The world's biggest focus group

As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.

Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted

The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show.  By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that?  The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.

There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control.  For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game.  Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’

The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenius in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks).  It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.

That’s appropriate for something called American Idol.  Is it right for your product?

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To truly appreciate how insanely alien Duck Rock felt at the time, you need to place your ears in its historical context.

The idea of creating cut-up music and rhythms from records and charismatically, charmingly rhyme-chanting over them was still very new.  Rap and hip-hop were still barely more than rumors to most of the country.  Even as a teenager in relatively open & urban Berkeley, the hip-hop hits that bled out into our mainstream were more like novelty acts.  Grandmaster Flash was on auto-repeat in the school cafeteria, while Tom Tom Club and Blondie had fluke hits that played on hip-hop styles without actually committing to them.  But that was about it.  The great Def Jam/Run-DMC/Beastie Boys explosion of 1984 was still yet to come.

I would never go so far as to say Malcolm McLaren discovered African music, but for the 80s generation Duck Rock represented its introduction into their consciousness.  South Africa and apartheid were only just entering mainstream conversation in America.  None of the great boycotts had started.  Nelson Mandela was still in jail – and wasn’t he some kind of terrorist or something?  All we knew about him we learned about from The Special AKA.  Stevie Ray Vaughn and friends had not yet declaimed “I ain’t gonna play Sun City!”  Most critically to the success of Duck Rock, African music simply hadn’t made it over yet.  After the political convulsions of the late 1970s, Africa’s music industry was essentially gone.  Graceland wasn’t even a gleam in Paul Simon’s eye.  The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto was not on anyone’s radar, except perhaps Robert Christgau’s.

Finally, Duck Rock believe it or not is a critical early entry into the creation of the synth-y pop sound that dominated pop in the 80s and is a focus of today’s 80s revivalism.  Producer Trevor Horn was fresh off the successes of a couple of the best sounding and most influential post-punk synth-pop productions, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love and Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and yet to move on to the monolithic and silly manifesto-ism of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.  It’s difficult to give the sense now of how new and modern Horn’s production style felt in the early 80s, especially coming out of a long period starting with punk where amateurism was so key to the aesthetic.  Crucially, the Horn style sounded great on Walkman headphones in the early days of personal stereos when little else did.  And whether on purpose or not, Duck Rock brought together several burgeoning genres – African, electronica, sampling and hip-hop – that sounded great on cheap portable headphones, even better when moving in virtual isolation through an urban environment – still a novelty in those days.

I think it also bears noting that there was – and should be – considerable controversy over the provenance of the songs. Connecting the dots between township jive and US inner city radio seemed pretty clever at the time and still gives a nice message that we’re all connected, baby.  But there’s also real reason to be uncomfortable with that message, especially in light of the songwriting credits that give all the rights to “Horn/McLaren.”  One listen and you’ll see strong reason to doubt that they really had much to do with songwriting.  While it’s true in the early days of sampling that credits were a bit less… stringent, the co-opting of others’ artistry – in particular from distressed urban areas around the world – reeks of the worst of cultural imperialism.   This is another crucial way that Duck Rock is a product of its time even as it stretched out ears into the future.

(Come to think of it, Malcolm had done something similar with another music project six years earlier.)

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Despite this I’m yet to see a dry cleaner go on the offensive to increase their revenue or take market share.  I’m sure many think that location is enough to take customers and get loyalty.  It’s not.  I travel all over my town every day.  If Purple Tie shows up in the workplace, that would automatically become a good candidate to steal my business.

The lifetime value of a customer is potentially huge.  Even in these slower times, my household easily spends $500 annually on its dry cleaning.  Knowing little about the business, I have to imagine that the margins are pretty good, possibly as much as 50%.   This implies that a customer in your neighborhood who visits your business for five years is worth well over $1000 to you.  So it’s amazing that dry cleaners do so little to attract customers and retain them.

So after the jump here are a few modest low-cost proposals for marketing a dry cleaning business to bring in new customers and keep them:

