The Kindle… Yet Another Small Step in the Right Direction, But a Rather Tiny Step…

One of our customers called this week, wondering if their Nxtbook would play on the new Amazon Kindle. While it’s super-cool that anyone would hope it would, it won’t.

The Kindle runs on E-Ink. A few years from now, E-Ink could be the cool stuff that revolutionizes the print industry. Right now, commercial applications are only black and white and - in the case of the Kindle - mostly text. No graphics. So if you’d like a black-and-white text version of your magazine to be available on the Kindle, I guess you could, though really, you could do that now. For free. It’s called RSS, and most magazine publishers have discovered that while RSS is something they should have their hands in, it’s hardly a winner-take-all strategy.

This is also why magazines are tumbling off of the Kindle’s best seller list and will continue to do so. It’s a rather unfulfilling experience for the reader - having no charts and graphs.

But only for now. The realist in us says, "There’s no market here," but the realist in us also says, "But there will be!"

There are quite a few other reasons why the Kindle isn’t a silver bullet for magazine publishers, but we’ll leave them be for now. At best, this is a device that will lead to other devices that change the way we do business.