Amazon will have to do much more than enlarge its Kindle to increase the e-reader’s appeal to college students.
Announced Wednesday, the Kindle DX features a 9.7-inch screen geared toward displaying textbooks for college students. However, many students polled by Wired.com on Twitter listed various reasons for why the DX would fail to replace their mountains of textbooks. Their complaints ranged from the reader’s $500 price tag to the DX being inconvenient for study habits.
“I’d need five Kindles just to hold a single thought while writing essays,” said Marius Johannessen, who is studying for his master’s in information systems at University of Agder. “Books work just fine.”
Amazon is investing high hopes in its Kindle e-book reader, with dreams of spearheading a paperless revolution. It’s unclear just how close Amazon is to actualizing this dream, as the company has declined to release official sales numbers of the reader, which debuted late 2007. However, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said in February that the Kindle makes up 10 percent of the e-book market, and Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated 500,000 Kindles were sold over 2008. So that would suggest 5 million e-readers were sold over 2008 — still a small market relative to the tech industry.
With the DX, Amazon is aiming to expand its e-book presence by targeting two major print industries — newspapers and textbooks. The textbook industry, worth $9.8 billion, is going to be tough to crack, because there are so many ways thrifty students obtain their books: University stores often offer used books, book-trading programs and sometimes even textbook rentals. Other than specification details and the product’s price, Amazon did not disclose sales strategies for e-textbooks.
Tech strategist Michael Gartenberg said a viable e-textbook business model would be the DX’s main challenge in appealing to students.
“You can’t introduce technology like this, which has got a lot of breakthrough things associated with it, and expect it to be business as usual,” Gartenberg said. “The reason the iPod worked was not only did it introduce new technology, but it introduced a new business model for the technology as well.”
Indiana University business student Chandler Berty told Wired.com he would consider a Kindle DX if e-books cost less than used physical textbooks. He added, however, that college students already carry laptops, which are superior to the Kindle, rendering the reader unnecessary.
“Two devices = fail,” Berty said.
Students pointed out plenty of other issues about the DX to Wired.com. For instance, students often loan textbooks to one another, and currently that’s not practical with a Kindle, as you’d have to loan your entire reader and library. Also, the beauty of paper textbooks is the ability to highlight sentences, underline keywords and keep all of them open at once. While the Kindle does have highlight and notes tools, the reader is sluggish with performance, and the keyboard is unnatural and clunky to type on.
However, it’s too soon to say how Amazon’s DX will fare on campuses, as the students polled by Wired.com had mixed opinions. Overall, 19 students replied to our query via Twitter, five of whom said they would definitely purchase a DX, seven who said no and seven who said maybe.
“Law students are waiting for Kindle books!” said Twitter user “SoCaliana.” “We have so many books to carry around. I couldn’t find my texts on CD or anything!”
We can expect Amazon to cook up some interesting sales models after it completes DX pilot programs with Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia and Pace university. Meanwhile, let’s get the brainstorming started. What would you suggest for e-textbook sales strategies, readers? Here’s an idea: Selling e-textbooks by individual chapters as opposed to complete books, since most classes don’t read textbooks in entirety anyway. That would certainly cut costs.
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Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com
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