Tag: Kindle

Forever Upward!

Random Thoughts

downwardSo, I was reading an article over at paidContent by way of The Passive Voice, and one quote leaped right out and punched me in the face:

What was once triple-digit growth has fallen to the double digits.

The context is that Amazon won’t win the e-book market because their growth is slowing.

Let me make this as simple as possible. Lets say every day a group of three people buy 10 bananas and split them. On the first day, person A gets 1, person B gets 1, and person C gets 1. 7 of them turn out to not be bananas. On the second day, they buy 10 bananas again, and due to a change in the way they buy the bananas, person A gets 4, person B gets 2 and person C still gets 1. 3 of them are still not bananas. Going from day 1 to day 2, person A sees 300% growth, person B sees 100% growth, and person C sees no growth. On the third day they get 10 actual bananas, person A gets 7 bananas, person B gets 2, and person C gets 1. Person A has seen a 600% growth since the first day, and their growth in raw numbers is the same from day 2 to day 3, they gained 3 bananas each day. However, the growth from day 2 to day 3 is … 75%.

That’s right, person A has seen their triple-digit growth fall to the double digits.

The main thing to note here is that in my example, there are three people and ten bananas every day. Despite what many people involved with the stock market will try to sell you on, growth cannot be infinite unless there is at least one infinite factor by which it can grow. There would need to be either infinite people to buy bananas (demand would exceed supply and drive the price up) or infinite bananas to sell (supply exceeds demand bringing the price down), or both. When it comes to ebooks, or any retail good, like it or not the limit is the number of people in the market (or the availability of the good – but we are going to stick to the market size going forward).

The population of the US as determined by census in 2010 was 308 million people. Assume in the first year of the Kindle, Amazon saw an initial buy in of 10 million people in the US on Kindle and start buying ebooks. Now, I’m guessing here, I don’t need actual figures to prove my point. Let’s say the next year 20 million more people in the US buy a Kindle and start buying ebooks. That growth is 200%, triple digit. There are now 30 million Kindle owners in the US, so in order to maintain triple-digit growth, more than 30 million people will need to buy Kindles. Let’s assume they do, let’s say the next year 50 million buy Kindles in the US and we get 167% growth. Now we have 80 million Kindle owners, and to maintain triple-digit growth, more than 80 million people will need to buy Kindles. Let’s say they do, 100 million people buy a Kindle in the US the following year,  125% growth. There are now 180 million people in the US who own a Kindle. Do you see the problem?

308 – 180 = 128

Even if Amazon were to manage to sell a Kindle to every person in the US who doesn’t own a Kindle already at this point, that would only be 71% growth. Double digit. The year after that would be even worse as Kindle sales would have to be tied to population growth, which since 2010 is estimated at 1.7% over 2 years. Single digit growth.

Growth is a nice number when you are a little guy, a small business. Growth is great when there are lots and lots of market space to grow into. But growth is a terrible number to use in a vacuum for judging a company slipping into failure. Saturation? Sure, but since Amazon is in the business of selling e-books, not Kindles (seriously, the Kindle is a loss leader for book sales), Saturation is actually good because it means your entire market is capable of buying your goods.

And my numbers are complete bullshit, because the market for Kindles isn’t the population of the US. There are plenty of people who don’t buy books at all and probably have less than zero interest in the Kindle. Those people are going to buy iPads, or cheaper tablets, because they want games and the Internet. Sure, the Kindle does those things too, but it is primarily marketed as an e-book reader. The Kindle’s growth HAD to fall eventually. Had to. Because at a certain point it becomes mathematically impossible for it to continue climbing.

Mostly, this irritates me because of the increasing presence of “doom-casting” that goes on in the media. Face it, bad news gets more attention. People don’t slow down their cars to gawk at kids playing with puppies in a safe environment. Because consumers consume it, the writers seek it out. They look for ways to twist and phrase things to make them look bad… well, unless they are writing about the underdogs. The only thing that tracks better than bad news is news about the “little guy” sticking it to “big guys”. Of course, how it is people continue to see Apple as a “little guy” is beyond me – a company with a hundred billion in cash reserves doesn’t seem little to me.

