E-Reading Between the Lines: A Closer Look at E-Readers
January 4, 2010 by Nate Winter
At this stage in the e-reader game, there are plenty of comprehensive, apples-to-apples comparisons between Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s nook and Sony’s Reader series. Since these types of reviews are well-worn territory, I’m going to discuss some of the key features and differences, but then offer predictions for the future of this very young, promising product category.
The Branding Perspective
In the early days of the web, Amazon was the first online bookstore and its brand stood for exactly that. Since then Amazon has expanded its product offering to include everything under the sun, so the brand evolved to connote a trusted ecommerce experience more than just books. And then in 2007 Amazon decided to draw upon its literary roots by launching its e-reader, the Kindle. Despite the brand's flip-flopping, I think Amazon does make sense in this category and that developeing the Kindle is a strong on-brand move. The Amazon of 1995 and the Kindle-crazy Amazon of today both stand for a new way to buy books.
The Barnes & Noble brand has a stronger link to books than either Amazon or Sony, which is a strength. But Barnes & Noble has no experience in developing consumer electronics, and that creates a key disconnect within the brand. I suspect consumers feel uncomfortable shelling out $259 for the first high-end electronics device made by a book store. And unlike Amazon, ecommerce is not a key part of the Barnes & Noble brand. Granted, Barnes & Noble's website probably sells a lot of books. But when the average person thinks of Barnes & Noble, I suspect that their mind goes to a retail location, not ecomerce.
Sony’s brand has no association with books, but a very strong connotation with quality consumer electronics. From a common sense perspective, I think Sony should have the advantage here. Amazon and Barnes & Noble might understand the reading experience better, but the Sony brand actually knows how to develop an electronic device. In my mind that’s a huge logical advantage, but branding isn’t always logical. Sony isn’t putting the marketing dollars behind its product the way Amazon and Barnes & Noble are. Sony also lacks an arena for free self-promotion, like Amazon has through its website and Barnes & Noble has at its retail stores.
If Barnes & Noble and Sony had collaborated to develop an e-reader-- The Barnes & Noble nook, brought to you by Sony-- these brands would've covered up one another's weak spots. Sony would contribute its expertise in consumer electronics, and Barnes & Noble would contribute its knowledge of the reading experience. That's a product with branding that will make sense to consumers. Let Barnes & Noble contribute a competition-free presence in all of its retail stores, and that's a set up that could more effectively challenge the Kindle.
Notable Product Features
There are a lot of attractive and promising product features between these three products. Unfortunately, no single product seems to have a clear advantage in terms of features... not yet, anyway.
Sony’s Reader Daily Edition has the unique feature of compatibility with the ebook formats of public libraries, allowing you to wirelessly borrow an ebook from your local library and enjoy it on your Sony Reader. A way to read ebooks for free is a strong draw for a device with a $400 price tag.
The Barnes & Noble nook handled the “free content” idea another way: ebook sharing. Just as you might lend a real book to a friend, the nook lets you share an ebook with another nook user for 14 days. It’s a great idea that covers off on copyrights and digital rights management, while also allowing people to share media the way they always have. It’s reminiscent of the song-sharing model Microsoft created for the Zune, which was a good idea, but not enough to save the Zune from total obsolescence.
The nook also allows users to connect to free wi-fi in any Barnes & Noble store, which seems like a thoughtful touch. Except that you can download an ebook to your nook wirelessly from anywhere, so this feature ignores the advantage of not having to go to the bookstore to buy a book. You can also browse any part of any ebook while in a Barnes & Noble store, just as you might pick up a book from the shelf and read through it. It’s a little hokey, but this move shows that Barnes & Noble understands the book-buying experience and is capitalizing on its retail advantage over Amazon and Sony.
Kindle’s text-to-speech function is a very cool idea, but it still has a long way to go. Kindle reads the text on an ebook aloud with a computerized voice-- an awkward, uninflected computer voice. It’s not something the average person could tolerate for more than a minute or two.
A more important issue though is that the text-to-speech feature is a direct competitor to publishing's huge audiobook market. Amazon acknowledges that publishers may choose to disable text-to-speech reading on their ebooks-- a liberty I believe many publishers will exercise in order to preserve their audiobook revenue. And in the future, I predict you’ll have the option of buying the ebook and the audiobook bundled together (a Kindle Bundle, anyone?), so you can switch effortlessly between the two.
Ultimately, many of these differences will only persist for the next couple versions of each e-reader. Over time any of these devices could easily incorporate popular features introduced by the competition.
What’s Lacking: Color and Light
Color screens will be an important feature as this new product category develops. (Technically the nook has a color screen, but it’s not the reading screen. It’s a small, secondary touchscreen for finding new books and other content to download.) While the typical novel doesn’t require color for its pages, there’s plenty of other reading material that does. Comic books and graphic novels, cook books, children’s books, newspapers and magazines and even book covers.
You can already access newspapers and magazines on these devices, but e-readers will need color screens to compete with full-color print publishing. Color screens will be important for showing photos and charts, but also for displaying advertising, a potentially key part of the business model.
A more curious let-down is the inability use an e-reader in the dark because the screens aren’t backlit. Backlighting causes the discomfort from looking at a TV or computer screen for too long (which is known as "eyestrain"), so e-readers feature a different type of screen that’s designed for hours of comfortable reading-- just not in the dark. E-reader clip-on book lights (like the ones for a regular paper book) sell separately for around $20. But a built-in lighting function that can be turned on to enable reading in the dark seems like an obvious innovation for the next generation of e-readers.
The Kindle Advantage
Despite the merits of other e-readers out there, it looks like Kindle has the advantage and will maintain it in the future. Here’s why.
BEING FIRST
While e-reading devices first emerged in the late ‘90s, the technology garnered little attention from the general public until Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007. This made Kindle the first e-reader in the public mind, which is an important factor in brand building as the first brand in a category is often considered to be the best-- Coke in cola, Gatorade in sports drinks, Ford in American cars, Harvard in American universities, etc. In some cases the first brand in a category actually becomes the category name, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Band-Aid.
Being first in the category also allows Kindle to set some frameworks that will be difficult for other brands to work around. Just as Apple’s iTunes Store set the price of a song at $0.99, Amazon has set the standard price for most new books at $9.99. This price obviously reflects the savings of eschewing paper book manufacturing and distribution, but also probably represents a price that Amazon felt was palatable for customers, which publishers will be forced to accept in order to offer their books on Kindle. And like Apple and iTunes, the Kindle is a closed system. Content publishers will need to jump through some hoops for Kindle’s proprietary formats and accept Amazon’s revenue model in order to cash in on this large new market that’s specific to Amazon.
MEETING DEMAND
E-readers were a top-of-mind gift category this holiday season, and Kindle appears to have come out on top. It’s currently the most popular product on Amazon, and it was available to anyone who wanted it over the holidays. The nook and the Sony e-readers, on the other hand, suffered from manufacturing volumes that couldn’t meet demand, and many December orders couldn’t be fulfilled until January. Because the Kindle was in stock and ready to delivery throughout December, it probably picked up customers who first chose nook or Sony, but really wanted something in time for the holidays.
Now that Kindle has the advantage, I believe it's likely to maintain it. As long as its features and services remain on par with the competition, Kindle can continue to dominate this nascent product category.
