eHarbor eCommerce Marketing Blog

By Robert Lockard

The Kindle DX’s launch last week brings up an interesting discussion on the value of content in the digital age. I couldn’t cover this whole discussion before, so now I’ll follow up on that discussion, as I promised to do in my first blog entry on Kindle.

I read another article on Kindle in Information Week, entitled “Amazon’s Kindle DX Poses Profitability Challenge To Publishers.” This article focused on a different effect Kindle DX can have on publishers. The publishers it discusses are not in the news media, but the textbook industry.

Apparently, a comparatively lightweight, digital copy of textbooks appeals to schools looking to save money for themselves and students. Textbooks can be expensive and heavy to carry from class to class, so Kindle’s new version offers a useful option. But the idea of turning their products into electronic copies doesn’t appeal to textbook publishers because of the negative impact that would likely have on their value and, thus, company profits.

The reason behind publishers’ hesitance to include their textbooks on Kindle is quite intriguing.

In the article, the author points out, “One fact that’s sure to keep shareholders up at night is the drop in the value of content once it becomes digital, sometimes as much as 50%, analysts have said.”

By publishing a written work in an electronic format, its value falls. The printing press, introduced centuries ago, made books much less expensive and time-consuming to create, lowering their value to a level attainable by more people. Perhaps the Internet is our new version of the printing press, allowing information to be shared cheaply and quickly, compared to traditional media forms.

By avoiding the costs of printing, binding and distributing books, these publishers could maintain their profits while lowering prices. But change is often scary, even if it has many positive points.

The article points out that the world is changing, and it’s becoming more difficult to ignore new technologies. I covered a similar topic on businesses that have yet to enter the ecommerce industry in my previous eHarbor Blog entry, called “Strong sales attract retailers to ecommerce.” We can look to the music industry to see the consequences of failing to take advantage of online services in a timely manner, the article also notes.

The photo of a Kindle atop textbooks is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of KNK.