Jeff Bezos and Amazon Launch Kindle 2.0, Try to Ignore Google Punch to the Solar Plexus

‘BRING ON THE DIGITAL BOOK REVOLUTION’, we say. The convergence of the book publishing world is picking up pace with the news that Amazon will unveil the second model of their Kindle e-reader at a press conference later today. According to leaks the Kindle 2 is lighter, still expensive at US $359 (approx. £240), and still looks a bit underwhelming, design-wise. Exciting!

However, despite their best efforts to toast the success of the Kindle (TechCrunch reckons the e-reading device is beating the iPod’s first year sales in the US)  Amazon will have to instead fend off questions about Google, who unveiled their own dastardly plan to conquer the book world last Thursday. Google’s announcement, made in a misleadingly innocuous blog post, is only now beginning to percolate into the world media echo chamber, and involves the launch of their Google Book Search service, which allows you to freely read out-of-copyright books, on their Android smartphone platform and – crucially – the iPhone. Unsurprisingly, Google’s plan has very little scope for involving an 80s calculator-style reading device sold by a certain online retailer… 

‘Happy mobile reading!’ said the Google Book Search team, presumably lip-reading the screen with the same semi-drugged benevolent monotone they pick up at the door with the free tricycles, although ‘An ice-pick to your heart Bezos clown!’ might have been a more honest exclamation (preferably accompanied by audio samples of bellowing cackles).

Either way, consider the cock well and truly snooked Amazon fools! As BAD IDEA Ed. Daniel Stacey noted in a recent in-depth piece for Slate.com’s The Big Money, the slow roll out of the Kindle in foreign markets has opened up a weak flank that Apple and Google are steaming into like bloodthirsty pirates.

Even if Tech Crunch’s claims that the Kindle has sold 500,000 Kindles in the last 12 months is correct, this is about the same number that downloaded the Stanza application on the iPhone alone, which has only been up and running since July 2008. Plus, you can download Stanza anywhere in the world where iPhones can be used – as opposed to the Kindle, which is a US only device until Bezos pulls his finger out. 

Enter Google, whose US $125 million settlement with the American Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers in October 2008 will allow them to mediate readers’ access to free and searchable digital copies of all out-of-copyright books, and take a cut on all purchases of in-copyright books sold through Google Book Search, Google or the Android platform (see left for pics of what Book Search and its reader looks like on Android phones). Expect more global settlements with publishers and authors in the near future.  

Where this leaves Amazon is unclear. Maybe they could turn Kindle into a mobile phone device? Or pray that Apple don’t weigh in with some kind of uber-iPhone tablet product? Or maybe they could just give up, and start working for Google like the rest of us will soon, if we don’t already…

(A quick footnote: a world ruled by Google is the latest obsession of new media pundit/Google fanboy Jeff Jarvis, a triumphantly returns to the theme in his latest weekly dispatch for the Guardian technology pages. In the piece, entitled ‘The Foresight of Google’, Jarviscombines a thinly disguised plug for his new book What Would Google Do?  with his dream of a Google utopia, where the search engine company dominates the world with hilarious totalitarian consequences: 

Imagine a restaurant run by Googlethink. Besides being decorated in primary colours with M&Ms on every table, wouldn’t it reveal its data to us – how many people order the crabcakes – to help us order? Wouldn’t it open up its process – its recipes – so diners could help improve them? I’m not suggesting that it become a computer-run bistro with an algorithmic menu, but merely that if you can hear them, you’ll learn that your crowd of customers is wise.

… We are in the midst of a fundamental and permanent restructuring of our economy and society. In response to my book, one reader emailed me and went so far as to suggest that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new system to follow capitalism, socialism, and communism: Googleism.

Memo to Jeff: now might be the time to lay off the red Google M&M’s pal!

Posted by Richard Leicester in Creative Economy | February 9, 2009 3:12PM |