1. Loyalty programs: It’s incredible that in a market where it’s as easy for customers to switch vendors as crossing the street – literally so on Oakland’s Grand Avenue – that cleaners do so little to lock you in.  If the average annual value of a customer is $250 profit, I’d gladly give you a few dollars back to make sure you keep coming to me.  How about $10 back on every $100?  Or a baker’s dozen for shirt laundry?
2. Tiered pricing: Most of the time when I come in I ask for rush service – and then don’t pick up the order for days afterward.  Yes, I suck, but I’m betting this is pretty common practice.  Why should rush service priced the same as “regular”?  When I come in and demand 24 or 48-hour service when the business’s standard is something more, essentially what I’m doing is asking to jump the queue in front of every other customer.  Clarify your pricing policy, charge a premium for premium service and give customers a perceived break for getting your regular service.
3. Be a community hub: There are few places in the neighborhood that everyone uses as they do a dry cleaner.  Put up a bulletin board and encourage flyering.  If you tell your customers that you are a center of life in the neighborhood, then they will treat you that way.
4. Take advantage of word of mouth and low-cost advertising: The big easy money in dry cleaners clearly comes from doing specialty items like carpets and wedding dresses.  I’ve never seen a dry cleaner that asks for reviews on Yelp, but that’s the first place folks of a certain age go to look for that kind of service.  Further, opportunity abounds through tight geographic targeting on AdWords, Facebook and the like.  A quick googling of “dry cleaning” around me yielded ads for national services and one in San Rafael – a mere 30 miles away!
5. Introductory specials: First time there?  Give discounts for a big-ticket items.  If they like your service, they’ll be back.
6. Have a sale: Sometimes that big-ticket item just lingers.  I’ve had it on my ‘long list’ to get our living room carpet cleaned for literally years.  If you offered a 10% discount for a limited time, I bet that would motivate me.

Finally a cynical word about “green.”  Some of my locals have higher prices – sometimes outrageously so – because they don’t use perc.  Many of your customers will appreciate the opportunity to support a safer, more environmentally friendly technique, but remember: by not using perc, you reap all the benefits, both your own health and the extra profit implicit in the premium pricing.   The customer gets no tangible benefit, so to reach & retain the average customer, especially in more frugal times, you’d better be offering ‘something else’ to land them.  Either that or you need to offer premium service – open Sunday? Delivery?  Something.

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Musical? Concert?

Last Sunday I had the privilege of attending a matinee of Fela! at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in New York.  I can’t recommend the show enough.  Telling Fela Kuti’s life story through a simulated night at his club/compound, The Shrine, the Broadway production isn’t just one of the best shows I’ve ever seen but also one of the best concert experiences.  If you have even a shred of interest in the man, his music or good ol’ fashioned spectacle, you must see this.  Don’t be that guy in “He Miss Road.”

The performers and set spill into every corner of the theater and virtually – no, in actuality – beg for audience engagement and participation throughout.  There is even a moment in the first act in which Fela invites the crowd to storm the stage.  This moment passes quickly and is done so subtly that I think most people, including the theater-savvy group with whom I attended the show, can easily miss it.  It’s clearly a charged moment for the performers, though, as they need to wait a moment to see if the audience will respond – but also be able to play through seamlessly to keep potential awkwardness to a minimum.  The musicians keeps riffing and if nobody moves the show goes on.

At the intermission, I asked one of the ushers if the weekend night crowds respond differently.  Oh yeah, some of the audiences are there to paaarty.  My Sunday afternoon brethren were a quieter bunch for sure.  What a performing challenge for the actors & dancers in a tightly choreographed show to have such an unpredictable element built into the show!

Another way that Fela! tries to break through the traditional Broadway audience dynamic is through an insert in the program inviting audience members to drink throughout the show.  The bar in the rear stays open and you are explicitly told its OK to have beverages at your seat.  In the spirit of the show – and, well, because I can’t imagine going to a rock concert without a tasty adult beverage – I made my way to the back bar towards the end of Act I.  Not only was I the only one in the theater to do so but the bartender seemed totally baffled by my presence, ignoring me even though I was her sole customer.

I don’t blame the audience for being confused.  The marketing on the web and around town still follows the formula of most Broadway musicals; it won this many Tonys, blah blah blah.  It makes me wonder how the show has decided to target its potential customers.  Would it be better getting the startled tourists and traditional theatergoers who have been taught to sit there and passively enjoy the show; or make outreach to younger audiences – or even traditionally more participatory groups like those found in gospel churches.  (Perhaps I’m so far away from this target that I can’t see the campaign?) As John Lennon legendarily said when he performed for royalty, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

So two lessons to take away.  First, no matter how much a show gives permission, it takes a lot to get an audience out of generations of ingrained viewing habits.  It’s hard to imagine a show with more energy, intelligence and pure uplift than Fela! – and still the crowd stayed seated until the curtain call.  (Me and my friend hooted for an encore, which only seemed to confuse our section-mates.  Isn’t that what you do after the set ends?)  Second, if you’re going to see Fela!, try for a weekend night!

• Discount tickets for Fela!
• “By the end of this transporting production, you feel you have been dancing with the stars.  And I mean astral bodies, not dime-a-dozen celebrities.” – New York Times

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Flickr : doggylama

The words every man dreads hearing: “You’re getting a little thin up there.”  And with that – no fanfare, no drama, no time for a neurotic outbreak – my barber Daniel snipped off the strands of my faux combover.  ”It’s 2010,” he went on.  ”Time for a fresh start.”

It was true.   One always wonders about the guy who has that one strand of hair carefully arranged over an obviously bald head.  How does he do that?  How does he face his loved ones when he gets wet?  Isn’t he worried it might be windy today?  For the last year, I was well down the road to becoming one of those guys.

