United States v. Apple: Competition in America by Chris Sagers

Author:Chris Sagers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Antitrust, Business & Economics, Economic History, History, United States, 20th Century, 21st Century
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

15

The Kindle

THE FIRST MEANINGFUL ATTEMPT at a commercial eBook was the Sony Data Discman, introduced in 1990. A small, clunky device with a clamshell design—the top flipped open like a laptop, with a reading screen above and a keyboard below—the Data Discman read books from cartridges inserted in a slot below its keyboard. It suffered several problems typical of all the early readers. It had poor battery life, a small, hard-to-read LED screen, and above all, a very limited selection of titles. Though Sony would release a dozen or more models of the Data Discman over the ensuing decade, the product never sold well and was discontinued.1

Somewhat more successful dedicated readers emerged later in the 1990s, including the SoftBook by SoftBook Press and the Rocket eBook of NuvoMedia, which would play a part in Amazon’s eBooks story. Proving that the major publishers were not oblivious to digital transition, SoftBook Press was financed by Random House and Simon & Schuster. The Rocket eBook was well-received by critics, and in 1997 Jeff Bezos reportedly said its display technology “was finally good enough.”2 Yet, all of the early readers suffered from a series of problems, and none were commercially successful. They were unpleasant to read and hold, and downloads were slow. Many were also very expensive. One model of the Rocket eBook retailed in 1998 for $1,200, and some could download content only through expensive subscriptions or special internet access accounts.3 But their chief weakness was their limited catalogues of titles, and on this account Amazon’s Kindle would put them to shame.

Several other steps moved the world closer to digital distribution in the years leading up to the Kindle. In 2004 Stephen King, an early eBook enthusiast, released a short novel in electronic-only form with his publisher Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Riding the Bullet, the world’s first mass-market eBook, sold more than five hundred thousand downloads. While the document was readable only on personal computers and the limited device options of the day, and while it suffered encryption and technological problems, it did more than just make commercial eBooks seem feasible. It was an early demonstration of digital distribution as a challenge to corporate publishing. As King later wrote in an open letter to readers on his personal website, he had been inspired to try another electronic-only book, and this one he would publish entirely himself, with no publisher intermediary. Telling his fans that “we have the chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare,” he began to self-publish an online serialized novel, The Plant.4 It tells the story of a potted plant sent by an author as a gift to a struggling publishing firm that had rejected his novel. The plant turns out to be a magical being that causes the publishing house’s fortunes to turn around, but also a demon that requires human sacrifices to sustain the firm’s success.

There were also various preliminary experiments with other technologies or delivery models, which for the most part were unsatisfactory. Some firms tried distributing books in PDF or other formats readable on general-purpose computer devices.

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