The digital revolution has touched nearly every part of society and nowhere is this truer than in the media and publishing industries. Fewer and fewer consumers will actually buy a physical CD of music for example, opting to simply download MP3s online from iTunes, Amazon.com, or any number of other digital music portals.
Likewise, films are increasingly being rented and watched online, without having to be made into DVDs or other video formats. For example, Netflix has recently introduced a “watch online” feature allowing subscribers to view thousands of available films, documentaries and television shows “on demand” on their computer.
But one area of the publishing and media business that has so far failed to adapt to the new digital world is the printed word. Hard and soft cover books are more popular than ever, and attempts to mass-market e-books, or digitized versions of books which can be read on a computer, have so far not sparked the imagination of the public at large.
While it is true that e-books continue to sell very well when he comes to very specific, nonfiction information, such as how-to guides, the public has so far not responded well to buying e-books of novels or other modern literary works.
But Amazon.com chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, wants to change all that. Bezos considers hard and soft cover books to be relics of a bygone age, and would like to see e-books replace standard tomes the same way that MP3s are replacing CDs.
To help bring about this paradigm shift with the buying public, Amazon.com is unveiling a brand new handheld book reader called “Kindle.” The idea is for Amazon’s new Kindle to do for digital books what the Apple iPod has done for digital music — make it accessible, mainstream, and above all else, cool.
The Kindle is a portable, mobile hard drive that will hold about 200 books, and is connected to the Internet via Sprint’s high-speed cell network, allowing users to search and download any book available online in just a few seconds. Kindle will be roughly the size of a paperback book, and display book pages on a backlit LCD that appears more like a standard paper page than a computer screen.
The Kindle’s official release date is November the 19th, and it will be available for sale on Amazon.com for $399. The real question is, will die-hard book lovers be willing to trade in their old paper tomes for a newfangled backlit e-book reader?
Amazon.com is betting that, given time, downloading books to a personal reader will become as commonplace as downloading digital music to an iPod — and just as profitable.
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