I’ve been keeping track of the Kindle reviews (mostly through Scoble’s link blog) and for the most part my opinion of the device hasn’t changed. The price still seems high, the wireless download (without contract or fee of any kind) still seems cool and in the end I still think it will be a failure. That said there was something that I read in this review by Smugmug’s Don MacAskill that sparked some thought in my mind. Here’s the quote…
The book selection sucks. There are big gaps, even for well-known bestselling books. Having worked in the book industry before, I put most of this blame in publisher’s laps. They’re just a nightmare to deal with, and paranoid about their content. Apparently they don’t want my money or yours, and even Amazon doesn’t have the weight to make them see reason. Shades of the music, TV, and movie industries, anyone? This must be incredibly frustrating to Jeff and everyone else at Amazon.
Now selection is of the utmost importance to the Kindle’s success and I think everyone realizes that so I won’t spend any time on it. What interests me is the idea that the publishers are holding up the process.
There has long been a debate as to how much influence illegal file sharing had on the music industry and specifically on the industry’s caving in to services like iTunes. This reaction from the publishing industry seems to point to the idea that file sharing was instrumental in turning the tide towards digital media. Look at the facts, here we have an industry that basically works under the same principles (e.g. selling content on physical media) but which sells a product that is hard to reproduce in digital form (scanning a book is much harder than ripping a CD) and that industry is fighting tooth and nail to not go digital (hence the lousy selection).
So the question I now have is “does this justify illegal trading?” I’m no radical but any historian will tell you that breaking the law was sometimes necessary to bring about change (see the Boston Tea Party allusion above). Maybe it’s just my old guilt over file trading as a kid but as someone who has bought his music legally since that has been an option I feel a little validated by this.