“The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one. Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while.”
- Steve Wozniak, Apple Co-Founder
The iPod isn’t quite dead yet. But it’s certainly closer to its endpoint than its inception.
Just like transistor radios and Walkmans, the iPod is being rendered obsolete by more powerful devices. The primary one, of course, is Apple’s iPhone. But smartphones in general are becoming cheaper and, in turn, more pervasive in the market. As more and more phones become media players, the standalone iPod is becoming a bit superfluous.
For the same reason, Amazon’s Kindle, a standalone e-book reader, is facing an uphill battle.
I don’t want to shortchange the Kindle. It’s a good product with a lot of cool features, and has generally gotten very favorable reviews. It also has some important competitive advantages over the iPod Touch, such as the electronic-paper screen, and immediately accessible content (including all the major newspapers, and just about every new best-selling book). Jeff Bezos has done a fantastic job evangelizing it, and it has sold better than I would have figured when it was announced.
But it’s not a phone, and I need to carry my phone with me. Bringing along another device (and paying $359 to have it), when my iPhone has just about all the same capabilities, is a hassle.
And make no mistake, the iPhone is a very good e-book reader. It may not be the perfect screen for reading long books on, but your eyes won’t fall out either. And while Stanza’s collection may seem out-of-date, its desktop client allows you to upload any e-book to your iPhone’s library.
There’s certainly some disagreement on this. But in the end, the reality is that people won’t carry an extra device (let alone an expensive one like the Kindle) when there is a pretty comparable product on the device they already own.
It’s too bad, in some ways, since the Kindle could have been a tremendous seller had there been great demand for e-books in the pre-smartphone era. Cellphone novels have already taken off in Japan, and I have a hard time believing Americans won’t be reading books on their wireless device soon enough.
But it’s already too late for the Kindle to become anything more than a niche product. E-books may thrive soon enough, but they will have to do so on phones, not standalone readers.
Feedback? Write a comment, or e-mail the author at shawn(AT)squawkingbaseball.com
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