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adderbolt - Jack posted an update Thursday, Oct 6, 2011, 5:20am EDT, 14 years ago
When the Kindle is Free?
Amazon’s recent announcement of the Kindle Fire was what got the most attention last week, but the online retailer also made some other announcements at the same time, including a drop in price for the original Kindle to $79. Based on the consistent and gradual declines in Kindle prices, some have speculated that Amazon could soon offer them for free. Which raises an interesting question: What would free e-book readers do to the book industry?
Amazon’s rationale in offering a tablet or other hardware is the exact opposite of Apple’s. Apple makes most of its profits from selling hardware while Amazon uses hardware as a conduit for getting that content to as many people as possible. So the original Kindle, for example, is simply a pipeline for getting books to people.
Not-quite-books can be written and uploaded by anyone, and offered at whatever price point an author decides: as little as 99 cents, or even free making it possible for more writers to make a living from their writing. You might not think that authors — or Amazon, for that matter — would be able to generate much from 99 cent books, but you would be wrong. Amanda Hocking has become famous for making millions of dollars from her short Kindle books. Other self-published authors such as John Locke have sold millions of copies of their books. .As a result, Amazon has taken to doing an end-around publishers by signing up popular authors like Tim Ferriss. How long until it is Amazon signing deals with Kindle Single self-publishers like Amanda Hocking, rather than a traditional agency?
Not everyone is happy about this state of affairs, obviously. Author Sam Harris wrote, “Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free… there are reasons to fear for the life of the printed book.” What I think Harris is struggling with is the fact that books don’t want to be free — they just want to be a whole lot cheaper than they are. And when you make books (not all books, but some) $4.99 or $1.99 or even 99 cents, people will buy more of them.
There’s even the possibility that books could be free and still make money: Amazon has an ad-supported Kindle, so why not extend that model to the books themselves? Magazine writers publish their content in an ad-supported medium, so why not books? Authors such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many of their novels on a monthly basis as magazine supplements.
Why not offer a subscription to an author, so that I can automatically get whatever he or she writes, regardless of length or format? This would blend the worlds of blogs, Kindle Singles, magazine-length features and novels into one stream of content, and I’d be willing to bet more people would read more as a result. In the end, that’s likely to be a good thing, not a bad one.
