Kindle Story Isn’t Just in the Tech

If you haven’t added Teleread: Bring the E-Books Home to your RSS feed yet, you should strongly consider it: David Rothman has been providing excellent reporting and commentary on the e-book corner of the publishing industry. His blog has been one of my regular sources for information and perspectives on the Amazon.com Kindle, and last weekend was no exception, with a Saturday post on some awkward questions being raised about Amazon’s pricing on Kindle-formatted bestsellers and other potential antitrust issues:

“Amazon, the 600,000-pound gorilla of e-tailers, at least partly sabotaged years of e-book standards work by the IDPF when it insisted on a new proprietary format for the Kindle. Meanwhile concerns exist about the Amazon-owned Mobipocket format that so many independents use; will Jeff Bezos and buddies kill it off or let it shrivel away, now that they’re playing up their new Kindle format, complete with $10 bestsellers that the Mobi store doesn’t offer at that price. Questions are even arising among tech-hip TeleBlog and MobileRead readers as to whether Amazon simply tweaked Mobi to create a new proprietary format—perhaps mainly to increase its dominance over other e-tailers? Is it the same old Mobi with just new DRM and fresh machine-identification numbers?”

Meanwhile, Peter Brantley collates more responses to the Kindle in a post for O’Reilly‘s Radar blog. Publishing veteran and Portable CEO Joe Esposito suggests that people who are complaining about what Kindle doesn’t do are missing the point: “Kindle is not a device,” he writes. “It is a component of a system… It won’t fail because it doesn’t support open standards or lacks this feature or that or even because the price is high; it will fail if it doesn’t self-evidently provide ten times the value of hardcopy, and a return on the capital for everyone in the value chain.” Commenters do not respond kindly; as one argues, “Making capital happy only gets you investors; making users happy gets you a business.”

Xerox PARC researcher Bill Janssen takes a lateral approach, roping in last week’s NEA report to suggest that we might be facing “a twilight of the popular novel,” on the wild-card hypothesis that striking WGA members might turn to “machinima” to reach audiences on the web. I’m not entirely convinced, but there’s one thing that’s true: The Internet has created a radically different environment in which to strike than 1988. It’s entirely possible the writers’ approach to the net may shift from using it as a platform to explain why they strike to using it as an entirely new outlet for creative expression. In the meantime, here’s a fun midpoint between the two:

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