Will Ipad dethrone the Kindle as an ebook reader?

[Lanshark]

Seems to be heating up.

Kindle vs. iPad: the Macmillan skirmish

Lauretta at Constellation Books in Reisterstown alerted me to the high-stakes spat between Macmillan, one of the nation's largest publishers, and Amazon. According to The New York Times, Macmillan's insistence that Amazon boost the price of e-books from its standard $9.99 to about $15 led the e-commerce giant to limit sales on those books. For example, if you looked for Hilary Mantel's “Wolf Hall,” a Macmillan book, you'd find no Kindle version listed. (In fact, the book was only available from third-party sellers on Sunday.)

Consider this just another round -- of many -- in the battle between publishers and retailers over the future of e-book sales. As we've noted before, publishers are worried about preserving profit margins, and shudder at e-books prices under $10. They're more comfortable with the Apple iPad model, which would give publishers more control and set higher e-book prices. Amazon, meanwhile, is trying to maintain its dominance in e-commerce against challengers such as Walmart and Target. Billions of dollars are at stake, so the battle is likely to be long and bloody. And hopefully, the interests of consumers won't get lost in the fog of war.

 

[RitaE]

Well I think there are a couple of different issues here. The first is the iPad as an eReader .... some people are going to love it because it does a whole bunch of things. Many people who read for hours on end are going to hate it because of the LCD screen and short battery life. So in all my guess is that people who buy the iPAD are going to be buying it for its browser capability or email capability or video capability and they might view the iBooks function as a nice bonus. So it will be yet another player in a market that is growing more crowded every month but I don't see them totally wiping out all the other makers of eReaders (and there is a whole slew of new ones lined up for introduction in 2010).

Now as far as the current Amazon/Macmillan battle over who gets to set retail price of the books on the Amazon website ... I don't see Amazon backing down from that and I certainly don't see heavy consumers of eBooks throwing a bunch of love to Apple and Steve Jobs for their attempt at making eBooks on average up to 50% or more expensive than the current pricing models.

 

[Kimberle]

no, it's to big. Kindle also reads more like a book (page appearance/light), ipad will read like a computer screen. I could never read a book on a computer screen.

 

[bumbershoot]

Now as far as the current Amazon/Macmillan battle over who gets to set retail price of the books on the Amazon website ... I don't see Amazon backing down from that and I certainly don't see heavy consumers of eBooks throwing a bunch of love to Apple and Steve Jobs for their attempt at making eBooks on average up to 50% or more expensive than the current pricing models.

Agreed.

I'm an Apple lover AND an Amazon lover (especially since the latter gives us our paychecks), but I'm on Amazon's side with this.

And does it seem to others that Apple just sort of threw out their ipad in response to internet nonsense? I thought I JUST read an article that was talking about some sort of "bounty" to prove that they were working on a tablet...then suddenly boom, it's out. If that's in response to the gossip, I worry that it's going to be very microsofty...they just put out something then fix it up later.

 

[FireDancer]

No. The iPad and Kindle, while overlapping in some respects, are not the same device aimed at the same people. I would venture to say a lot of people will have both. The e-ink display and battery life for the Kindle will be favored by people who read often and who read while traveling.

The Amazon deal is not really related at all to to the iPad. The publishers are slowly becoming irrelevant in the publication of e-books. As the tools become available to authors to self publish they are getting pushed out and I can't wait for it to happen. As it stands now tech savvy authors are using publishers to publish the paper books but not the electronic or audio books, they are doing that themselves.

Just like the electronic music has allowed some artistes to self publish their music without the need for a label electronic books will allow authors to self publish without the use for a publisher. Print on demand will hopefully completely get rid of the need for publishers. This is all good for the consumer because the less people there are in the middle the less the end product will cost us.

 

[RitaE]

Well unfortunately I was wrong. Amazon released an announcement that they will be capitulating to Macmillan's demands.

 

[KramBerries]

No one really knows. There are so many unknowns. Will the iPad be a success like the iPod or a failure like the Newton? Will people who buy it want to use it for reading? Will Apple attract enough publishers to compete with the Kindle? Will the iPad have a Kindle app? Will people want books with extra content?

I really don't have a good guess. I hope that they are both successful and competitive.

I'll say this. I had dinner with a couple of dozen techies (my IT department) the day of the iPad announcement. Half the people in the room had iPhones. Very few were enthusiastic about the iPad. The non-tech crowd seems jazzed, but it's not clear if they'll be buying.

