Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book

This article is more than 2 years old.

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. -- The Amazon Kindle has sparked huge media interest in e-books and has seemingly jump-started the market. Its instant wireless access to hundreds of thousands of e-books and seamless one-click purchasing process would seem to give it an enormous edge over other dedicated e-book platforms. Yet I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.


To understand why I say that, I'll need to share a bit of history.

In 1994, at an industry conference, I had an exchange with Nathan Myhrvold, then Microsoft's chief technology officer. Myhrvold had just shown a graph that prefigured Chris Anderson's famous "long tail" graph by well over a decade. Here's what I remember him saying: "Very few documents are read by millions of people. Millions of documents--notes to yourself, your spouse, your friends--are read by only a few people. There's an entire space in the middle, though, that will be the basis of a new information economy. That's the space that we are making accessible with the Microsoft Network." (These aren't Myhrvold's exact words but the gist of his remarks as I remember them.)

During the Q&A, I said: "What you said is completely right, but it's not the Microsoft Network that is going to deliver that information economy. It's the World Wide Web."

You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform.

The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser.

While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day.

In fact, the year before, we'd launched The Global Network Navigator, or GNN, the world's first Web portal and the first Web site supported by advertising. To jump-start GNN, we hosted and sponsored the further development of the free Viola web browser, as a kind of demonstration project. We weren't a software company, but we wanted to show what was possible.

Sure enough, the Mosaic Web browser was launched shortly thereafter. The Web took off, and MSN, which later abandoned its proprietary architecture, never quite caught up.

For our part, we recognized that the Web was growing faster than we could, particularly as a private company uninterested in outside financing. So we sold GNN to America Online in June 1995. Big mistake. Despite telling us that they wanted to embrace the Web, they kept GNN as an "off brand," continuing to focus on their proprietary AOL platform and allowing Yahoo! to dominate the new online information platform.

So it was with a feeling of deja vu that I listened in mid-2007 to the promises of Amazon about the potential of its new proprietary e-book platform. While no payment is required to participate, there are clearly onerous restrictions that could limit the growth of the market: a proprietary file format, and the requirement that the e-books only be sold by Amazon.com.

The file format was a problem for us from the get-go: Amazon's Kindle file format doesn't provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web's native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first "strategy tax" paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can't support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.

The single point of purchase was also a non-starter for us, since my fundamental understanding of information marketplaces is that they grow bigger and more lucrative for everyone when there is a rich ecosystem of cooperating players. (Here's the text of a talk I gave on that subject back in 2000.)

History has already begun to repeat itself.

We've thrown our support behind epub and other open e-book standards, providing our books as "e-book bundles" that give the reader the choice of pdf (still the only viable choice for many highly formatted books like our Head First series of "brain friendly" tutorials that even HTML can't handle), epub, and mobi, an HTML-based predecessor to the Kindle format that lacks digital rights management but that can be imported into the Kindle. To help jump-start the market, we're hosting and supporting the free bookworm e-book reader.

While Amazon doesn't reveal sales figures, industry estimates place Kindle device sales somewhere in the region of 500,000 to 700,000 units. Meanwhile, another e-ink device, the Sony Reader, claims to have sold about 300,000 units. Neither discloses the number of e-books sold. In fact, Amazon's agreements with publishers prohibit any disclosure of sales figures.

But we can already see the momentum on the open e-book platform. Stanza, the epub-based e-book reader for the iPhone and other Web-capable phones, may well be playing Mosaic to bookworm's Viola. Lexcycle, the creator of Stanza, announced recently that its software has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times, and that more than 5 million e-books have been downloaded.

Most of those 5 million e-books are free, public-domain books, to be sure. Only a tiny fraction are paid downloads--so far. But at O'Reilly, we already have a proof point of the power of the new Stanza/epub platform. We released one of our books, David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an application bundle with Stanza through the iPhone store. In the six weeks since it was released, it has outsold its print counterpart even though that paper-based version has been the best-selling computer book in the market, and is outselling its closest competitor by a ratio of 3:1. Even though the iPhone application is only 20% of the price of the printed book ($4.95 vs. $24.95), it doesn't appear to be cutting into sales of the bound edition.

And frankly, this is what we saw with the original World Wide Web. Most of the initial content was free. Even now, the bulk of the content on the Web is supported by advertising. But that advertising business model has created more than one multibillion-dollar company. Meanwhile, other business models also thrive, much as I predicted back in 1996 when I wrote Publishing Models for Internet Commerce.

For example, at O'Reilly, we offer our books, along with those from more than 30 other technical and business book publishers, through Safari Books Online, which we launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group back in 2000. Safari has a different model than downloadable e-books--it's an online subscription service that provides access to more than 8,000 books and videos for a single monthly fee. But it's also HTML- and PDF-based, using formats that anyone can read on any device. We recently introduced a mobile-friendly version of the service. Safari now represents O'Reilly's second-largest channel for sales of our content (ahead of print sales through Barnes & Noble , and behind only Amazon.)

In developing the business plan for the Kindle, Amazon was no doubt influenced by the great success of Apple with the iPod: Proprietary hardware and proprietary file formats made Apple into the kingpin of the digital music industry. But what Amazon seems to have missed is the important role that "free" played in the success of the iPod. People didn't populate their iPods solely with music purchased from Apple. It was easy for them to "rip" their own CDs into the standard mp3 file format and load their entire music collection onto the device.

While users can load some of their own documents onto the Kindle, there is no easy way to "rip" a book. But with epub-based readers, there are millions of free titles available, and books are available from many vendors, each able to experiment with new business models. Buy a print book, get an e-book free? Buy a print book and e-book for one low price? Buy one, get one free? Buy in multiple formats?

Apple has played the same game to perfection with the iPhone App Store. The Cupertino company seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.

Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program. Or, like AOL and MSN, Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. He can also be found as @timoreilly on Twitter.

See Also:

Where Real Innovation Happens

Making Future Headlines

Big Hairy Audacious Work
https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html
www.forbes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-05
413649
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZIJDTAEOA6Q7W4AFJNLCU3EHONSVCJTW
<urn:uuid:51f3f2bc-4040-4cb8-8ffe-86fe83ddc6e1>
2020-01-18T18:44:44Z
151.101.250.49
text/html
sha1:TTPJPGN6A2TFNDHPOS46M33U7R52R4OT
<urn:uuid:ef97abce-965f-41cd-a143-7b786c24053b>
https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html
response
<urn:uuid:61354b7b-ebea-4e12-b69d-67ad8484e31b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-05
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-103.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/