I've said it before but I'll say it again, I misjudged the Kindle.  I, along with most tech bloggers, pegged it for a quick death with its seemingly high price tag and seemingly low number of features. 

But now Time is reporting that Kindle sales have doubled in the last two months (on top of sales that appeared to be impressive before that).  Here's the quote...

Is the Kindle starting to catch fire with consumers? From the Department of Inscrutable Data Points comes word that e-book sales for Amazon's Kindle — its digital reading device-have doubled during the past two months. Kind of, sort of, maybe.

According to a source at Amazon, "on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles." Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print.

Though Kindle is important on a tech level what makes it fascinating is how it bucked the gadget trend.  The perception is that "gadgets" have to appeal to the tech crowd first and that they then trickle down to the average consumer. 

But the more I look at the Kindle the more I realize its success is a tribute to the idea that the average consumer doesn't want the same things that "Gadget hounds" do.  Looking at the device it's practically feature deficient.  But it has three things that average users seem to care about...

• A screen that is easy on the eyes,
• A physical size that's comfortable in the hand
• And a wireless feature that makes purchasing easy. 

Those seem to be enough for most people. 

As with any Kindle post I need to give the standard caveat.  Amazon refuses to release actual numbers so we really don't know specifically how successful the device is.  But whatever the numbers are the trend line is clearly headed northwards and that's more than any tech blogger expected when it was released.

In discussing Amazon's Kindle I think I've echoed the sentiments of most bloggers in that I found it interesting but entirely too expensive.  Given how expensive it is I just didn't see success in its future particularly while it matches the iPhone in price.

So Imagine my surprise at reading this (via ABCNews.com)...

Amazon amzn launched the paperback-size gadget to considerable fanfare last November. But prospective buyers who click on the Kindle links at the top of Amazon's home page are informed that due to heavy demand the product is "temporarily sold out."

...

"We can't go into details about exact wait times," says Amazon vice president for digital products Ian Freed, conceding that the company underestimated demand. "We've had to ramp up manufacturing pretty significantly, and ramping up a manufacturing takes a little time." Amazon's Senior Vice President Steven Kessel told a group of publishers recently that Amazon's focus is "on getting back in stock" with Kindles.

...

Judging from online discussion groups, the Kindle wait time seems to be about four to six weeks. It took a month before Sacramento-based digital library consultant Kris Ogilvie got hers.

Of Course, there is one catch...

The company takes Kindle orders on a first-come, first-served basis. But the online retailer won't reveal how many have been sold or when supply will catch up with demand.

So we don't know exactly what this means.  If Amazon was hedging its bets on the Kindle a sellout would still equate to very few sales. 

But this is a good sign for Amazon and it means we probably won't see a price drop anytime soon.  I wonder where the disconnect is between what I (and most bloggers) thought and what consumers actually did.  The best I can come up with is that a society of book lovers exists and they're willing to spend money on book paraphernalia.  Amazon would know that audience better than anyone and could have tailored Kindle to them. 

These are probably people who don't even know what the word blog means but who, because of their love of books, are avid Amazon visitors who have a lot of trust in the brand.  When they saw an e-book reader made by Amazon their trust was enough to justify the cost. 

This could end up being a coup for Amazon if they play their cards right.  They can milk the die hard buyers for $399 and then release an updated version (perhaps one actually worth the $399) while dropping the current Kindle down to a more reasonable price.  By doing that Amazon could become the Apple of the e-book revolution.  A very profitable place to be if e-books take off. 

I doubt e-books will ever be as successful as digital music...but then again...I didn't think the Kindle would sell out either so what do I know?

A while back I said that I had wanted to return to this post by Fred Wilson and I thought now was as good a time as any.  To briefly recap, in the post Mr. Wilson takes a look at the media consumption habits of his kids and tries to glean some predictions on where the media world is going from those observations.

This time around I wanted to tackle his point on e-books.  In his post Mr. Wilson says...

