Amazon revved up competition in the e-books market Wednesday by releasing a free iPhone app for reading titles purchased at its Kindle store.
But established players who already top the iPhone's e-book app charts are not only unafraid of Amazon's move, they think it could actually be good for business.
“I kind of view it as a legitimization of reading on mobile devices which is nice, and that will help us,” said Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcyle the company behind the Stanza app that is currently number one in the free e-book category.
“On the other hand, Amazon’s got this incredible brand name and massive marketing budget, and users are going to be making choices on what applications they’re going to use to do their reading on,” he said. "We still have to distinguish ourselves in the space.”
Choksi says one of the next steps for Stanza is to improve support for magazines and newspapers, including easier ways to both subscribe to and view the content.
Amazon has certainly wooed the mainstream media lately, with big endorsements from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Stephen King.
And despite all of the buzz about its release, it’s no surprise Kindle e-books are now available on an iPhone app. Amazon’s been talking about expanding to more devices for a while. The company even designed a new Whispersync function in the Kindle 2 which helps readers keep track of what page they're on, a feature that makes it easier to read the same book on multiple hardware devices.
The new app that was released on Wednesday allows anyone to read books they purchased online (or via the Kindle), but the titles are still in Amazon's proprietary .azw format and the iPhone app doesn’t include all the functionality of the Kindle, like text to speech.
But there are numerous other apps in the store with more functionality and options that have become extremely popular with iPhone users, and the makers of those apps are not worried about the new competition.
Topping the charts on the paid side is Classics, an app which offers only about 20 public domain novels but has realistic page turning visuals and sounds. It received quite a boost from Apple, which has been promoting the app in its commercials on TV.
Co-creator Phil Ryu says he isn’t concerned with Amazon, since Classics'
focus is more on the visual aspects of the classic novels and since it makes its money through app sales as opposed to being a portal to a third party seller of new releases. Ryu says his team has already brought in about $225,000 in revenue with over
160,000 downloads.
“I don’t feel like we are really in direct competition at all,” said Ryu. He doesn’t, however, feel the same way about the others.
“I think the Kindle app is basically going to wipe out Stanza, and I’m sure pretty much every Kindle user with an iPhone or iPod Touch will be picking it up,” said Ryu. “It’s extremely convenient, as Kindle owner myself, having all your purchased books centralized on Amazon."
Stanza, eReader and a new face that launched last week called Short
Covers are probably the most similar to Amazon's app in that they offer a portal into a massive collection of books for sale through book sellers like Fictionwise and Indigo. But unlike Amazon's app, their books can be purchased directly through the application.
“If you’ve got Kindle and you’ve got some books on your account then you can read them on the iPhone, that’s complimentary for what they’ve got but pretty limited for everybody else,” said Michael Serbinis EVP
of Short Covers and CIO of Indigo. He says he's excited in general about the opportunities with e-books and thinks it's a "billion dollar market."
Apps like Short Covers also have a leg up over Kindle in that it is available internationally and on a number of other devices like the
Blackberry and Android phones. Short Covers is also accessible through a web browser. There's even an app in development for the yet-to-be released Palm Pre. And along with Stanza and a few other apps, it also supports .epub, which many are pushing to become the open standard for e-books.
Another alternative unique to the app store is Scroll Motion, which partnered directly with publishers to produce and sell books as individual apps on its Iceberg platform.
“Of course Amazon’s gonna have a big impact on the market, they’ve had a big impact on the digital book space overall,” said founder and CTO John
Lema.
“That being said, I think there’s a huge opportunity that Amazon isn’t really addressing in the book space right now,” he said. “A place where we can play very strongly is in these kind of multimedia graphically intense titles, children’s books, graphic novels, comic books... that aren’t going to be readily available through the
Kindle.”
Scroll Motion just released one such book this week, James Patterson’s Daniel X, which can be viewed like a mini movie which animates with text bubbles as you slide your finger across the screen.
While Amazon is still behind on a number of fronts, there is still a possibility the Kindle will rise and become almost synonymous with e-books in the mainstream, much as Apple has done for digital music with its iPod and iTunes ecosystem. But it’s unlikely that publishers will ever rely solely on them for distribution, especially this early in the evolution of the market.
“I actually think it might go the other way," said Lexcycle's Choksi.
"Once you’ve [converted a book to an e-book], to get it into another format is not that hard."
“Publishers are kind of deathly scared of Amazon. I think it’s being described as Amazon is a strategic decision away from being a publisher,” he said. “So I think the publishers are also constantly looking to – I don’t wanna say even the playing field – but they’re constantly making sure that there are alternatives.”
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