This bizarre article in The Atlantic is typical of most articles slamming the Kindle: it's got little or no basis in fact, it's riddled with faulty logic, it's written by someone who never seems to have used a Kindle, and it calls for Amazon.com to take action based on little more than the author's wishful thinking. How bad is the article? Let me count the ways:
1) The Title. The headline screams: "The Kindle in Crisis?" That's an old Fox News trick: if the facts don't support your position, phrase your conclusion as a question. (Example: "Is Obama the Anti-Christ?") Either the Kindle is in crisis … or it isn't. If Kevin Maney doesn't have enough facts to know one way or the other, why is he writing this article? (Hint: later in the article, he refers to the book he's selling.)
2) The Faulty Assumptions. In the very first paragraph, Maney offers us his thesis: "Most successful products and services aim [to offer either a great experience or great convenience], but not both." I'd argue that most successful products and services offer both of these. Ever heard of an iPod? It's not the most fully-featured MP3 player out there … but it offers both a great experience and great convenience. It's also the most wildly successful MP3 player on the market.
3) The Lack of Facts. "Despite all the great press it's gotten, Amazon.com's Kindle may be in trouble." And it might have been designed by aliens. And it may be leaking radioactive waste. And a certain writer may be pulling suppositions out of thin air and selling them to The Atlantic.
4) The Bizarre Assertions. "In aiming to provide both a great experience and supreme convenience, [the Kindle] has achieved neither." In what ways, specifically, has the Kindle failed to deliver great experience and supreme convenience? Maney doesn't say. Meanwhile, my personal Kindle experience has been flawless — books are easy to buy, easy to read, and easy to refer back to whenever I like. As for convenience: being able to wirelessly summon almost any book Amazon wants to sell in sixty seconds or less is pretty darn convenient. (And certainly more convenient than, say, having to connect the device to a PC to download books … which every competitive product requires.)
5) The Confusion of Price and Convenience. "Unless [the Kindle] can be revamped to truly distinguish itself, either as the best reading experience around … or as the cheapest and most convenient reading outlet available, it may be doomed to fail." Perhaps because it's hard to argue how a device that can summon virtually any book in seconds is inconvenient to use, Maney (sneakily!) revises his approach by equating convenience with a low price. Hey Kevin: if convenience and price are the same thing, why doesn't my corner convenience store have the lowest possible price on milk?
6) Problems with How You Slice It. "The entire e-reader market consisted of just 1 million units in all of 2008, and Amazon nabbed only a slice of it." In December of 2008, Sony claimed it had sold 300,000 e-book readers since launching the product back in 2005. In roughly a third of that time, the Kindle sold between 250,000 and 500,000 units. [Source: PBS]. If, indeed, the entire e-reader market consisted of just 1 million units in 2008, the "slice" the Kindle nabbed equates to between one fourth and one half of the entire pie.
7) The Apples to Oranges Comparisons. "Microsoft sold about 1 million Zune music players from mid-2007 to mid-2008, [and] the product was widely considered to be a failure." The Zune's a (dog of a) media player and competes (poorly) against the wildly popular iPod in a well-established category. The Kindle's a new product in an emerging category … and in its first year, it captured between 25% and 50% of the market. One's a flailing wanna be; the other's a stunning newcomer. There's no real comparison here, and Maney knows it — which is why he avoided quoting numbers and resorted to an apples-to-oranges comparison instead.
8) The Confusion of Price and Convenience (Again). "Paying $300 or more for a device to read books … is highly inconvenient." For $300, I'm doing a lot more than just "reading books." For that price, I get access to the only piece of technology on the planet that makes it possible for me to wirelessly summon hundreds of thousands of books, in seconds, with zero friction and without involving a connection to a PC. Afterward, I can carry that entire library around in the palm of my hand. And because the new releases I buy cost me $9.99 instead of $24.99, my Kindle paid for itself in the first year of use. By what possible measure is this inconvenient?
9) Rather Desperate Examples of "Failure." "On the reading experience side, the Kindle ended up on shaky ground, too … The Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of a traditional book's appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book … can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person … But on the Kindle, no matter what you're reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device." The Kindle isn't a very good doorstop, either.
10) The False Advantage of Google's Public Domain Library. "Google has made 1 million public domain books available for free on the Sony Reader." Given that the vast majority of those public domain books are also available on the Kindle, for free, through Project Gutenberg and other online sources (and have been for years!), how is this an advantage, exactly? Meanwhile, at the Kindle store (where people actually spend money — an activity generally required to make new technologies viable) Amazon.com still offers twice the number of books available in the Sony Reader store.
After all this nonsense, it's not surprising where Kevin's logic leads him: quoting a market study calling for Amazon.com to sell the Kindle for less than $100.00.
So when all is said and done, Mr. Maney's recommendation for improving the Kindle's success comes down to this: Amazon.com should take its cutting-edge, market-creating, segment-dominating product … and gut its profitability?!?
Yeah. Amazon's gonna jump on that.
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