same basis that made the first Playstation carve a market for it back in the early console war days.
Piracy, so yes I agree.
I’ve written 15 textbooks. I’m not rich by any means. Sure, they’re expensive to buy, but the market is small. Plus they’re much cheaper than college tuition. Most school charge between $2000 and $5000 for a course and they only cover 1/3rd of the material in a textbook.
If piracy continues to flourish, I’m not writing any more books. You can dream that somehow the Kindle is going to flourish because of piracy. Perhaps. But the information on it is going to get very stale if they don’t control piracy.
I’ve written 15 textbooks. I’m not rich by any means. Sure, they’re expensive to buy, but the market is small. Plus they’re much cheaper than college tuition. Most school charge between $2000 and $5000 for a course and they only cover 1/3rd of the material in a textbook.
If piracy continues to flourish, I’m not writing any more books. You can dream that somehow the Kindle is going to flourish because of piracy. Perhaps. But the information on it is going to get very stale if they don’t control piracy.
First, while I work at a university I don’t know the first thing about publishing. That said, could textbook writers publish direct with Amazon and save some of the costs of printing textbooks and the work the publishers today do? If the textbooks are sold electronically for 1/3 the cost of printed textbooks could the textbook writer make more money compared to traditional methods? I don’t have a clue.
Also–is the previous post correct in that you really need 64 gray scale and 16 shades is not enough for graphs, etc.? Thanks.
Wow what a rip off!!!! For about the same amount ($500) you could buy a cheap laptop and then put the pirated version of the textbook on there. Sure not quite as convenient but anytime you have a question you can just google it! Sounds like a rip to pay $500 so you can pay for newspapers which are already free!!!!
1) For the guy writing textbooks, please don’t write anymore. The world will stop spinning and we’ll all be thrown into space, but some how, I imagine we will make do.
2) Those arguing against textbook piracy should refocus their ire at the publishers charging $150 for a book which will not be used 16 weeks after purchase and loses 80% of it’s value when you leave the book store.
3) Also blame the universities for raising tuition every year, even when we’re in a recession. I know guys like “Bob” up there only care about their own pockets, but the students have to empty their wallets for everything under the sun.
haha…. i’m in college now..
and i pirate the good ole way… we just photocopy the whole damm book. cover and all.
the p/copy shop lady even gives us a bulk discount when a few of us do it together at once..
i’ve heard some of the guys sell their “second hand” pirated photocopied text books to juniors…
nuff said… kindle will fail..
I think you’re onto something regarding piracy & textbooks here. But pricing is even worse than you imagine.
$70 per textbook is pricing from the mid-90s – that’s what I paid the first time I went to university. When I returned to complete the degree in 2003, several textbooks were in the $180-$250 range. Each.
So, one Linear Circuits Analysis text + 1 Quantum Mechanics text ~= cost of a Kindle DX.
The same “random access” problem is for newspapers as well, and to me is nore critical.
For myself, and all the people I’ve seen, none would read the newspaper from headline to classified ads. We scan, then we read 10% or even less. It’s only made possible by true paper.
I own a SONY reader, I’ve tried both generations of Kindle. The page turning speed is ok for reading (as for reading a novel), but absolutely kills me for scanning. And I don’t see this resolved in near term, given the fundamental working principle of e-ink.
I wonder if Kindle DX is kind of device you want to bring everywhere especially if netbook can run existing softwares, offer millions of colorview ebook and do many stuff that KindleDX may not able to. No doubt that power usage is currently problematic in Netbook though solid-state device and better power management will improve the Netbook’s appeal.
I think the nemesis to KindleDX and other Ebook device is the touchscreen and pivoting capability which will be built into future Netbook like Eee PC T91
http://www.lili...en-netbook.html
Just like iPhone dispense with many buttons by simulating them with software, the future touch-screen netbook can simulate Kindle’s button with “software buttons”.
