Fifteen years ago, I closed the factory where we made the Signature Series line of custom tailored golf, driving/sport and dress gloves. Painstakingly. Individually. With expert craftsmanship. Our Gloversville, NY craftsmen table-cut the very best fitting gloves, from soft and supple domestic deerskin, based on the individual hand measurements of the customer. The metaphor--fits like a glove--was apt for the Signature Series glove that was as personal as your signature. Like the last buggy whip manufacturer that made excellent buggy whips, we made the best gloves that money could buy. But lower labor wages in third world countries and the lack of money to automate the glovemaking process eliminated the domestic glove manufacturing industry.
Today, the newspaper and paper book industry is contracting whereas the Internet-driven digital news, information and book industry is rapidly growing. The convenience, competitive price, customer service and technology-driven advantages of online book ordering is making the mass production of paper-type products obsolete. Websites, like www.Lulu.com, allow authors to sell and consumers to buy both e-books or just-in-time paper printing for those who wish to receive an ink-and-paper book.
However, e-book readers, like Amazon's new Kindle 2, and smart phones, like Apple's iPhone, are rapidly becoming the preferred way of buying, distributing and reading news, special interest articles and book content.
The new Kindle 2 ($359) is nothing like reading e-books on a laptop. You can enjoy the device anywhere you can whip out a regular book and not worry much about how you hold it. The catalog of books available on Kindle has now swelled from about 90,000 in 2007 to over 230,000 today, and titles still typically cost around $10 (prices range from $1 to $15). You can subscribe to periodicals and blogs (there is a Web browser built in) but the Kindle is primarily for reading books. Delivery of books, magazines, and newspapers is done over the Sprint wireless broadband network and requires no user registration or extra fees. Purchases are billed to your Amazon account, and the cost of the network is built into the price. This allows you to download books or update periodicals on the fly, without using a computer and with no monthly fee for the wireless service.
The Kindle 2 display, based on technology from E ink in Cambridge, MA, supports 16 shades of gray. Power consumption, low to begin with, has been cut further, so the battery lasts for days at a stretch. There's enough memory to store 1,500 books, so managing your library is likely to be a bigger problem than running out of space. And Amazon promises the future ability to load Kindle books onto other mobile devices, such as smart phones that people already own.
While the Kindle project has often been compared with Apple's iPod, because both are hardware devices seamlessly connected to online-content stores, there is a fundamental difference. Apple offers content to sell hardware. Amazon offers the Kindle to sell content. Ultimately, the best market for the Kindle may be as a replacement for huge, expensive books...including textbooks. The ability to carry a whole library in a 10oz. package makes it a reader's treasure.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2009 and BUSINESSWEEK, March 9, 2009