That's an American hand
MobileRead’s been keeping track of the Sony Reader’s European march: the PRS-505 debuts in Germany tomorrow, and in Switzerland in early April (still no sighting of the 700).
Just in time, it appears, as new data suggests a whole bunch of Germans want to buy ebooks, over two million (Germans, that is), more than even generous estimates of Kindle sales.
It seems like more and more of a missed opportunity for Amazon. The Kindle has never been available outside the U.S., ostensibly because the whispernet isn’t set up yet. Despite tiny indications that Amazon’s working on this, I’m siding with the camp that says this isn’t changing any time soon.
The two million estimate is way high, as the analysis grants, but still, with the addition of the Sony Reader, that makes only three Kindle competitors (the other two are BeBook and CyBook) available in large swaths of the world. So why isn’t Kindle trying to spread its tentacles across the globe?
I think there are two explanations, the charitable one, and the true one. First, let’s go charitable.
If I were Jeff Bezos, I’d go see (or become) a laugh therapist, and then I’d send Jon Stewart a thank-you card for shivving me hilariously on The Daily Show.
But if I were Bezos answering why Kindle is America-only, I’d say that Amazon is committed to the whispernet as Kindle’s flagship feature, and so there won’t be Kindle in Europe or anywhere else until the infrastructure is in place.
In reality, though, I don’t believe a word of that. I think Amazon’s doing what it’s done for the entire life of the Kindle: the minimum.
Let’s look at some history. They didn’t need to try to struggle against DRM to sell Kindles, so they haven’t, and in fact they’ve embraced it. They didn’t need to make Kindle 2 support different formats or support library books or use folders to organize books (despite the fact that they’re customers desperately wanted them to), and so they didn’t. In fact, they essentially didn’t improve Kindle at all in the jump to iteration 2. They also didn’t bother to lower the price.
In short, Kindle is picking up steam thanks chiefly to Amazon’s name recognition and wide variety of available books, and any extra effort on Amazon’s part is unnecessary and so not expended. The effort you do see—Bezos on TV, deals left and right with publishers, strongly advertised cheaper prices—is not on behalf of readers, it’s on behalf of an attempt to lock down as much market share as possible before customers wise up, or, more likely, a competitor creates such an obviously better device that Kindle has to play catch-up.
I’m guessing they’ve crunched the numbers and they can hit market share goals easier by hard-selling in America than by creating infrastructure in other countries, and so the real reason Kindle isn’t in Europe is because Amazon doesn’t care enough to get it there.
The odd part is that Kindle is so proprietary and locked down that Kindle buyers are cyclically forced into staying Kindle customers for the foreseeable future. So if Amazon had put a little more effort in, they could have a whole bunch of Germans lined up.
I can hear Bezos laughing now, chortling out his company’s motto: “Why bother?”
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Below: Bezos with Stewart, for no good reason. My favorite line is “Oh, you got to pay for the books, too?” Sold!
