Note to e-Book Reader Makers — It’s the Content, Not the Device Itself

bookstore01_002227The e-book space is heating up, with the Amazon Kindle leading the way. Amazon has sold a lot of Kindles (they won’t share exactly how many), and that has driven a lot of e-book sales. Sales are big enough that others in the book retail world are jumping into e-books as fast as they can. Barnes & Noble bought e-book retailer Fictionwise recently, and has brought e-book readers to the iPhone and BlackBerry. A number of companies have announced their own Kindle competitors coming  to market, all hoping to cash in on the e-book “craze”. I have a bit of advice for those electronic book reader makers — it’s the content you make available, not the reader itself.

Don’t get me wrong, cool gadgets go a long way to excite consumers. The Kindle capitalized on that by pairing e-Ink display technology with wireless capability. Folks got excited about the Kindle as it attempted to recreate the experience of reading traditional dead-tree books. Whether it succeeded with that effort or not depends on who you ask, but it did a good enough job to get people to buy them. Adding the wireless capability was a stroke of brilliance by Amazon, as they recognized the online e-book buying experience had to be even easier than the traditional bookstore trip. They succeeded on that score, although they tried to shoot themselves down stupidly, but that easy buying experience was only part of the reason for that success. They made sure they had lots and lots of e-book content for sale at launch.

I’m not just talking about public domain books, such as the hundreds of thousands scanned by Google. While Sony makes a big deal about having hundreds of thousands of these books available for the Sony Reader line, consumers want bestsellers. Let’s face it, new bestsellers have been driving traditional book sales for as long as there have been books, and those are the books that e-book customers want. Amazon understood this with the Kindle, and Barnes & Noble understands that just as much. That’s why it bought Fictionwise; it got an instant inventory of popular titles to sell.

Several different e-book readers have been announced, many of them touting wireless capability to compete with the Kindle. Plastic Logic has an interesting reader coming soon, and it has partnered with Barnes & Noble to provide the content at launch. That’s a smart move; content is king in the e-book world. Surprisingly, other readers are still being announced without wireless capability. This is sure to limit their success in the market. Consumers don’t just want a vehicle for reading books, they want the whole system to get them too.

It’s not just the e-book reading device that determines success in this space. It is the content that consumers can tap into with them. That content must be available from day one or disappointment will set in immediately after the purchase of the reader. It’s like buying a big screen TV only to discover that no channels are available in your home. Looks pretty, but…

NOTE: Those who want an in-depth overview of the e-book scene should check out this research briefing on Gigaom Pro (subscription required.) It is an outstanding look at the players in the e-book industry and how they all compare.

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