Will Kindle Reignite Amazon’s Flame? – Seeking Alpha
For a second imagine if the Kindle had all its morphological features (ie: EVDO, e-ink display, light weight, nice price) but with an open API for anyone to publish content for anyone that uses the device, through an Amazon market place. No DRM imposed, only an infrastructure that provided a means of doing mobile reading of ANY textual content. Also, we should come up with what the modality of experience this engenders should be called. Mobile reading? Ubiquitous Textuality? Diachronic Discourse?
And hell, since Kindle is supposedly a “service, not a device” how ’bout letting other hardware manufacturers build compatible software on their devices?
It looks like Amazon got obsessed with the high-concept tag “the iPod of books” and ignored the difficulties every previous e-book device has had gaining traction.
Instead of aping the iPod business model, they should have taken an approach like Google is taking with their new Android phone platform, with Amazon, like Google, making money on transactions instead of hardware, and partnering with as many hardware companies as they could.
The market for standalone e-book readers will always be a tiny fraction of the market for devices that could read e-books (phones, iPods, laptops, desktops…) — why not deliver a solution that could capture the larger market?