My former colleague from Macromedia, Laurent Sellier, just launched yesterday the Kindle i-Phone app. This and the new Kindle (which I got last week) show the direction where Amazon is going with their core offering in books and digital media: it is a full-fledged monetization platform for creatives of the future. It is one of the most probable companies to face an anti-trust lawsuit in five years. It is addressing the web 3.0 opportunities with a solid backing of an e-commerce operation of gigantic scale: unlike most Internet portals still today, these guys are actually selling something. And those e-books are expensive: $9.99 is a lot for a product that will be locked forever in the walled garden of Jeff Bezos.
Julia Borstin writes on Seeking Alpha: “Publishers can get e-Books onto consumers iPhones and Kindles so fast, it should encourage the e-publishing of more books on current issues. And because they’ll be more relevant upon release, more people should want to read them. Since it’s so much less expensive to distribute a digital book, it should allow for more niche products to be published electronically. And that should be good for all the out-of-work writers desperate to write the great American novel or historic tome.”
I fully agree. It is all about ‘frictionless’ knowledge creation, oiling the process sometimes presented as three types of knowledge appearing sequentially: productive, transformative and representative. Those who can develop their brain into a frictionless transformer of knowledge and produce a constant stream of monetizable pieces – and still be sane after living a life like that – will eventually lead a successful life. But like anywhere in life, success increases competition and the need to learn faster. It had better be a lifestyle – there is no rest.
I am a bit worried that the market is at this point going into the direction of further verticalization. No matter what people say, Apple and Amazon have walled gardens. They have built those walled gardens in a legitimate fashion: they let the customer choose freely, after each purchase. And in most cases the customer will return. In the mobile industry we don’t have such luxury – we have 2-year contracts and penalties. Apple and Amazon are building their power bases outside the crippled mobile ecosystem and preparing for an attack. Poor Nokia.