Anyway, that’s my ranting for today…

Ruining It for the Rest of Us

Random Thoughts

Last night I attended a screening for the upcoming movie Dredd (very good, enjoyed it a lot, plenty of action, too violent for the youngsters, looking forward to some sequels) and ran into the latest round of backlash and silliness.

No Recording Devices
All Your Cameras Are Belong To Us!

I’ve been to many screenings, so I’m used to them saying that you have to turn off your phones or even saying you can’t bring them in. Sorry folks, they keep making better phones and with 720p HD video recording on your phone, it is getting easier for people to bootleg movies. And that’s really what they are looking for, recording devices.

First off, to all you people there who download shitty bootlegs recorded with camera phones: Stop. For one, there are better bootlegs out there. For another, THERE ARE BETTER BOOTLEGS OUT THERE. I’d say that again in bold and italics, but I figure CAPS should be enough.

Secondly, to the theaters: see the above paragraph. Very few people are downloading bootlegs made on iPhones. Mostly because almost no one is making bootlegs on iPhones. Most bootlegs are made in empty theaters by unscrupulous theater employees, or made as a digital copy right off the discs/camera/stream, however you are getting your digital copy of the movie. If the screening is months before release, then I further understand a desire for “security” to keep screen grabs from leaking onto the Internet, but when you are within a week of release and professional paid reviewers are already dropping bombs and spoiling your film, a kid who snaps a crappy photo of your movie is the last thing you should be worried about.

What really irked me though, was the insistence by security that not only were phones, cameras and such not allowed inside, but no iPods or Kindles or Nooks or any electronic device. That’s right, even devices that do not have cameras because they are not made with cameras, were not being allowed inside. Certainly this was because of lazy – it’s easier to ban everything than to actually know things and selectively exclude devices that are capable of recording. On top of that, though, is the fact that in all the screenings I’ve been to the only thing that ever needs to happen is for security to say, “Put all phones on silent or vibrate. If you use an electronic device during the movie, or a device you have makes noise, you will be removed from the theater.” and then stand in the back of the theater, watching and listening. When that happens, no one pulls out their phones to make calls or text or play games. Because, by and large, people don’t suck when given simple logical instructions.

To top that off, the movie was in 3D. You cannot, to my knowledge, record a 3D movie projected onto a screen with a handheld camera and preserve the 3D. At best, you slap one of the polarized lenses on the camera and record only the left or right eye image, capturing it in 2D – but it will be much worse quality than just capturing the film in straight 2D.

And further insult to injury, the security staff was willing to “bag and tag” phones, but they offered no insurance. One guy actually said, to the crowd, “If you lose your ticket or we lose your phone, you will not get a replacement. It’s just gone.” You know, there is a reason that I keep a photo of myself on my phone at all times, that way I can walk someone through unlocking the phone and opening the photo to prove it’s either mine or someone who knows me. But if that wasn’t enough, the parking garage at this particular theater is a typical parking garage, and thus on your parking ticket states “The management of this garage is not responsible for damage or theft of any vehicle or its contents.” So when the security guys were offering to let people out of line to go put their phones and Kindles and iPads in their cars, they were basically saying “You can’t take those in the theater, with you, where they are safe, you need to put them in your car, where the garage has specifically stated that they aren’t responsible for them.”

I guess people could just not bring their phones and things with them, but who goes around without a phone these days?