Piracy may help boost KindleDX uptake but that may not be enough because KindleDX is not designed to be mainstream as determined by its pricing strategy and limited capability, its focus at niche market where user read paperback not colourful magazines etc. Eventually Kindle may come with color screen but then netbook market may not be standing as they may built some capability of Kindle to differentiate themselves. Netbook, the Kindle Killer ? Very likely. The unexpected success of Netbook pose a threat to KindleDX especially the price point are almost in par. Morever, Netbook built on commodity whereas Kindle technology built on exclusiveness, hence it hard for KindleDX to reduce its price to compete against netbook in future.
A Kindle, a netbook and a Tablet all do different things well, even though they all do the same things to a certain degree.
A netbook is great because it is small, cheap, portable and works for general purpose computing, but it is low powered, the screen is small and it isn’t that comfortable for reading.
A Tablet is more comfortable for reading, but the screen is still tiring for serious reading. It is also nice for notes and annotations.
The Kindle lacks color and computing functions, but is much easier to read.
If you owned a textbook in pdf you could load it to a Kindle and your laptop/netbook/tablet – whatever you use. The color screen could be used for diagrams and pictures but serious reading done on the Kindle.
I signed up for the DX the first day it was possible. Native pdf support on a bigger screen is huge. As it is, I download manuals, contracts, long papers that I need to read and put them on the Kindle. I hate the poor pdf support but it saves a lot of paper.
What I don’t get is – if students are going to pirate texts on the Kindle why not just pirate them on a laptop?
I think the DX will be successful because it has Amazon marketing behind it. The Irex readers are poorly marketed, more expensive and hard to find.
Nonsense. College kids already have laptops. Laptops have a color screen and are larger than the kindle. Explain to me why someone would shell-out a bunch of money for a Kindle DX so that they can pirate material that they can already read on their (already superior) laptops.
Possibly battery life and ability to read outside?
This article states the obvious (as, remarkably, very few articles on the Kindle has managed to do).
The issue is simple: look at music, look at movies.
Q: What happened to music and movies once the masses had access to (1) the internet and (2) cheap storage/playback devices and formats (mp3; xvid; mp3 players and so on)?
A: piracy-o-mania ensued!
The same thing will OBVIOUSLY happen to books. We already have (1) in place of course. Kindle DX, or the something a bit improved, will achieve (2). This fall may be to soon but next spring I suspect 50% of all uni textbooks will be pirated pdf versions read on a Kindle or something similar. Fall 2010 75%. If not more.
Publishers, brace yourselves for a rocky ride!
ok….
then since you’ve had a serious amount of laptops with the ability to create/read pdf files, and you’ve obviously had the ability to simply walk to a copying machine and copy the book…
why hasn’t there been a great deal more piracy of textbooks.
kindle’s not going to make it happen in and of itself…
tom: If you know where to look on the internet you’ll see that there IS massive textbook and ebook piracy already. Massive in the sense that almost anything being published by the big publishers gets pirated. But it is not massive in the sense that the masses has gotten with the program. Yet. The reason is that desktops and laptops much worse to read books on compared to even a photocopied paper version of a book. Kindle solves that, through eye friendly epaper screen, light weight and other functional features. Not perfect but good enough. See it as todays equivalent of those clunky 256MB portable mp3 players some of us bought for 300$ in the dawn of times. Since tech dev has sped up since then so we’ll likely move to the equivalent of the ipod within a year.
to all you guys/posters who think that amazon’s not going to do anything regarding possibly piracy of the textbooks on the kindle, that are owned by their partner publishers…
simply contact/call/talk to amazon to get a feel for their strategy in this area..
that’s called actual journalism….
peace
Unless you have some proof other than “take my word on it because I’m an anonymous guy on the interwebz” I highly doubt Amazon will be tracking down torrent users and beating them about the head and shoulders.
This will be great for textbook publishers because they will lower the price to something like 75% of the paper version of books and call it a discount. This will also eliminate the ability for students to sell back books so that “discount” isn’t such a discount and it makes more money for the textbook companies.
Additionally, this will kill campus bookstores and who owns more and more campus bookstores? Barnes and Nobel. So Amazon will be helping publishers and hurting their competition.
free (or pirate) = viral
no?
yall some idiots
http://www.gigapedia.org
So is there a source to find “free” pdf books. I heard of sites like that for music or movies, but books?
