E-books are, in both price and size, still in their hardback stage. Author, blogger and all-round clever thinker Seth Godin thinks it's time for a "paperback" e-reader, a cheap Kindle which would be completely bare bones but also put e-books into the hands of just about anyone who can read.

Godin suggests that Amazon forget about a touchscreen and 3G connectivity and instead make a mass-market Paperback Kindle, a device so simple that it could be sold for just $50. Who wouldn't buy that? Especially if it was made without that giant, ugly chin for the keyboard and instead was small enough to fit in a back pocket like a real paperback.

In making this suggestion, Godin is seconding the opinion of e-book market experts who predicted, in a March 2010 Wired story, that the e-reader market would soon split into two segments: One for high-end e-readers with color screens and one for cheap e-readers with monochrome E Ink screens.

There are some other great suggestions in Godin's blog post (buy eight books, get a free Kindle, for instance) but it's the idea of cheap hardware that seems to make so much sense. The Lady dropped and broke my Kindle last week, and $260 (plus international shipping and taxes, $350) is too much for a replacement. This effectively means I have lost all the books I bought, too. If the hardware cost $50 and was available in the corner store, I'd have gotten one right after the old Kindle died.

Does this seem like wishful thinking? Maybe. But perhaps Amazon (or Sony, or anyone else in the e-reader market) has no choice. Godin:

The only way to get authors and publishers to embrace this device is to sell 20,000,000 of them. You either become the best and only platform for consuming books worth buying or you fail. And the only way to create that footprint in the face of an iPad is to make it so cheap to buy and use it's irresistible.

There is one other alternative, and it actually isn't so bad for Amazon, although it would mean the end for the Kindle as hardware. There is already one device which has sold a lot more than 20 million, and people replace it almost annually. It's the cellphone. E-books will explode, but that doesn't mean e-readers will necessarily be a success. If Amazon continues to make its Kindle app available on more and more cellphones, then it could still win.

Paperback Kindle [Seth's Blog via Media Bistro]

Photo: Charlie Sorrel

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