By Raunak Haldipur
Amazon has been selling Kindles for a decade now and the tenth-anniversary edition of the Kindle has been made waterproof. The first Kindle was introduced in 2007, three years after Sony came up with their E-Ink reader called Librie. That being said, a question that begs to be answered is with regards to the Kindles soaring popularity as compared with Sonys E-reader. It is even more surprising when one sees that Sony introduced the concept three years before Amazon did. All the success of the Kindle is in the behind-the-scene elements.
The story behind Kindle’s success
When Sony launched the Librie in 2004, Jeff Bezos attended the event and understood the potential of the product. He then ordered 30 Librie devices for his employees to play with. The Librie could hold 500 books at a time. However, Sony had one issuethey had an arrangement with publishers to access their library of books, which was conditional to the extent of only 1,000 titles per publisher. This was nothing, it was just a drop in the ocean when it comes to the number of books available. What good would be an E-reader if it only gave access to a few book titles? Hence, the Libre was unsuccessful.
This is what Jeff Bezos learnt. He approached E-Ink about building an E-reader for Amazon. At that point of time, it was a puzzling project and people questioned his motives. When Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, it had a wireless connection, unlike Librie, which had a USB connection. A major differentiator was that Amazon had a huge catalogue of eBooks for sale and they had already developed a good relationship with all their major publishers. On the launch day of the Kindle, Amazon had over 88,000 titles of eBooks available for download. More importantly, it was very easy for anyone with an Amazon account to buy the book with just one click. When Amazon launched the Kindle, the first batch was sold out in five and a half hours. E-Ink made e-readers a reality and the behind-the-scenes effort by Amazon made Kindle the real winner.
Kindle over the years
Just this week, Amazon released the Kindle Oasis. The Oasis was first released in 2016 when Amazon experimented with a different screen size as compared to all the previous models. However, this time, Amazon has taken it up a notch by making the Kindle water-resistant, which is ideal for beach reading. It also provides support for audiobooks through Bluetooth headphones. The Kindle Oasis has 8GB and 32GB storage versions. The top end version with LTE-support retails for $350, which is actually cheaper than the first generation Kindle when it was launched in 2007.
The first generation had 250MB storage space and a physical keyboard. It looked bulky and retailed for $400, and yet, it was sold out in five and a half hours. It was only in 2011 that Amazon did away with the keyboard and introduced the Kindle Touch. It also did away with the physical button to turn pages. In 2012, Amazon launched Kindle Paperwhite, which was affordable and also came with backlighting so that users could read books even at night.
In the meantime, Amazon also experimented with Tablets. They introduced the Kindle Fire, which ran on the Fire Operating System (OS), a custom version of Google’s Android OS. Since then, a new Fire tablet has been launched every year. The latest one is the Fire 7 which was launched in June 2017 and was priced at only $49. It is not a tablet with high specifications, but it is very affordable.
The way forward
Amazon is working on making the Kindle more and more like reading an actual book. This year we saw a waterproof Kindle being launched, and Amazon may even push the boundaries of technology to make it more colour-friendly and like a physical magazine. Amazon is no longer viewed as an e-commerce company or a book-selling company. It has transformed into a technology company which promises to continue introducing innovative products for years to come.
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