For some reason, everybody wants this single purpose gadget to be successful and coming up with such kaka-meme schemes like the one described in this article. Why should a person pay north of 500 dollars where he or she could invest much less to get a netbook with 10 inch screen and use it for multiple purposes ?
I think, TechCrunch as well as other well read blogs are getting some “payola” money from Amazon to put up such bizzare ideas out there to help them peddle, otherwise useless and overly priced gadget.
Good luck with this but marm my words. It ain’t gonna work as we say it in the south…
I completely agree with the author. The course I took this semester required a $90 text book that we only opened twice.
The disadvantages do exist with the existing e-reader platform in highlighting and browsing, but the costs outweigh the benefits. Not to mention 3 textbooks in a messenger bag is brutal to carry all day.
This was definitely a device that was going to be made. Amazon was smart to release it first. If Sony came out with the product then amazon would also loose out on the sales of best sellers and newspapers.
you are pretty off. this whole textbook thing will make little impact on sales of amazon kindle. come on, who the heck thinks about textbooks when buying this thing. just not the right market. no broke student is going to justify spending this kind of money to make textbooks cheaper.
if they really are about saving money they would have read the pirated pdf on their computer screen anyway.
but that’s the real issue. the problem is that there wouldn’t be high enough availability of these pirated textbooks for this textbook-piracy-distribution-network that you speak of to work. the problem faced by the same underground textbook solution site is also relevant here. it’s a lot of friggin work to scan all those pages, and there just won’t be enough people doing it. on top of all this, as student reaches late sophomore classes, it’s harder and harder to find classes in different school using the same textbook.
I’m pretty good at finding torrents, but only one of my last dozen text books was even available in a digital format, and there were no torrents to said book.
We’re a long way from people truly being able to get value from a $500 pdf reader in any way, shape, or form.
Who knows maybe some student will copy textbooks and make a nice little side job out of it selling that $60-80 book for $20 scanned and converted into PDF.
With the internet and Ebooks becoming bigger its only time until most if not all publishers go this direction and making their books into ebooks.
The thing that would be more interesting would be audible text books to use along side ebooks. You can kick back and do other things while listening to someone else read your text book and just later on replay important parts and highlight them in the ebook. Then they’ll make an ebook that can also read audible. Just a thought.
No touchscreen ? Unbelievable. Was all antsy to get one but that’s a dealbreaker right there. C’mon Jeff get it together !!!
Jef Thats coming in 2010 from what I read.
http://www.enga...isplay-returns/
hey….
as a followup, for anyone who cares….
checked with a few of the analysts/partners (biz dev types) who were at the ny show, as well as who deal with kindle and the plasticlogic guys…
the thought is that amazon could do a 1st pass to check for pirated content, but it could be difficult, but doable. but the larger issue would be the potential backlash!
the majority thought was that amazon would take the position that you as a publisher/author would be on your own regarding piracy…
this will be interesting over the course of time…
somebody’s going to get sued!!
The only way I can really see that working is if they only let you download books, magazines, and news papers from Amazon and not allow anything that doesn’t have an Amazon “tag” get put on it. Kind of like iphone apps, you can’t (not that I know of) make one and put it on your phone and use it, it has to go though the iphone store.
The thing I can see being done though would again be basically jail breaking the Kindle so you can download and it won’t do the check, or someone will copy the Amazon tag and write a program that will let you put that Tag on the file you want to put on the Kindle so when it does its check it’ll think the non-Amazon document is from Amazon.
There are so many ways past it, they won’t be able to stop piracy on it.
The technical details of what Amazon will do and how it will be circumvented aren’t really the point.
Anyone with any experience with edonkey, bittorrent, circumventing copy protection on games, defeating macrovision, …etc knows that there isn’t really anything companies like Amazon can do to out and out prevent piracy.
