Will Amazon Open the Kindle to Developers?
We're heading into the holiday buying season, which means the introduction of new gadgets and the media's annual anointment of the season's hottest tech toy. Plenty of pundits think electronic book readers will sell briskly this year …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Kindle has been on the market for under two years, launched in November 2007 to reviews that found the hardware impressive and the industrial design anything but. Since then Amazon has shipped it strictly as a dedicated book reader; the open question is whether that positioning holds.
Timing sharpens the stakes: pundits expect e-readers generally, and the Kindle specifically, to sell briskly through the approaching holidays. Talk of opening the device to third-party developers is circulating as unconfirmed speculation ahead of any official Amazon word — and whatever Amazon decides before the shopping season begins will help decide how the device fares in the annual contest for the season's hottest-gadget label.
First-order effects
- If Amazon opens the Kindle to third-party developers, every unit already in customers' hands becomes an application platform overnight, and Amazon gains a software distribution channel layered directly on top of its bookstore.
- Third-party developers would gain access to a device with a built-in audience of committed book buyers, and a pre-holiday announcement would let Amazon shape the gadget narrative pundits are already writing.
Second-order effects
- Rival e-reader makers would find themselves compared on software breadth rather than just price and screen quality, forcing roadmap answers during the highest-stakes selling quarter of the year.
- Apps riding the Kindle's built-in wireless connection would deepen customer lock-in to Amazon's account and delivery infrastructure, raising the cost of leaving well beyond abandoning a book catalog.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dedicated reading devices follow the path phones took: value migrates from hardware specifications to whoever controls the software layer, making openness versus control the defining strategic choice in the e-reader category.
- Because the holiday season tends to concentrate demand on one or two anointed gadgets, a single platform decision by Amazon carries outsized weight in determining how quickly e-readers move from early adopters to mainstream buyers.
The trend: E-readers are tracing the smartphone trajectory from single-purpose appliances toward software platforms, and Amazon's openness decision determines whether the Kindle competes on books alone.