The Most-Loved Car, Bikini Baristas Put On Notice, and Some Bitch-Slapping

1. What car delivered the most satisfaction this year? Probably a Lexus, or a Prius, right? The answer may surprise you.

2. Snohomish County, just north of Seattle, takes aim at the latest menace to society: bikini baristas.

3. Papa John’s, which is donating all profits from pizzas sold yesterday and today to the families of the four police officers who were gunned down near Tacoma last month, is so overwhelmed with business that all but three of its 20 Seattle-area stores have stopped taking orders. I love the community response, but this left us scrambling for other dinner plans.

4. Perez Hilton gets bitch-slapped.

5. Speaking of bitch-slapping, have you been weighing the Barnes & Noble Nook versus Amazon’s Kindle? The New York Times’ tech maven David Pogue opines: “Every one of the Nook’s vaunted distinctions comes fraught with buzz kill footnotes.”

UPDATE: Other reviewers pile on:

Here’s The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg: “My recommendation on the Nook is to wait, even if you prefer its features to the Kindle’s. It’s not fully baked yet.”

Here’s the AP: “I’ve been trying Barnes & Noble Inc.’s $259 Nook for a few days, and I’m not eager to prolong the acquaintance.”

Four Ways Amazon Can Have Fun with the Kindle Business Model

After the last price cut on Amazon’s Kindle, I was kicking around some ways that Amazon could make the Kindle even more attractive, besides cutting price, that is. I was finally spurred to write these up by Prof. Bogost’s interesting post on Kindle economics (key revelation for me: it’s actually dirt cheap to print a physical book).

Each of these addresses either a barrier in the adoption of e-books, or a way that e-books can improve upon the physical format, making them attractive despite other shortcomings. Some of the most interesting things e-books will do will come from what they enable that physical books never can, and digital distribution is part and parcel of that.

A favorite analogy among media and analysts around the Kindle is how it compares to iPod. And those comparisons are indeed instructive. But the ways in which the two devices are not similar are often more interesting than the ways they are. For instance, the main factor in the iPod’s success was convenience: someone can listen to a dozen CDs in a single day, and he doesn’t know in the morning what he will want to listen to at night. So the ability to carry hundreds of albums in your pocket represented an awesome leap in convenience. By contrast, a paperback book is alread pretty damn handy. Most of us don’t read a dozen books simultaneously, but instead spend days or weeks working on a single title. Yet how many times hav eyou reached for your bookshelf to look up that funny passage, check a factoid, or even just remember who that one author ways, anyway? So like the iPod, convenience is a factor with the Kindle, just not in the same way. 

So here are some ways that the Kindle business model can really stand out.  

1. Get past purchases on Kindle for a one-time fee. Imagine an iPod or MP3 player that doesn’t allow you to put any of your existing music on it but only new purchases that are formatted just for that device. MP3 players are so successful because nearly everyone has an existing collection of dozens or hundreds of CDs that can be nearly instantly ported over to the new device. But with Kindle, all those books on your shelf are destined to stay there, collecting dust and forever separated from digital nirvana. But what if Amazon made an offer to all Kindle owners that for a nominal charge, say, $2 a book, you will be provided with a Kindle copy of every book you’ve ever bought from Amazon. Heck, for power readers who have ordered a ton of books, call it Kindle Prime and charge a flat $99 to cover every past purchase. This is similar to what Apple did with its iTunes store when it started offering unprotected MP3 files at a premium. For an additional 30 cents per song, Apple would upgrade your library of tracks to the new, DRM-free format. By doing the same thing with books early on in the Kindle’s lifecycle, Amazon would basically bootstrap the device and makes it instantly more useful to users by an order of magnitude.  

2. Get the physical and electronic editions together at a discount. A lot of people are intrigued by Kindle but still want a physical copy for their bookshelf at home, or as insurance in case Kindle flops or Jeff Bezos really does turn into Big Brother. Amazon already offerings pairings of popular products and books, so it’d be a snap to say, “Add the print edition of this book to your Kindle order for just another $5.” A colleague of mine also suggested that Amazon could notify Kindle users when the physical form of a book they’ve bought digitally moves down into discount bin territory.

3. “Lend” your books to other Kindle owners. This is a huge one for me. My parents and I trade quite a few books. In fact, there’s sort of an arrangement where nearly any book we buy each other for Christmas, birthdays, etc, we will lend it back to the buyer after we’re done with it. I’m sure a lot of families are the same. We are all bibliophiles and also technophiles, which should make us ideal Kindle consumers. But the inability to swap books is a big limiting factor on our purchase intent. So why not enable that with a sort of digital lending license that would let me, say, lend two copies of the book to any other Kindle user for, say, 30 days? It could be like transfering a file via IM: “Scott has offered to lend you ‘Outliers’ by Malcom Gladwell. Do you accept? You will have 30 days to read this book from the moment you accept.” Amazon could reap a huge amount of goodwill with a move like this. 

