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There is a long article at Newsweek.com (that is annoying to read because of all the ads and pop-ups) about the new Kindle from Amazon. Priced at $400, this electronic book reader threatens to overturn the publishing industry the way that Napster upset the apple cart for the RIAA. I agree with Seth Godin that Amazon is missing a huge opportunity with this new product:

“When Amazon came to talk to me about being included on the reader a long long time ago, I said sure, but.

The but is that I wanted my books to be free and included in every reader, and my blog, too.

… the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach. No harm, no foul, all three of us win. If there were a million of these machines out there and an author had a chance to have her next book show up automatically on all of them, few among us would say, “no thanks to that exposure.”

This is a disruptive approach, the sort of thing only a market leader could pull off. It changes the world in a serious way. I wanted to be part of that.

I was unpersuasive. Sorry.“

I see something else that is missing from this product. Read this excerpt from the article and tell me if you see it too:

Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com

The model other media use to keep prices down, of course, is advertising. Though this doesn’t seem to be in Kindle’s plans, in some dotcom quarters people are brainstorming advertiser-supported books. “Today it doesn’t make sense to put ads in books, because of the unpredictable timing and readership,” says Bill McCoy, Adobe’s general manager of e-publishing. “That changes with digital distribution.”

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem—in fact, instead of buying a book in one discrete transaction, you could subscribe to a book, with the expectation that an author will continually add to it. This would be more suitable for nonfiction than novels, but it’s also possible that a novelist might decide to rewrite an ending, or change something in the middle of the story.

We could return to the era of Dickens-style serializations. With an always-on book, it’s conceivable that an author could not only rework the narrative for future buyers, but he or she could reach inside people’s libraries and make the change. (Let’s also hope Amazon security is strong, so that we don’t find one day that someone has hacked “Harry Potter” or “Madame Bovary.”) Those are fairly tame developments, though, compared with the more profound changes that some are anticipating.

What are the more profound changes?

“Book clubs could meet inside of a book,” says Bob Stein, a pioneer of digital media who now heads the Institute for the Future of the Book, a foundation-funded organization based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house. Eventually, the idea goes, the community becomes part of the process itself.
[and]
“The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.

No, Mr. Vershbow, I suspect that the idea of authorship will change, and there will be less of a need for publishing houses. The “expense” of publishing a book mentioned above goes way down when you do not have to print the text with gallons of ink on thousands of pieces of paper. And advertise in the legacy media. In fact, I am already an author, read by over 2,000 people every day. What is to stop me from writing a novel (using free word processing tools from Open Office) and upload it to E-junkie as a zip file? Sell it using the free PayPal service? Market it free in my gmail?

The answer: nothing. (Except that I am not a novelist!)

The changes that something like Kindle can impel are bigger than anybody wants to realize. Look at Radiohead, they don’t need a music company contract anymore.

It’s the end of the world as they know it, and I like it just fine.

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UPDATE: The Unclutterer wants to know is the Kindle worth it? and points to a couple of reviews by Scoble and Management Craft.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/67wuvx. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen