Digital Book Market - Competition Set To Hot Up
Amazon released their first Kindle ebook reader in November of 2007. It sold out in five and a half hours and was then out of stock until April 2008. In February of 2009 the new and updated Kindle 2 was released and it consolidated Amazon’s present position as the biggest player in the ebook marketplace.
In May of 2009, a mere three short months after the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon announced the launch of the Kindle DX – a larger version of the Kindle with a bigger display and the functionality to read native pdf files.
It’s very obvious that Amazon consider the ebook market as a target for potential massive growth and it’s worth noting that, despite the fact that alternatives do exist in terms of ebook reader devices, there have been few, if any, competitors with the necessary size and infrastructure to pose a threat to Amazon’s dominance – up until now.
In early June of 2009 Google announced that it will launch a scheme for authors to market digital versions of their books online before the end of 2009. This follows on from an earlier commitment to make public domain books available in downloadable digital format – and has led to a partnership with Sony who announced in March that they would make Google’s public domain ebook library available through their Sony PRS ebook reader.
Google’s scheme will allow a wider choice in how readers access ebooks. It seems unlikely that Google will restrict the downloads to one proprietary hardware device. At this time, books downloaded from the Amazon Kindle store can only be accessed on either the Amazon Kindle itself or the Apple iPod Touch or iPhone loaded with the necessary Kindle reading app.
It may also be better for the authors of the books – Amazon has been criticised for retaining too large a portion of the revenue generated by ebooks downloaded from its site.
The potential market for ebooks and ebook readers is vast, so it can come as no shock that Amazon finds itself with competition for a share of the potential income. However, until now the majority of the new developments in the field have been from companies intending to sell their own ebook readers, such as Plastic Logic who recently advised that they will launch a DX sized reader in 2010.
Google’s huge library of electronic titles, available for use across a number of different hardware platforms, has the potential to completely alter the marketplace for downloadable ebooks in the immediate future.
It’s also worth noting that, in a slightly ironic twist as the Kindle has frequently been dubbed the “iPod of reading”, Apple may well be releasing a tablet type PC in 2010 – which will be positioned somewhere between an iPod Touch and a MacBook. It would seem reasonable to assume that this may have the functionality to read ebooks, possibly in a variety of different source files.
Possibly more important than the hardware considerations - it doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to envisage that Apple could expand their iStore to incorporate ebooks just as they already expanded to include video when the iPod Touch was launched. On the other hand, were Apple to stick with an app which allowed their users to read Kindle books on their Apple hardware then Amazon’s position might be further strengthened.
It’s a tribute to Amazon that almost any new development is the field of electronic books is currently labelled as the new “Kindle killer”. There’s no doubt that competition is going to be fierce in this market in the near future. Amazon certainly won’t have it all their own way for much longer. Even so, they are the current key player in the marketplace and might reasonably be expected to play an important role in the future of digital books.
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