Anyway, I’m sure we got this terrible treatment by security because some schmuck somewhere tried to record a movie with his iPhone and then uploaded it to YouTube. If you are that guy, just know, you are ruining the movie going experience for everyone. Cut it out.

eInk Writer’s Companion

Random Thoughts

I like to write. I hate to write sitting at my desk. I would love to be able to write anywhere. Being a left hander brought up in a school system that refused to teach left-handed writing styles, I have horrible form and it hurts to write manually for extended periods, which prevents me from using pen and paper for any long form writing. I love computers. I have a completely bizarre typing style that has developed over years that doesn’t result in any discomfort or carpel tunnel issues. And when I say write anywhere, I mean anywhere, including sitting on a beach in broad daylight.

So, what I really need is essentially an eInk Kindle, in landscape mode, perhaps a slightly longer/wider screen, with an attached clamshell keyboard – a real keyword, for use with fingers not just thumbs. It could have wi-fi, but really only for some sort of wireless sync. All I need it to be able to do is create new document files, open existing document files, save files, delete files and support some form of hierarchy so that I can associate multiple documents to each other – such as chapters to a book – and see it visually. Something that simple, with no need for additional software and browsers and Internet and such, could run for hundreds of hours on a single charge, and being that the files are only text, a small amount of memory can go a very, very long way.

I know these days people and companies are in love with multi-function devices. Phones that are also music players and cameras and PDAs and web browsers and email clients and so on and so on. But I still like my single function devices too. I like having a Zune for my music/podcasts and nothing else. I like having a Kindle for reading books. And I would love to have a device that is simply for writing and not for gaming and a million other functions.

Looking around at other simple eInk tablets/readers that exist, I think this could be put together and sold for around $79, probably less, and at that price I’d buy one in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I doubt such a thing would ever exist. It’s too simple, and whenever I bring up the idea to someone they always respond with either “Get a Tablet” or “Get a Netbook”. I have a netbook and a Kindle Fire, and neither of them are what I want – mostly because the screens are less than useful in sunlight, and the Fire lacks a full physical keyboard. Plus, the battery life on them both is terrible. 8 hours? Bah!

I’d be happy to be wrong though. If there is an eInk document writer with a full keyboard, let me know. I’d be forever in your debt.

Save Yourself, Save the World

Random Thoughts

RecycleI’m a little late for my semi-annual plea. I missed Earth Day by about 5 days, or 371 days if you count the fact that I didn’t post last year…

Anyway, previously I’ve posted about services that help you eliminate junk mail. Unfortunately, those sites are all dead now, probably because they set their fees too low to be successful in the long-term. 41pounds.org, however, has managed to stick around. I can’t vouch for their specific service, but I can say that taking advantage of one of these services that will help get you off mailing lists is pretty awesome. They are currently running a special for $24 to cover every adult in your household for 5 years. $4.80 per year to stop most junk mail. Totally worth it in my opinion.

I also haven’t gotten a phone book in over two years thanks to their new opt-out policies. Yay!

We’ve continued the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra around the house. We generate about a bag of trash every two weeks or so, and I’ve been working harder to turn off unused electronics. I’ve gone 100% over to electronic billing, except for medical bills – hospitals insist not only on paper bills, but on generating several copies of every bill, and every bill contains the full accounting of the charges and payments. It’s a miracle that they allow me to pay online.

Both the wife and I have gotten Kindles, her the Fire and me the basic model. We’ve switched over to buying most new books in eBook form. I doubt I’ll ever buy comics or graphic novels that way, at least not until there is a cheap high quality 14 inch tablet that can view them full size without zooming or going panel to panel. And with two-page splashes the way they are, a 28 inch tablet is just impractical.

Most importantly though, and the intent of the title of this post, is that most of our efforts have actually been to save money. The eBooks are cheaper than they physical counterparts most of the time (especially when you read classics and keep an eye out for deals), electronic billing means so buying stamps and envelopes, keeping electronics off drops the power bills, drinking water saves on groceries, less junk mail means less trash bags, and so on and so on. Nothing we’ve done was specifically to save the planet. It was all done to save us money, and the side benefit is it just happens to be better for the world (or at least our continued ability to live in it) in the long run.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to afford solar panels and an electric car…