iPhone’s Coup Over The Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is a beautiful, useful, and elegant handheld ebook reader. Its drawback? It’s not a cellphone (though it does have a cellular-data-capable radio).

The iPhone is a much more natural fit as an eBook reader because it’s owners carry it with them everywhere they go. It’s screen is smaller, yes. But small screens haven’t stopped the Japanese from reading and writing books on their phones. In Japan in 2007, 5 of the the top 10 bestselling books began as cellphone novels (i.e. written on a cellphone).

…a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

“My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what? She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in bookstores.”

I believe the iPhone’s true abilities with regard to eBook reading have yet to be fully explored. There are many eBook readers for the iPhone, but none has become so dominant so as to make the iPhone a real contender in the eBook reader space.

What Amazon Needs To Do

If Amazon.com wants to survive as a bookseller, they need to compete with their own product (the Kindle) and make their electronic bookstore the standard on each and every popular electronic device. Amazon needs to build a Kindle app for the iPhone.

Think about it: what proportion of people carry their cellphone with them everywhere they go? And how many people carry around a dedicated eBook reader?

If Amazon doesn’t put out an iPhone eBook reader application in the next year, it’s possible Apple will — or one of the existing apps will become so ubiquitous that it might come installed standard on iPhones and be listed as a selling point for potential iPhone buyers (perhaps Stanza will become this heralded piece of software).

Either way, this market is Amazon’s to lose. They just have to be comfortable competing with themselves in order to provide the most utility and the best experience to the public. That’s not such a revolutionary idea, is it?

Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader? – ReadWriteWeb

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular – NYT