The Cult of Kindle
I'd not given Amazon's Kindle ebook reader much chance of succeeding given the stratospheric price tag combined with DRM, but then I started reading the customer reviews for it and just realized that the Kindle has already amassed quite a considerable cult following, and this could be crucial to its success.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon launched the Kindle in November 2007 explicitly aiming to do for books what Apple's iPod did for music, but the first wave of coverage was rough: as the Wall Street Journal review put it, the device makes buying e-books easy and reading them hard. Hardware 2.0 had written the product off given its stratospheric price tag combined with DRM restrictions.
What changed with this piece is where the evidence came from — not reviewers, but customers. The Kindle's own review pages revealed a considerable cult following already forming around the device, which the author argues could be decisive precisely because the product's design flaws were so obvious on paper. A separate blog claim circulating the same week that the Kindle was 'a fraud' remains unconfirmed and sits oddly against that groundswell.
First-order effects
- Amazon gets an organic marketing asset money can't buy at launch: a vocal owner base defending a $399, DRM-locked device, softening the reviewer consensus from the November 29 coverage.
- Sony's competing e-reader now faces a rival whose real advantage is Amazon's storefront and one-click buying, not the hardware itself.
Second-order effects
- Because pirating copyrighted books for the Kindle is described as trivially easy — comparable to free pirated music — heavy-handed DRM risks pushing even paying customers toward piracy, pressuring publishers to reconsider e-book pricing and terms.
- Rivals and publishers alike are forced to treat the device-plus-store bundle as the competitive unit, since a cult following attached to Amazon's catalog is harder to dislodge than any single hardware spec.
Third-order effects
- If the iPod analogy holds, the e-book market consolidates around retailer-controlled ecosystems where the store, the format, and the DRM lock-in matter more than the reader hardware — handing whoever owns the customer relationship durable pricing power over publishers.
- A device whose fans forgive its flaws becomes a template for platform-first hardware launches: ship early, let a committed user base carry the narrative past hostile reviews.
The trend: Dedicated e-readers are turning into retailer-locked distribution platforms, where ownership of the bookstore rather than the quality of the device determines the winner.