They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. They read them for school, they read them for entertainment, and they read them lying in bed waiting to be tired enough to turn off the lights. My son Josh read four 600 page Harry Potter books on our two week trip and he’s not a super fast or voracious reader. But he likes reading. All my kids do. Might books be the only medium that remains unaffected by the Internet (except the ease of finding and buying them)?

Later in the post he goes on to say...

books may be the one category of media and entertainment that aren't disrupted by digital technology. or maybe we just haven't seen the technology that will do it. i honestly don't know. and i don't know how the book business is faring versus five or ten years ago. but at least in my family, books are still a growth sector.

I'm inclined to agree with the theory that we just haven't seen the technology that will do it yet.  There are really two issues here. 

First, digitizing books is harder than digitizing music so the industry has little fear of piracy.  I've been a strong critic of music piracy but I fully realize that fear of it has pushed the music industry into doing good things (as I pointed out here).  The lack of fear on the side of book publishers has made it very hard to get them to digitize their content and that lack of content will continue to hold down e-book readers.  Until an e-book reader can get 95% of the newly published books digitized (in a friendlier format than pdf) I don't think it stands much of chance. 

Second, there still hasn't been a break through e-book reader.  I think people forget how much of a dud MP3 Players were before the iPod came along.  But once it did come along the market boomed in a big way.  The more I look at it the more I think the Kindle is on the track to being that break through device.  Its just a couple versions (and a huge price cut) away.

Anyway, I think once those two issues are resolved the e-book market will boom.  Even if Mr Wilson's son just loves the feel of real books I think he's probably been too conditioned by the world of instant gratification to pass on a device where he can (a) get books instantly and (b) carry his entire library around with him.  Not to mention searching, sharing, and all the other goodies that come along with a digital format. 

That, in a nutshell, is what I think it has come down to.  The iPod has gotten us accustomed to having all (or at least much of) our media constantly at arms length.  As that becomes available for a new types of media I can't see kids saying no to it, even if they have to give up a little to in the process.

I'm going to cheat a little bit here. 

I had already written a pretty anemic post explaining why I like Mathew Ingram but I was never happy with it because of how short it was.  Then Mr. Ingram made a point I really wanted to draw attention to and that made the situation worse because it would be odd to make the blogroll post and then turn around and quote him in a separate post.

So I'm combining the two ideas into one post with the first part being why I appreciate his blog and the second part addressing what I wanted to say about his recent post.

On the first point, I think the easiest way to make it is to say that there have been many occasions where I honestly felt Mathew Ingram was the only sane  person in the blogosphere.  Whenever there's one of those "techmeme explosion" where everyone's jumping up and down over some imagined slight Mr. Ingram is almost always the first one to (a) realize how unreasonable everyone is being and (b) call them on it.  Neither of which are small tasks as you end up drawing the enmity of everyone and often times end up alone because those who agree with you don't have the guts to draw that same enmity.

I'm really not sure the tech blogosphere could go on without a Mathew Ingram in it and I would hate to see it try.  For that reason I've put him at #4 on my blogroll. 

That is also what makes it hard to write a whole post about him.  I don't think you could overestimate his value but stating that fact doesn't take terribly long.  Which is why my initial post on him was so anemic and why I'm now resorting to this (somewhat awkward) transition.

Recently he made a post in regards to the whole "Google Shared Items" snafu in which he lays out how odd it is to get angry at Google for sharing items that you marked as "Shared" (a point that a surprising amount of people are missing). 

That's a good point in itself but in his post I think he makes a bigger point that gets lost in the shuffle.  That is what I wanted to draw attention to.  In the post he says...

Scoble has decided to take the high road and blame Google for not implementing ‘granular privacy controls’ — and that might be a good thing for Reader, just as it would be for Facebook.

But it’s not something that’s necessary, in my opinion, nor is it something Google should be slammed for not having. The company explained that shared items would be visible to GTalk contacts — pretty simple, in my opinion. Plus, they can only be seen by contacts who also use Google Reader, and those contacts have to specifically click on the shared items from other users to see them. It’s not as if they’re being emailed to your friends, or scrolling by on the Jumbotron.

Would GPC be handy to have? Sure.

