The iPad, The Kindle, Google and Book Publishers

•Google 'opens' a digital bookstore in competition with Apple, Amazon & Barnes & Noble!
•Which device or store gives readers most choice and flexibility?
•Locked in by ebook publishers?

An excerpt from an NPR interview with Ken Auletta. Originally published in The New Yorker.
Listen or read at NPR.org

AULETTA: But now what is Google is doing, assuming that the courts approve their settlement with the publishers and the Authors Guild, what Google hopes to do is basically to create an online bookstore as well, and compete against Apple and against Amazon. The publishers welcome that because the more competition, the more leverage they have.

GROSS: So now that you have several different e-publishers putting out books, what are the odds that you'll be able to download all books on all devices, or will devices largely be - will the books that you are able to download largely be controlled by their compatibility with the device you own?

Mr. Ken AULETTA: Oh, you've really touched on an important difference and an issue here going forward. With Apple and with Amazon, you can only download a book on their devices. What Google is promising when they start their program, assuming they do this summer, that's their target, they are saying that you can download our book on any device of your choice.

So it's not a closed system, the way the Amazon Kindle is a closed system or the iPads, iTunes or iBook is a closed system. And that's going to be an interesting test, what happens there.

GROSS: But aren't the companies going to have apps that'll enable you to download the other companies' books on your device?

Mr. AULETTA: Well, you will have apps, which obviously Apple will get a piece of. Apple is in the app business, and they have - in fact, Amazon has an app on the iPad. So you can actually order Amazon books on the iPad.

Yes, then you can download it to, say, to your desktop computer or your laptop computer, but Apple, of course, is making a chunk of change on that.

GROSS: When Apple started iTunes, there was already a culture of free music. There was a lot of, like, sharing of free music through the Internet, a lot of sites where you could download free music. The music industry was very upset about that, and Apple, as far as the music industry was concerned, Apple was selling stuff cheaply, but at least they were selling it, which was good news for the industry, compared to the giveaways.

Now, in the book world, there hasn't been that culture of free books. There's been a culture of giving away newspaper and magazine content for free, but not books. So is that affecting how the new world of e-books is being shaped?

Mr. AULETTA: I think you're quite right. Piracy has not been the worry for book publishers that it has been for others, but the larger point here - if you go back to when iTunes began in 2003, what it really did was challenge the very culture of the Internet. The culture of the Internet is a culture that grew up around the notion that information and entertainment should be free, that the Internet is free.

What Apple did was introduce the notion that you should pay for content, and in that sense it was salutary for the music industry but also salutary for anyone in the content business.

And you see this world of the Internet changing very dramatically. I mean, Amazon is an online world that says you want to buy a book, you have to pay for it. That is a very important step in the notion that all people who are traditional publishers or in the content business are terrified of.

They say, How do we charge for our content on the Internet? How do we avoid people either pirating it or taking it, thinking that they deserve to have it for free? So you can make the argument that what's happened is that the digital world, the Amazons and the Apples, have become pioneers in the notion of charging for content, and now you see a change taking place because of the recession of late '07 and '08, where suddenly companies like Google wake up and realize that, oh my God, we are relying totally on advertising to support and sustain our business, and advertising has fallen off. We need another revenue model, another source of revenue.

That is good news for traditional publishers and for people in the traditional content business because it means that the digital world is moving closer to them.

GROSS: So how do you read now? Do you read a lot of e-books? Do you read a lot of, like, hardcover books? Do you read books?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. AULETTA: When I go - I have a Kindle. I'm waiting to buy the iPad until the 3G or the faster model comes out in a month or so. When I go on vacation, I take my Kindle and read on that because it's much lighter. When I say lighter, I don't mean the three-quarters of a pound with Kindle. I mean instead of taking five books, I take my Kindle, and they're there and you can download in 60 seconds. I love that.

I actually prefer to read a book in hardcover because I can mark it in a way I can't in the same efficiency of a Kindle, and it's on my bookshelf, and I can refer to it as I'm writing. Some years later, I say, wait, wasn't there a Bob Caro(ph) story about Lyndon Johnson in the Senate that - and I can find it much more easily if it's on my bookshelf.

The other thing I don't like about the Kindle, which is an advantage I think the iPad offers, the Kindle doesn't paginate. You don't know what page you're on. It says you are 52 percent of the way through this book.

But the Apple iPad will actually paginate. So you see you're on Page 10 or 20 or whatever, and that's an advantage. I mean, I find that more attractive.

Read more on NPR's FRESH AIR. "Can The iPad Or The Kindle Save Book Publishers?"

Comments

book publishers said…
Google's open source ebooks software will no doubt challenge ipad and kindle over the coming months.
Schiplady said…
While walking through BJ's Wholesale, which is like Sams, I noticed that Sony has 2 different versions of a similar device to Kindle. There was no information that I saw on the display as to where the books came from that are read on the device or how much information it would hold. I did notice that it was significantly less expensive than Kindle.