Kindle: Lighting a Fire Under Textbook Publishers

By Jack B. Rochester, Managing Editor, The Business Insider

I just returned from a week's vacation in Jamaica, yah mon. I planned to spend lots of time catching rays on the beach, so I took fourteen books along with me. Conveniently, they were all on my Kindle. I was an early adopter, last year, and recall a colleague asking if I didn't miss the smell of ink and the feel of holding a book in my hands.

Well, no, not really. The only down side I've found is I have to switch off when the airplane I'm on is taking off and landing.

With the advent of the second-generation reader, the Kindle 2, we have a handheld electronic reader that's been improved by reader feedback. Amazon's technical people actively solicited comments, and it looks like they took our comments and suggestions for improvement to heart. Stephen Windwalker is to be commended for both his evangelism and his technical documentation, a book pre-installed on the Kindle. Then in March, Amazon announced a Kindle application for the iPhone. No moss growing under these people's feet.

Yesterday, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Amazon announced a large-screen Kindle intended for use as a college textbook reader. The device goes in the opposite direction of the iPhone application, for obvious reasons: It has to display many illustrations, graphs, artwork, and photos that enhance the textual explanations. No way to squeeze all that content into a 2x3" screen.

A friend of mine from the college textbook business, whom we shall refer to here as Mike, wrote me an email about this new innovation, from which I excerpt:

"Do any of you really think [the Kindle will replace a printed textbook]; at least in your lifetime?  I don’t; no more so than today’s digital textbooks for the PC have. I’d bet that the sales of current digital textbooks are dismal relative to the quantities of books printed, and likely will remain that way for this good reason: traditional textbooks = no batteries required.  Printed textbooks are just way more practical and convenient and a whole lot easier to really study from. Bottom line for me: printed textbooks can be greatly enhanced by digital media, but not replaced by it."

How do you feel? Me, I think Jeff Bezos and his Amazon people are genius-grade. I never was, nor have I ever met, a college student who enjoys lugging heavy textbooks around. Nor do they want to pay the high prices textbooks command [hence sharing, hence buying used copies]. But what they do like is electronic gadgets, and this one makes a lot of sense - even to helping cross the final hurdle of getting a student to read the book. And they can still do all the traditional highlighting, markup and bookmarks - electronically.

Batteries? Schmatteries. There's always a place to plug in, and besides, this thing will go for weeks without a recharge. Colleges can buy the Kindles, like they did computers, for  students as part of tuition or make the price low and attractive. If textbook pricing follows trade book pricing - e.g. $24.95 in paper, $9.99 as a Kindle download - everybody wins.

Business and technical writers ought to be thinking of the Kindle as an emerging publishing platform, because it's good for many other formats and types of documents - PDFs, Word files, newspapers, magazines, etc. Indeed, companies that must provide business or tech docs to accompany expensive, complex products would do well to explore putting the docs on a Kindle instead of the traditional, far more expensive, PPB paper-based manuals.

That's what I thought about as I sat in my beach chair, facing the beautiful waters of Montego Bay: yah mon, this Kindle has so many uses that are just beginning to be explored....

Cheers,
Jack

Comments

[John "Excuse me while I light my spliff" Buck]

Before you buy a Kindle consider the paper book.... Consider that the books you buy from Amazon are limited by digital rights management rules imposed by the publishers. You may invest thousands of dollars over the years in a library that your friends can't access and your heirs can't sell to second-hand dealers