Consumers have mobile phones and digital music players. They write e-mails, surf the Web and watch videos on YouTube. Yet digital publishers and manufacturers are still trying to convince consumers to modernize that most old-fashioned medium: the book.
On Monday Amazon.com entered the fray with Kindle, a $399 device that will try to do for books what the iPod did for music: use a new gadget to promote a digital-based industry.
It’s a flashy idea tied to the digital media revolution that has already upended both the music business and newspapers, which are scrambling to adjust. But book publishers, particularly those of literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, have struggled to find a digital format that offers immediate and significant improvements over the time-tested combination of paper, ink and binding.
“Fundamentally, you’ve got a very portable device at the moment — the paperback book,” said Eric Price, associate publisher at Grove/Atlantic in New York.
Amazon’s long-rumored Kindle is itself the size of a paperback and weighs 10.3 ounces. The company will make more than 90,000 books available electronically, including best sellers and new releases, many of which cost $9.99 each.
One of the Kindle’s main features is its ability to download content without being connected to a computer. Amazon’s reader uses a wireless broadband standard used by mobile phone service providers. Kindle owners must have Amazon accounts to use the device, which can hold more than 200 titles at one time.
1-minute download
“It can provide instant access,” said Steven Kessel, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide digital media. “So you think of a book and you go to the store that’s connected on the device you buy, and that book is downloaded in less than a minute.”
Industry players say that while “e-books” have gained popularity in educational circles and other niches, mainstream consumers have been reluctant to adopt the new technology because they want it to replicate the experience of physically handling a book, something the digital format has not delivered on yet.
Both Amazon and Sony Corp., which introduced a new version of its portable book reader in October, are working to overcome this hurdle. The two companies use technology by Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up E Ink Corp., which makes “electronic paper” designed to reflect light like physical printed paper. The displays on the digital readers do not require backlights and are meant to reduce eyestrain and glare.
“The Amazon Kindle and devices like the Sony Reader are now taking advantage of very exciting reading technologies that are improving the ability to create a much more booklike experience,” said Steve Potash, who is president of the International Digital Publishing Forum, an industry trade group. “So this is a big advance.”
E-book proponents are betting that technological strides in readability and portability will dovetail with consumers’ growing ease in accessing information digitally. Digital books are already popular with travelers, who can carry one device to read multiple books rather than lug around a mini-library in their suitcase.
But one reason that consumers have been slower to embrace e-books is that digital music offers “compelling advantages” for consumers that do not necessarily translate to books, such as the ability to pluck one track from a list of songs on an album, said Matt Shatz, corporate vice president for digital at Random House Inc. in New York.
“Because the consumer differences aren’t as obvious as music, it doesn’t mean we expect the floodgates to open instantaneously here,” Shatz said. “But that said, people are doing more reading every day on screens.”
Random House will have more than 6,000 titles available on e-book by the end of the year and sales revenues have seen healthy percentage growth each year, albeit from a low base, said Shatz. Publishers acknowledge that the market for e-books outside of niche genres such as romances and thrillers is still limited. Price of Grove/Atlantic noted that when his firm published Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,” which won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, the novel sold just 13 e-books in three months, compared with the 270,000 paperbacks.
The Association of American Publishers says electronic book sales grew 24 percent, to $54 million last year, but still represent less than 1 percent of the U.S. publishing industry’s $24.2 billion in 2006 sales, according to Bloomberg News.
People reading less
In an interview with influential technology blog TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said the main buyers of the Kindle will be “heavy readers. Anyone who keeps three or four books open at the same time.”
They are the minority, of course, which underscores the challenge facing Amazon: how to promote widespread adoption of digital media when fewer consumers are reading books.
“The reality is that people are reading less,” Price said. “That’s the biggest problem we have really — people using their scarce relaxation time for reading, which is a total immersion thing, as opposed to video games or TV, which is not complete immersion but rather impressionistic.”
Despite publishers’ limited success so far with e-books, companies are still willing to participate in the digital book business because they want to be prepared for any shifts in consumer tastes and technology. The acquisition of digital rights for new books is now a standard part of contract negotiations, and publishers are also combing through backlists to see which titles can be converted to digital form.
James McQuivey of Forrester Research noted that publishers are willing to have the digital versions of their bestsellers sold through Amazon at a steep discount to the price of a hardcover.
“Publishers clearly don’t want to send the message that their books aren’t worth as much money as they have been charging, but they also don’t want to miss any possible transition from paper to digital because they’ve seen what happened to the music industry over the past five years,” McQuivey wrote in an e-mail.
At this early stage of e-book adoption, publishers are focusing on making their content available and leaving the question of delivery up to manufacturers and consumers. Publicly, publishers aren’t swearing allegiance to any one device.
Amazon and Sony are competing with products such as mobile phones. Amazon has the advantage of its branding muscle. Sony, whose Connect e-book store isn’t as extensive as Amazon’s offerings, has to give consumers a reason to add the reader to their load of gadgets.
“It’s about a lifestyle experience of now having access to digital content on a device that’s designed for reading,” said Steve Haber, Sony’s senior vice president of digital imaging and audio. “It’s not designed to be a music player. It’s not designed to be a Swiss army knife.”
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wawong@tribune.com
