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The Kindle Pit
-Andrew Grossman
April 9, 2009
The popularity of Amazon's electronic-book device, Kindle,
has electrified the market. E-book readers have been around
for years, but none of them provided the connectivity and
the depth of content provided by Kindle. Even Sony's own
entry in the market, Reader, does not provide wireless
access. But it soon will. And many other offerings will
follow from additional tech companies coupled with
additional wireless services. Five companies have already
applied to Verizon, which provides wireless access, for new
e-book devices. AT&T will soon jump in with an announcement
of their first agreement with a device manufacturer. Nothing
succeeds like access.
The effect of reading devices on the income of writers
has not yet become clear, but the fervent nature of
consumer content demands is very well established. On
April 8, a group called The Reading Rights Coalition,
which represents disabled readers, staged a protest
outside the Authors Guild's New York offices. The reason
for the protest: the Guild, when it negotiated a
vast content sale on behalf of its members last year,
refused to allow a blanket availability of content to
the text-to-speech function, which is built into Kindle.
The reason for the refusal is that the Guild felt such
access would
be a major threat to the
billion dollar audio book market.
One result of the Guild's intent to protect the income
and rights of its member: limiting the rights of
the disabled. Is the Guild at fault? Only of wanting to
slow down content access in order to examine rather
writers are cannibalizing their sales in print without
achieving equal dollars from e-book download sales. The
hesitancy is justified, in order to study the
implications of such access, and to conduct this study
without the warp speed of consumer device advances.
Devices demand enormous databases of content-the Kindle
offers more than 260,000 books, plus newspapers-and such
quantity cannot help but lessen the author's sense of
the integrity and the uniqueness of individual works.
What we know, but only the first implications, are the
insatiable content demands of current devices. What
creatives fear even more are the heightened demands of
future e-book devices, and the likely expectation, from
manufacturers, from network providers and from the
public, of ever more access for ever less money.
This entry is
part of a larger article. To receive the full article,
contact:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net
Category: Kindle,
Fiction Income,
Author's Guild
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