 

[WDWBarb]

I don't think I would ever choose an iPad specifically to be an E-Book reader. The brilliant display, while beautiful, isn't easy on the eyes (especially for reading). I could read now, on my laptop, if that's what I wanted to do (the Kindle app for PC allows me to do so) but it causes serious eyestrain.

I think people who like to read a lot will stick to Kindles (and their e-ink ilk). I think people who like to read a little will use their iPads to do so (but doubt that will be the reason they own an iPad in the first place).

 

[MrsPete]

I love-love-love my Kindle and don't want to see it go by the wayside.

Regardless of what I WANT, here's my prediction: If one of these formats adopts/buys into the college textbook market, THAT E-READER will be the winner. Why? Because if it's a money-saver, college students will buy it . . . and then they'll continue to buy their books in that fashion after college . . . and high school students will begin to receive this as a preparation-for-college gift (in the same way just about every high school senior gets a laptop for Christmas or graduation). Yep, college textbooks are the key to winning the business.

 

[elgerber]

Well unfortunately I was wrong. Amazon released an announcement that they will be capitulating to Macmillan's demands.

Do you have a link? I would like to see what it said.
Thanks!

 

[my3sonsagn]

Well unfortunately I was wrong. Amazon released an announcement that they will be capitulating to Macmillan's demands.

I saw that. A lot of Amazon's critics have been going on and on about how yanking Macmillan's books was just them trying to strongarm the publishers and prove their "dominance" rather than them going to bat for consumers. IMO, I think they've just decided that they're confident enough in their position to let consumers vote with their wallets - big publishers will sink or swim on their own, and, personally, I think they will ultimately sink. More and more authors (Anne Rice is a prominant one) are realizing that signing deals with amazon and other epublishers nets them more money (from ebooks) in the long run, AND it allows them to retain the rights to their work.


As for the Kindle vs iPad; I agree that they're aimed at different markets. The iPad, to me, is just a bigger version of the iTouch, and people will use it as such. The Kindle, OTOH, is an ereader - it is meant to be easy on the eyes and purchase & store books, and I think it does that beautifully.

Jennifer

 

[RitaE]

Amazon's position

Initial post: Jan 31, 2010 2:22 PM PST
The Amazon Kindle team says:
Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

 

[bumbershoot]

Well unfortunately I was wrong. Amazon released an announcement that they will be capitulating to Macmillan's demands.

Drat!

But I do like how they worded it.

 

[NotUrsula]

I come at this from the Library POV:

iPad: I think that at heart, it's a stripped-down MAC, and there are some people who like them and some people who hate them. It isn't the Kindle's most direct competition, IMO.

McMillan: Folks, the prices that Amazon negotiated on Kindle editions were really loss leaders to get people to buy the Kindle. I don't think that Amazon ever really intended to hold that pricepoint for very long on anything except Classics. Authors who want to publish in paper generally cannot decide to self-publish electronically; normally the contract of sale specifically forbids that for a certain period of time. Also, the legal and IT costs inherent in protecting copyright and preventing piracy in an ebook actually make the electronic editions pricier to produce than the paper.

The most central truth about the question of ebook pricing is that it won't level out until libraries can really get into the game. Right now, the ebooks that consumers can buy cannot be purchased by libraries because they are mated to a given device AND to a credit card account; we have to jump through all sorts of bizarre hoops to be able to circulate them, and most of us choose not to. The key to the market is a universal standard format that will work on EVERY ereader, and that won't require a $5K annual license (on TOP of the cost of each title) to be used by libraries. (That license being Adobe DRM, which presently governs DRM pdf format.)

Scholarly journals have been available in electronic format for a little over a decade now, and our users are accustomed to that format, which is ALWAYS open PDF, paid for by institutional access license. They simply will not accept a DRM-restricted ebook platform that is keyed to a particular device.

I've got a couple of scholarly ebook distributors that tried to sell me on a platform that does not allow the download of complete book chapters by licensed users. The most that they will allow is a "print" download of one page at a time, which the user can then run through Acrobat to reassemble back into a chapter. It takes FOREVER and is a total PITA, and after trying it out for two months my clients unanimously told me that if that was the best the publisher could do, then paper was preferable.

For the academic market, Amazon never could promise that under-$10 business. Technical ebooks average $185/title, and I don't see that going down anytime soon.