This brings up something I noticed earlier this year with Amazon's Kindle when several people commented that the Kindle was insufficient because it lacked the iPhone's touch interface.  Bloggers understandably want their dream product but it is not understandable to then bash a product if it doesn't do everything exactly the way you want it to. 

Sure there are some features that really do become "must have" but those are a rare occasion.  Even features as great as a touch interface or Granular Privacy Control aren't enough to make the whole product insufficient and I'd bet money that virtually no one dropped Google Reader because of the sharing feature.

If you want to fairly review any product you really have to force yourself to be sensible and weigh all the good features against the bad.  What makes the above cited criticism particularly maddening is the fact that none of each products competitors sport the features being demanded.  So how is it fair to then demand that feature from one vendor?

I'm not saying you can't suggest things for future releases I'm just saying there's a huge difference between "I wish it had this" and "it sucks because it doesn't have this".  That's a difference that more bloggers should pay attention to. 

The book selection sucks. There are big gaps, even for well-known bestselling books. Having worked in the book industry before, I put most of this blame in publisher’s laps. They’re just a nightmare to deal with, and paranoid about their content. Apparently they don’t want my money or yours, and even Amazon doesn’t have the weight to make them see reason. Shades of the music, TV, and movie industries, anyone? This must be incredibly frustrating to Jeff and everyone else at Amazon.

 Now selection is of the utmost importance to the Kindle’s success and I think everyone realizes that so I won’t spend any time on it.  What interests me is the idea that the publishers are holding up the process.   

There has long been a debate as to how much influence illegal file sharing had on the music industry and specifically on the industry’s caving in to services like iTunes.  This reaction from the publishing industry seems to point to the idea that file sharing was instrumental in turning the tide towards digital media.  Look at the facts, here we have an industry that basically works under the same principles (e.g. selling content on physical media) but which sells a product that is hard to reproduce in digital form (scanning a book is much harder than ripping a CD) and that industry is fighting tooth and nail to not go digital (hence the lousy selection).    

So the question I now have is “does this justify illegal trading?”  I’m no radical but any historian will tell you that breaking the law was sometimes necessary to bring about change (see the Boston Tea Party allusion above).  Maybe it’s just my old guilt over file trading as a kid but as someone who has bought his music legally since that has been an option I feel a little validated by this. 

Leave it to the blogosphere to bash a device before its even been announced but that is what's happening to the poor Amazon Kindle e-book reader. 

Jeremy Toeman asks "Is the market today "in crisis" when it comes to books?" and then supplies the answer "No".  I would disagree in that I personally would do anything to have my library of computer books with me both at work and at home but carrying three bookshelves isn't plausible.  I don't think I'm a niche in this either.  To me Jeremy saying there is no crisis here sounds a lot like the people who asked "why would I want to carry all my music around with me?" when the iPod first arrived.

Jeremy does go on to make some decent points about e-book readers but since his post was contingent on there being no great advantage to the e-book reader the remaining points fall pretty flat for me. 

I found myself agreeing with Rex Hammock who says the iPod Touch is a  much better model for an e-book reader but I'm not sure that automatically makes the Kindle a bad product.  The iPhone/iPod Touch model is revolutionary and its going to put almost any other handheld device to shame as far as things like navigation are concerned.  But that's no reason to necessarily dismiss a product that has other advantages (Such as allowing you to wirelessly purchase e-books from anywhere and have access to them that instant). 

Plus, my understanding is that the Kindle does a good job of replicating paper with its screen and that shouldn't be overlooked.  Whether you realize it or not looking at a computer screen is hard on the eyes and a decent e-paper solution is worth a lot in the battle to replace the printed book. 

All that said, I haven't quite formed an opinion on the kindle yet.  There are certainly points that I like (mostly the wireless download) and things I don't (high price, appearance) but it really is too early to tell.  If I had to guess right now I'd bet against it but I also would have bet against the original Palm Pilot and look how that turned out. 

One last note, the thing looks really ugly which doesn't help.  I can't help but think Amazon would have been better off had they made something that looked a little more like this.