What sounds like some sort of paradox is a
challenging editorial by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian's Tech blog. Bobbie believes that the Kindle will never be some kind of iPod of books, because:
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To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn't being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren't forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn't there to be confronted.
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You may counter that it took many MP3 players to come out before the iPod finally changed the market. Does that analogy work for e-book readers? Bobbie thinks not.
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But unlike the music business - who saw those lost customers head straight to Napster, Kazaa or Gnutella - the average book reader isn't turning to legally dubious sources for their novels, or meeting up with book dealers on street corners to pick up copies of the latest bestseller. If they want to share files, they can get somebody to lend them a copy, or go to a place for sharing this information that's wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries).
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Personally I believe the biggest problem with his argument is that, if analysts and CEO Jeff Bezos are to be believed, Kindle readers already sell very well -- and that despite the fact that it may be more difficult or impossible to fill an e-book reader with pirated content.
And since we're already talking about the Guardian, check out
this earlier article in which they gave extra mentioning to the Kindle 2 image leak.
