COMMENT On the internet, media companies have developed an unfortunate habit of destroying – or allowing others to destroy – value in their products. So when a device comes along that promises to create value for media businesses, it is worth celebrating. It leads to a different, and altogether happier, set of problems: how best to capture the value created, and how to share out the goodies among the various players in the digital media value chain.
The Kindle is such a device. Like Apple’s iPod and iPhone before it, Amazon’s electronic reader, currently for sale only in the US, has proved that consumers of digital media are sometimes happy to pay up. Kindle readers buy more books, and show little sign of cutting back on their hard-copy purchases.