4. Give book lovers a way to show off their bookshelves. Another gem from my aforementioned colleague. Admit it, there are books you like having on your coffee table or bookshelf to impress visitors. What about when you’re at the airport and you see someone reading a fantastic book you just read? You sometimes start a conversation with them to see what they think, right? But with Kindle, there’s no way for any of this signaling to take place. What Amazon needs is a sort of virtual bookshelf that will let anyone browse your library, perhaps even leave comments. Sort of a social network for booklovers. There’s already something like it on Facebook called LivingSocial, which lets you display and review books, games, albums, movies, etc for other users to see. However, it’s clunky and obnoxious to use, and Amazon could either build something better or buy it and make it better. To be sure, iPod suffered from the same shortcoming, which has only been somewhat rectified with the recent introduction of Cover Flow.

I’m sure there are tons of other cool things Amazon could do. Heck, it could even resurrect those old book clubs deals where you got five books for a penny if you promised to buy a book a month at regular price for the next year. Maybe you could get a Kindle for $99 if you could promise to buy a Kindle book a month ($9.99 minimum price) for the next two years. What other ways could Amazon innovate and use the Kindle’s digital infrastructure to light a fire under e-book sales?

Missing the point

Here’s another piece by someone slamming the Kindle because it turns out that a cheap netbook computer can act as an e-reader, too!

Happily, the assertion is fully refuted by the accompanying photo. Why, yes! Tilting a laptop sideways to read a book is a perfectly natural and attractive thing to do!

Hey, know what? I can listen to my music collection on my laptop, too. But you don’t see me wandering around town with headphones on and my laptop tucked under my arm.

The Kindle is useful because it does for books what the iPod did for music. It creates a stylish (well, the Kindle 2 does, anyway) and convenient way to read your books or listen to your music.

Why is this so hard for some people to understand?

Kindle math

I am sorely tempted to get the new Kindle. I really liked all the features of the first version but, truth be told, it was just too damn fugly. Thankfully, Amazon not only gave the second iterationof its ground-breaking e-book a badly-need facelift, it seems they also fixed several shortcomings while improving the features that did work.

As part of my ongoing internal deliberations, I decided to run the math on my book purchases and see where the Kindle would net out.

James Martin at PC Worlddid this a couple days ago, but I have some issues with his calcuations. First, he says this:

For the sake of argument, let’s say I’m an avid reader who buys two paperbacks per month from Amazon. The average price of a book on Amazon’s top 10 nonfiction paperback bestseller list is $16.19 (based on my calculations). If I bought 24 paperbacks a year, that’s $32.38 per month or $388.56 a year.

I’m not sure where he’s getting those prices. I couldn’t find a “Amazon’s non-fiction paperback bestseller list”, though I did find a New York Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list. The prices on those books ranged from about $9 to $12, not the $16 Martin found.

Martin’s bottom line?

Still, my number crunching reveals that even a loyal reader of paperbacks would only have saved $58.82 by the end of the second year of Kindle 2 ownership.

My instincts told me that while the Kindle wouldn’t realize massive savings for typical readers, it would offer a bit more than $59 a year. So I looked at some real-world numbers, namely, my own actual purchasing history from the past year.

In the last 12 months, I bought 24 books from Amazon costing a total of $311.03 before tax. Sixteen of those are available in Kindle editions that would have cost a total of $150.61. Those 16 books cost $200.45, so switching to the Kindle would have saved $50. If all 24 of my purchases were available in Kindle editions, they would have cost $233, saving me about $78.

Yet there’s another wrinkle. I pay $70 a year for Amazon Prime, which gives me default 2-day shipping on all my stuff. Of course I ordered everything from CDs to a GPS device on Amazon last year, but books probably made up half of my orders. CDs probably made up another 1/4 to 1/3. But I’ve recently switched largely to ordering MP3s straight from Amazon’s digital store, obviating the need for CDs. If I bought a Kindle, I’d probably have justification to drop out of the Prime program. There would probably still be some things I’d have to pay shipping on, so let’s conservatively say I’d save half of the cost of Prime — $35.

That brings my annual savings up to $113. That’s about double Martin’s estimated savings. Of course, the Kindle costs close to $400 with tax, so it would still take nearly four years to recoup the cost.

The catch is that a device like the Kindle isn’t just about straight savings is it? It’s about . It’s about new functionality, like searching your library for that great quote or factoid. It’s about having an entire library at your fingertips. Financial savings is part of the equation, and helps justify the purchase, but it’s not necessarily the most important factor.