Tapping the Zeitgeist III

Amazon announced the release of its new tablet / e-reader today.

The Kindle Fire.

Catchy, don't you think? To kindle, the verb, means to ignite something and set it aflame. Kindling, the noun, is small pieces of dry wood, useful for starting a much larger fire.

Kindle Fire. A fire, coming from small things - words - that set something much larger alight.



That is precisely what I was thinking of, just a few short months ago, when I came up with the idea for Kindling Press. We are small, but we're trying very hard to set our words on fire to make something much larger come of it. Our burning-page logo anticipated the Kindle Fire advertising campaign by just four months, and the release of the tablet by six.

It all makes me feel like I anticipated it, like I tapped into something - hmm, let's use the German here: Zeitgeistiche. Zeitgeisty.

With prices like these, they're giving them away

Not really, but it's getting close. The cheapest Kindle is now 79 dollars. Slog gives us a quick look at the facts of the matter, and notes (correctly, I would think) that Amazon isn't really making much on Kindles (esp. the low end ones), so that they're obviously counting on selling a lot of product. Volume has always been their strategy, and I think in this case it's really smart of them. I'm waiting for the just before Christmas announcement that the basic ad supported Kindle is 49.99 for a limited time, which I think they'll do just to try to get people using them, because they make a goodly amount, even with their very generous terms, on every ebook sale. This is really smart, and really great if you're self-publishing on the Kindle. Like, say, for an anthologie of Steampunk stories, or a fantastical Steampunk YA novel, or a sweet, sad tale of a lost and broken young man. Just saying.

Amazon starts ebook lending?

The Kindle may soon have ebook lending. A long time ago, this sort of thing was terribly common. There were a number of societies in the Industrial Age, comprised of eager persons mostly of the lower classes who paid a small fee to be able to check out books from a library put together by the society. This is much the same, I think, and may, in a while, serve the same purpose. Once Kindles have dropped to a nice, cheap price (I mean, they are already, but soon enough they will be affordable to the sort of person I was growing up) it is entirely likely that people who never had the means to afford expensive books (technical, historical, reference) will be able to access them cheaply and gain the same education that the industrial workers of the 1890s did. I like the idea, picturing reading groups devoted to historical writings, to genetics, to atmospheric sciences. It will be wonderful, I think. The past made into the future.

Questioning Authors

If you could ask your favorite author any question just by highlighting a section of their ebook and sending them a Tweet straight from your Kindle...what would you ask?

That is what Amazon wants to know. Their newest program, @Author, features sixteen current authors who will, in fact, answer questions posed to them by readers through their Kindles.

There are some caveats, naturally: questions must be 100 characters or less, and yes, you have to have both a Kindle and a Twitter account for this to work. But those seem like fairly modest hurdles in this day and age; if you read ebooks, chances are good you have a Kindle, and likely have a Twitter (or aren't afraid to set one up). And if anything typifies this age of short attention spans, thinking in 100 characters would be it. (That last sentence was 99 characters including spaces, incidentally).

But what is really new and interesting about this program is not the ability to ask your favorite author a short question electronically. That is far from new. No, the innovative aspect of this is the immediacy of its accessibility. By making it easier than ever for readers and authors to engage one another, epublishing as a whole becomes a different and far more compelling experience than reading the same book in dead-plant-matter ("treebook") form. Remember when seeing a movie in the theater was a much more immersive experience than on a grainy VHS tape at home? As home entertainment technology advanced, the movie theater experience seemed less and less impressive - until the advent of 3D, which gave the movie-going public a reason to flock to theaters again. Notice how rapidly we've seen the signs of in-home 3D televisions coming our way!

Amazon is testing the epub waters with just that kind of strategy. The content is there, the technology is there, but the biggest question yet remains: if you could ask your favorite author a short question...would that affect your decision to buy their ebooks over those of other authors, and a Kindle over other e-readers? Amazon is betting it will.