Amazon Kindle To Debut On Monday - Ugly But Impressive
The speculation over Amazon's new ebook gadget, called the Kindle, ends on Monday afternoon during a special Amazon press conference in New York. Newsweek's Steven Levy claims to have had the device for weeks and wrote …
Context & Ripple Effects
The week of speculation ends today: after CNET reported on November 15 that Amazon would show its e-book reader, the company holds a special New York press conference this afternoon to unveil the Kindle. The arc runs through Newsweek's cover story — Steven Levy, who has had the device for weeks, frames it as ugly but impressive, and Bezos positions it as the next act after building 'a better bookstore.'
What separates the Kindle from earlier e-readers, per the confirmed details, is untethered delivery: books download wirelessly in under a minute, and newspapers, magazines and blogs arrive automatically with no PC or Wi-Fi hotspot. The reaction across the syndicated coverage splits along exactly that seam — Read/WriteWeb hails it as finally lighting the eBook world, while mathewingram.com balks at paying to read blogs and Howard Owens doubts the newspaper experience.
First-order effects
- Amazon moves from selling books to selling the device they're read on, putting a pricey new gadget in shoppers' hands just ahead of the holiday season — where its own Customers Vote promotion is already discounting consoles to drive traffic.
- Newspapers, magazines and bloggers gain an automatic-delivery channel to readers, but only on Amazon's terms — the blog-subscription model is already drawing public pushback from writers like Mathew Ingram.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and periodicals now face a second gatekeeper: reaching Kindle readers means accepting Amazon's pricing and revenue split, echoing the leverage Bezos already holds over book suppliers.
- Rival e-reader makers are forced to answer wireless delivery — a PC-synced device suddenly looks dated against one that pulls books off the air in under a minute.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Amazon owns the full reading stack — hardware, store, and delivery — turning bookselling into a platform business where the storefront follows the customer onto the device.
- The 'ugly but impressive' split in the coverage signals that e-reading's fate hinges less on industrial design than on whether consumers accept paying for content streams like blogs that they currently read free on the web.
The trend: Bookselling is extending into hardware, with Amazon using the Kindle to move its storefront from the browser onto a device it controls.