DX?

I'm sure you've heard that Amazon announced a new text book sized Kindle, the Kindle DX. I've been giving the matter some thought, and want to expand on some of the other commentary about the new Kindle.

I think there's a lot of potential in having variable sized Kindles. Larger screens, smaller screens, it all depends on your preferences.

But textbooks? The technology is no where close to being usable for flipping back and forth to reference something you half understood in the last chapter.

There's a bigger problem though - textbook piracy. College students are the biggest group of pirates around. They're also cheap. If faced with a choice of a $40 textbook, or a free textbook and $40 in beer, you'll find that not many textbooks will be sold.

There's not a lot Amazon or the textbook publishers can do about this either. There's no requirement that students buy the textbook for a class so there's not going to be much evidence to support a piracy claim. Yes, Amazon can have Kindles start calling home (they do have a cellphone chip after all) to report on pirated books, but the wireless can be turned off.

So what then? When I was graduating many of the intro classes were adding lab books that you had to purchase. They were only 100 pages long and you had to rip pages out in order to turn them in, so they weren't available used. They also cost as much as the main textbook new. Students were pretty angry about it.

The only real alternative to combating piracy is to force students to purchase something for the sake of making sure they spend money. It's not good and it won't work.

The digital book market is no where near ready to face the consequences that wholesale piracy will bring. Far from being the springboard to wider acceptance, the college market may well be the anchor that sinks the whole ebook economy.

kindle fail