Teleread: Amazon and Synergy = Kindle

On the TeleRead.org blog about a month ago Felix Torres was asked to expand, as a guest contributor, on a comment he had made on a related post. His guest post turned into one of the best explorations of the Amazon market strategy I have seen. Two years ago, I thought the implications of the Kindle were far greater than publishers anticipated but Felix pulls together all the strands to make clear both the 'danger' for publishers and the inevitability of the strategy (Link):

Here are some examples:

Once you factor in Amazon’s hidden face it is hardly surprising that they are leveraging their cloud platform capabilities into boosting Kindle with features like Whispersync and hosting notes and bookmarks; they already host Kindle bookshelf backups and email accounts and file conversion services for their users, after all. And when you consider that none of their existing ebook-business competitors has any experience in that arena (except Microsoft, who may not even be in the game anymore) this just might turn out to be the deciding factor.

....

For the near term, say three-to-five years, Amazon really has no significant challengers to the Kindle cloud they are developing. Expect new features to roll out regularly, many of them shocking, some might even seem head-scratchingly odd, but all will fit into a basic paradigm that says: “reading is more than just about books”.

....

Want to see where Kindle is going? Look to Xbox 360. Look to Zune. Look to XBOX Live. And then look again, at what doesn’t show on the surface.

XBOX 360 is, like Kindle, a “walled garden” content delivery system. DRM rules XBOX live. Unlike Sony, Microsoft doesn’t own any movie studios, yet they beat them to market by over a year with online movie rentals and TV show sales.

....

Kindle is just for reading ebooks, after all, right?

Sure, just like an Xbox is “only” for games. Except people buy Xboxes these days so they can play with/against their friends; they buy Xboxes because the people they know buy Xboxes. And there is added value in having the same console, playing the same game, and talking, interacting. Suddenly, gaming is about more than the games. Its about the (forgive the marketing-speak) “experience”.

And that is where Kindle is going. Fast.

....

There is a lot more. With respect to this last quote the Amazon strategy of owning Social Booksites like Shelfari and LibraryThing (partly) suggests they have the elements in place to build their 'experience.' As potential influencers and curators perhaps it is the Kindle upon which these investments will be leveraged.