They will target their efforts on making it inconvenient enough to satisfy the content providers and if the product remains actively developed, Amazon will try to maintain that balance (between excessive spending on their part to reduce piracy and ignoring it all together). Without constant attention on Amazon’s and the publisher’s part piracy will become more prevalent. Eventually development on the product will cease (new platforms and products will take its place). At that point the older technology will be completely overrun by piracy (it will be “fully cracked”). This is practically inevitable – it happens with every tech product that has a hacker subculture interested in it.
the technical details of what amazon will do has everything to do with piracy.
there have been several cases where content providers are successful in helping slow down or stop piracy, some examples are harder-to-mod systems such as PS3, iTunes songs (basically the same model as Amazon in terms of distribution), various sorts of DRM, the gaming industry turned itself around because the authentication is now done online for popular online games.
there’s a lot you can do on lower network layers to help stop this too. but that’s not even the point, these are just “readers”. books to the Kindle is like music to the iPod. think about that.
I just wanted to say that I spend much more than $300 every semester for books (think more $800+), which only strengthens your argument. However, I not a science major (I’m finance) but I’m still not sure black and white would work very well for all the color-coded, complicated graphs and charts in my textbooks.
Give me a break. Most netbooks cost two-thirds what a kindle does, will do the same thing with the same size screen and give the user oodles more options. Anyone who buys a kindle is retarded–not a good bet for someone who is interested in expensive college textbooks.
The kindle is a fool’s errand. There is much better technology, in a much better package, for a much better price. My aspire one even allows me to rotate the display so I can read texts in the same way as the kindle.
A better name for the kindle would be kindling. Use it to start a fire in your furnace. That is about all it is good for.
Most college students have to buy the latest version of their textbooks. Even if Amazon is up-to-date on these books, the pirated versions might not necessarily be available when the students need them. They find out what books they need and have to start using them a week later, typically. I don’t see this being a commonly viable option.
Does no one care that there are a myriad of public domain PDFs out there that could plausibly “save” the kindle dx? Google Books, anyone?
I certainly don’t only read material written in the 20th century. As far as pleasure-reading goes, I read just as much public domain stuff as I do new-releases.
If buying a kindle dx means I can avoid paying for public domain books forever, I think $500 is WELL worth it.
Here is what will happen regarding college textbooks, when we reach the point where nobody sitting in a college classroom has a paper book with them – we’ve moved totally to ebooks and digital readers:
The texbooks will be “free”, but the publishers will work out an agreement with each college such that a royalty will be paid back to the publisher based on student counts in the classroom.
Twenty students taking physics 101? Then a royalty is paid based on an expectation that twenty copies of the physics textbook are in use.
This cost will be layered into the college tuition/fees and will indirectly be paid by the students.
The transition to ebooks is inevitable. The cost recovery model will have to adapt.
The Kindle DX is already the 4th most popular electronic on Amazon.com and it isn’t even available yet! http://bit.ly/JEHNj
I wonder, does anyone thinks that textbooks are overpriced? Isn’t that the first step to promote piracy? Unfortunately, it seems to me that this economic model, based on pure (and lots of) profit is THE problem. Maybe we should start to discuss it before talking about how piracy is a such big menace or implementing restrictive rules and censorship (like some UE countries are doing – France and Sweden).
11familyguy11, I would also like an Invite if you can spare it. Thanks
I got through my last two years of school with a 3.9 GPA and I just quit buying textbooks. I learned that the secret was to take down every work the teacher says and memorize it. Of course, I did have to purchase some workbooks, lab books, but I saved a lot of money and realized that reading my assignments was actually hurting my grades, as I would spend hours reading and never get to studying what the professor actually said in class.
Just my 2 cents worth for all you students out there
It’s very expensive. You can compare it with others e-book reader at
http://www.cool...ing_Device.aspx
and you can get other information of e-book readers at
http://www.cool...BookReader.aspx
This one is good.The texbooks will be “free”, but the publishers will work out an agreement with each college such that a royalty will be paid back to the publisher based on student counts in the classroom.
I’ve bought a Kindle DX at Revolution Store few weeks ago and I’m really impressed with it. It’s wonderful. I love it!