Kindle Delight: the Coming e-Reader Battle

Bishop Ed Little, Prof Doug McGlynn (Nashotah House), and I spent delightful moments yesterday at our clergy conference celebrating our love for our Kindle e-readers. That is, the bishop and I waxed philosophical about the wonders of our Kindles while the good professor salivated as he anticipates buying one for his upcoming sabbatical. I showed him the collection of research works I carry on my Kindle DX along with my digital "margin notes" and then showed him how I sync it in order to continue reading the same book on my iPhone while in the barber's chair or in a line waiting for service at the auto dealership or elsewhere. Amazon Kindle: don't leave home without it!
All of which is introduction for this article in today's Wall Street Journal about the upcoming battle in e-readers we can anticipate .....

And then there's the e-reader business.

This is a new industry, which means nobody knows for certain what will happen next. The naive—and most common—approach is to assume the future will look like the near past. Amazon's Kindle, which is easy to use and lets you download books and other reading matter wirelessly, has transformed the industry. All credit to chief executive Jeff Bezos. And the company isn't hanging around. It just cut the price of the Kindle, and at last launched an overseas version as well.

But that does not mean Amazon's lead will last.

(After all, Palm once dominated the hand-held organizer business and look where that got them.)

The Kindle has weaknesses. Books purchased on an Amazon Kindle can only be read on a Kindle (or an iPhone). The company uses a proprietary closed format. As I've mentioned here before, it risks making the Kindle the Betamax (Bezomax?) of e-readers.

Meanwhile Amazon's competitors, including Barnes & Noble, are moving to an open, shared standard known as ePub. Books purchased in ePub can be read on any other device, including laptops. A wave of new e-readers hits stores this fall. And at long last, these are copying Kindle's key feature—the connection that lets you browse and buy wirelessly. Consumers finally have a real choice.

Barnes & Noble is ramping up its online business to compete with Amazon and the Kindle. It purchased Fictionwise, an independent e-book seller, earlier this year and launched its own e-book store in July. As my colleague Geoffrey Fowler revealed last week, the company is poised to launch its own e-reader, possibly within weeks. The new iRex DR 800SG, which will be sold in Best Buy next month, also links wirelessly to Bares & Noble's e-book site.

Ironically, one of Barnes & Noble's biggest advantages in the coming e-reader battle may be its legacy asset: stores. Unlike Amazon, the company can put an e-reader physically into the hands of book buyers. Forrester, the technology research company, reports that e-readers are just poised to take off: Lots of consumers are interested, but so far very few have made purchases. Notably, Forrester found that 40% of consumers had heard of e-readers but had never seen one.

There is everything to play for in this business. Forrester puts the size of the U.S. book market at around $25 billion, and over time a good chunk of that is going to move to electronic formats. I'd rather bet on the cheap stock that everyone has written off than the expensive one that everyone already owns.

via online.wsj.com