Business Insight Zone

Even when I disagree with him or find some of his ideas wildly impractical, I like Seth Godin because he is so willing to challenge the conventional non-wisdom that afflicts so very, very many industries.*

Now he talks about what he wants Amazon to do on the e-book reader front.

You won’t find me on Amazon’s new book reader

. . . I’ve been hyperventilating about Amazon becoming a book publisher since at least 1998. . . . Lots of room there for Amazon to integrate the process, to find long tail successes, to match hidden needs with authors needing promotion.

. . . My thought was to use it, at least for a few years, as a promotion device. Give the books for free to anyone who buys the $400 machine. (Maybe you can have 1,000 books of your choice, so there’s not a lot of ‘waste’.) You’ll sell more machines that way, that’s for sure. And 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 an idea worth pursuing. I’ve expressed my own doubts about the utility of e-book readers. My hunch is that, at least while e-book readers sit at such an enormously high price point, they have very little future as a standalone device. People will read books on electronic devices, but my guess is that these will be smartphones or iTouch-type devices rather than expensive single-function toys made for rabid early adopters.

Godin’s idea would help e-book readers expand beyond the early-adopter market — but so far no one’s biting. My guess is that Apple or Nokia will solve this issue before Sony will. In other words, the solution will come in the form of an integrated communications device rather than an electronic entertainment gizmo. When the time comes, Jeff Bezos will figure out how Amazon can make money from the phenomenon — but that still looks to be a ways off.

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* You and I shouldn’t sit here feeling so smug. I can guarantee you that I’m locked into many kinds of conventional unwisdom in my own approach to business, and I’ll bet you are, too. Am I wrong?