Amazon Kindle: Death of a product

I am going to write this post without any major references. But most of the facts can anyway be looked up on the internet.

Image Source: Amazon India Website

Amazon Kindle tab was launched with much fanfare. It was the cheapest priced tab. Especially, the Kindle Fire. It was lapped up readily by the hipster generation as book reading was too mainstream. Amazon had hoped to build a ecosystem around the device, very similar to the ecosystem around songs build by Apple. It went about muscling the publishers to accept the platform, copying the tactics of Apple. It wanted the device to become a platform where anybody could publish and have their books available for download. In the traditional publishing, an author has to be worthy enough to be read and bought by enough number of people, to justify printing and distribution costs. This meant having a run of at least a few thousand copies. I knew some of my friends who managed with a run of few hundred books, but the distribution part was left to them. The publisher gave them a few hundred copies of their own books and asked to distribute them. 

But, digital publishing broke these shackles of printing and distribution. Now I can publish a book online and distribute it online at almost zero cost to the publisher. Another friend of mine, published a book on Amazon, and it scored about 80 downloads. Most of them friends and well wishers. 80 downloads would have netted some revenue to Amazon, and made an author out of nobody. But this illustrates how the business was supposed to work. Traditional publishers make money out of thousands of copies of a few authors, but online could make money out of few copies of millions of authors. And the site where all this would happen was Kindle. 

But Amazon missed out of two key aspects of consumer behaviour when it comes to books. They are unlike music in two aspects

1. Books cannot be consumed like music. They need involvement. 
2. You don't consume books in the same amount as music. Yearly, people would read about 5 books (on the upper side), but consume hundreds of songs. 

These two things, will ensure that although online publishing will spawn hundreds of thousands of authors, there might not be a population base of eager downloaders and readers. And as if this potential shortcoming wasn't enough, came the cheap tablet era. 

Kindle provided the basic functionalities (and the style quotient of moving around with a tablet) at half the price of I-Pad. But cheaper tablets have destroyed that advantage. Nowadays, I can get a tablet, at 2/3rd the price of a cheap Kindle, which will support many many Android apps, web-browser, camera etc. And the Kindle can only be a good e-reader. If I had to sell a Kindle to a customer, the first point that (an Indian customer) would ask me, How is it better than the Datawind's Akash tablet being sold at 1/3rd the price?

There, is the death of this instrument. At the higher end, Kindle is trying hard to be like any other tablet, with full features and its own operating system. But then it cannot compete against other tablets. And it can no longer be just an e-reader. A cheap android-based tablet with an e-reader app would do just fine. And publishers are not just limiting themselves to Amazon only. There are other websites from which e-books can be downloaded. You just don't necessarily have to have a Kindle to read an e-book. Thats how the product dies. 

The fact that Amazon does not reveal sales figures of Kindle, perhaps point to the fact that they know that the product will die, sooner or later. And this might not just be Kindle, but the way that all e-book readers (without any other major functionality) will go into tech history.