How the Kindle Will Change Your World

It’s clunky. It’s ugly. It’s flawed. It just may change your life.

Amazon’s Kindle rolled out in November as a $399 e-book reader, destined to rule the world. It’s cheesy retro, but loaded with EVDO-connectivity to allow speedy text-based downloads of books, newspapers, and even blogs through Sprint’s network.

It took three years to develop, but just 330 minutes to sell out of its initial batch. Obviously this is the kind of demand that can be easily orchestrated. Early adopters, by definition, are few. This isn’t the Wii. This isn’t even last year’s Tickle Me Elmo TMX.

Proving my point, I wrote a Kindle-specific book entitled Why the Kindle Will Fail and it took just three digital copies sold on the first day to push the book up to #307 on a best-seller list with more than 90,000 available titles.

Wait a minute? How did I get an electronic book published so quicky? It’s a breeze with Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, available to anyone at http://dtp.amazon.com. This is where the Kindle begins to change your life as someone with something to publish.

There is no velvet rope. You don’t have to be McGraw-Hill or Simon & Schuster to get rolling. I dug up the digital version of the only novel that I have ever completed. The Last Perfect Father’s Day is a coming-of-age book that I wrote during a creative funk in college. It’s not my finest work, but it’s the only completed manuscript that I have lying around in fiction (after devoting the rest of my life to the publication of nearly 10,000 non-fiction Web-published pieces).

I decided to feed it to the Kindle. It was a painless process. Amazon encoded the entire book that was in Microsoft Word form and had it on its storefront — complete with an industry-standard ASIN code — in a matter of hours.

I was published! All Amazon required was a title and the name of the author. Oh, and the text file. Any text-based document can be uploaded and priced from $0.99 to $200 for digital delivery through Kindle.

Amazon is initially pushing the hardcover bestsellers, typically priced at $9.99 (or about $7 less than its print versions). However, it won’t be long before creative self-publishers — like you — hop on the bandwagon.

Online newsletters? Your grandmother’s old recipes? Your guide to the best restaurants in Chicago? If you have a passion for it, the Kindle platform is waiting. It is absolutely free. The only downside is that Amazon swipes 65% of the list price before sending you the rest. Still, if it’s content that is collecting cobwebs, the first sale is enough to get you into the black.

I know what you’re thinking. In a year, the Kindle storefront will be flooded with content of questionable quality. The supply of content will outstrip demand, of course, but there are worse things than an overbuilt cottage industry. The key here will be the viral promotion by the actual authors. The same person who is writing passionately about collecting Webkinz stuffed animals or golfing around the planet will be the Kindle’s greatest ambassador, encouraging everyone they know to snap up a Kindle.

I’ve got a great joke, but you’re going to have to read it on a Kindle. I know who is going to win the game between the Lakers and the Spurs, but you’re going to have to spring for a Kindle before calling your bookie. I’ve got the walkthrough you need for the hottest video game, but you know what you have to do first.

The key as a self-publisher is to come up with content that isn’t readily available and then promote it creatively. You don’t want to simply scrape Wikipedia. In fact, the Kindle allows users to surf through Wikipedia.org for free right out of the box.

I’m not going to call the Kindle perfect. I have a wish list longer than my arm of things that I would love to see in Kindle version 2.0. The thing is still too expensive, yet that too will come down sometime next year.

The key here is that you now have a source for incremental revenue. As more home-based publishers rally behind the platform as a moneymaker, demand for the Kindle itself will come around. It’s the network effect, not all that different than what you saw in eBay where buyers went where the sellers went (and vice versa).

Amazon’s secret weapon to make its Kindle next year’s must-have entertainment appliance? You!