Kindles, iPhones, and Oh, My

What do these devices all have in common?

They are far more than convenient electronic devices. They are indeed handy. You can carry an entire library of books you have personally selected in your briefcase at the added weight of a few ounces. You can read them almost anywhere. I can take my Kindle with me on the road and indulge my curiosity whenever I want except during take off and landing.

It’s not just the Kindle. A colleague showed me how he reads on his iPhone. He connects directly to his Kindle account and download books directly to his phone. The screen size isn’t ideal, even when he rotates it 90%. And the type is still pretty small. But the display is not too bad. And it is even lighter than a Kindle.

These devices open up marketing opportunities that may have escaped the attention of a lot of publishers. Consider what has happened to the music business over the last decade. You no longer need to shop in a record store. (Record store? What’s that?) You can now download (or, unfortunately, share) music files in a matter of seconds. Savvy record companies have discovered they can turn music into impulse purchases. Especially now that consumers can buy single tracks instead of entire albums, the music industry can “give away” the most popular tunes to broadcast and Internet radio stations and let the market initiate the purchase of the track. Artists themselves have discovered that social networks allow them to sell music while they assert their independence from labels.

E-book readers like the Kindle and the iPhone let publishers and authors turn their books into impulse purchases like music tracks. A good interview, a good blog entry, a good YouTube video, a good audio clip can stimulate a buyer to purchase a book on impulse. Within 30 seconds or so of making the spontaneous decision to purchase a book, a customer can own a less expensive copy that cannot be returned, duplicated, or given away. I’ll try to explain in a later entry why lower price for the customer does not necessarily mean lower profits for the publisher or author.