Kindle

Andrew Sullivan extracts from Farhad Manjoo's review of the Kindle at Slate. I share most of his observations and frustrations regarding the Kindle - the eBook lock-in, the pathetic web browser, the lack of RSS, and the "blog" feature. But he reads the tea leaves and says:

If you're in the market for an e-book reader, you'll probably choose the one that offers the most books, and that means Kindle. (At the moment, there are about 240,000 titles available for the Kindle; the Sony Reader, its closest rival, has fewer than 100,000.) Taken together, these trends all point in one direction—Amazon will come to rule the market for e-books. And as the master of the e-book universe, Amazon will eventually call the shots on pricing, marketing, and everything else associated with the new medium.

In the short run I think Amazon will remain master of the eBook. But I have the feeling that in the long run the complete lock down of the device will hurt them once someone cracks the open format nut.

A relevant comparisson here is the evolution of the MP3 player market. Early on everyone was trying to build their own proprietary silo's. You had the microsoft and sony crowds building their own formats. Rio was the big name doing MP3's; however, they suffered from a clunky app for moving your files to the device. And they each did pretty well because there was no one else out there.

But then the iPod came out and (more importantly) iTunes. This made it easy to add to your iPod. You could rip from any CD or import MP3's. Then came the iTunes store. This let you buy music; however, you could still use all your other music. Then podcasts became cool, and apple added the podcast on iTunes but still let you bring in any other one you wanted as well.

The biggest embrace of this openess is the iPhone platform. Apple built the phone but opened it up to the world for software development. Where the big recurring money is is in being the distribution channel for other peoples efforts. This gives others a stake in pushing the iPhone, and it lets them drive innovation. And it is exactly what is missing from the Kindle and why I see its ceiling as the Zune.