What I learned over the last few years is that nobody plans for a combover.  They’re insidious.  They are the product of years of attrition, denial, compensation and the simple refusal to adapt to new ways of brushing your hair.

There’s something comforting about the No BS treatment at traditional men’s barber shops, a fading breed, run for the most part by old guys who have been doing nothing but giving no-BS quick & dirty haircuts for eons.  San Francisco has a couple of fancy locations – Mister and The Barber Lounge – which say they are barber shops but are in reality more like ultra-masculine salons.  More memorable, though, is Original Palace Barber Shop at 2nd and Mission.  Basically a bunch of chairs pushed together in a mound of the eccentric absentee owner’s garbage (must be seen to be believed), Original Palace is staffed by a crew of several 50+ men, all foreign with indeterminate nationalities, and one terribly unlucky woman. Never a wait and never out of there in more than 20 minutes.

SF Chronicle: Carlos Avila Gonzalez

My local barber shop is the simply-named Montclair Barber Shop.  Its proprietor, Rocky Becker, a near-silent character I see all the time on Mountain Boulevard smoking and sucking down coffee, was recently profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle.   To be in Rocky’s chair is to be transported somewhere into the early 1970s.  He’s got his Raiders calendar, a few shots of his Harley – and that’s all you get to see because after 5 minutes you are done, $20 and a pile of hair lighter. Not the greatest haircut, but that’s not what you were there for – nothing some pomade and an encore in four weeks can’t fix.

The Chronicle was principally interested in the shop because of its longtime relationship with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, who’s been getting his hair cut by Rocky for 49 years.  The Raiders of the 70s were known for their hard partying, rebellious personae and straight-up intimidation of their opponents.  ”Just win, baby” was their mantra. And of course they were one of the most successful franchises, a regular visitor to the playoffs and winner of three Super Bowls.  Al Davis is one of the founders of the modern NFL, one of the world’s great business growth stories, and a member of its Hall Of Fame.

Al Davis in the 60s, current hairstyle

Davis may not be loved, but the media and Raider Nation remains entranced by the Davis mystique.  They are fascinated by Davis for never changing, a throwback – and for almost 40 years one of the cleverest, most influential men in football.  They also lay his lack of success in the last decade – the Raiders now officially own the worst 7-year run in NFL history – for never changing.  ”He still likes to maintain his look,” Becker told the Chronicle. “You’ve got to maintain what you have. Al’s a big believer in that.”

Change is hard work.   Sometimes it needs to be tough love, other times it’s letting someone or something just go to town on you.  You gotta cut off those old strands flying in the wind and move on.

Hurrah for traditional barber shops!  Thank you for letting me stay the same as long as I could and then making me change when it was the right thing to do.  Long may you wave.

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One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well.  (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.)  The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files.  If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read.  Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.

(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence?  That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)

Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device.  If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.

Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped.  Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.

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Essentially what the crowd and the speakers agreed on was that there is something negated from the reading experience when you move from a book, which is singularly dedicated to the content at hand, to an electronic device, a more promiscuous format for lack of a better term.  Think for example – as Hornby did – of the difference in experience between playing a record and selecting an album to play on an iPod.

Even as a Kindle user, I’ll be the first to agree that consuming content on a Kindle is a much different experience than from reading an actual physical book.  In my mind, carrying a book around is the last stand for analog content; I long ago came to think of music and movies as files or folders, but until recently I had never thought that way about books.  In a discussion led by Eggers, the founder of an imprint that publishes some of the world’s most physically beautiful books, there is bound to be some bias towards the aesthetic experience of buying, holding and reading a book.

The most striking thing about the Kindle Bestseller list about it is its utter dominance by serial fiction – the stuff you find in supermarkets by popular authors like Janet Evanovich, Richard North Patterson and so forth, plus right-wing screeds by the likes of Glenn Beck and cohorts.  What the [ahem] cultural elites fail to understand about these books – the actual physical books – is that they are produced to be the very worst of aesthetic experiences in publishing: poorly bound, grey-papered budget paperbacks.  For devotees of these kinds of books, the Kindle actually represents an enormous step up from what they’re given today.  It’s not for nothing that Goodwills and St Vincent De Pauls are piled high with mass-market paperbacks selling for a dime each.  Nobody wants these when they’re done and there’s no meaningful secondary market.  They’re consumed and then they’re trash.

So when a San Francisco crowd starts booing a delivery device for popular fiction because it’s some kind of lowering of their standard of what a book should be, I can’t help but compare it to the same ‘cultural elitism’ that makes it impossible for them to understand the appeal of a George Bush, Fox News, or any mysteriously popular icon of so-called Red State America. E-readers are the most democratic of devices, moving the words and ideas in books out of their hallowed packaging and leveling them for all readers.  As Hornby himself discussed, there’s nothing wrong with having books be easy to read and fun for all; it’s the very cornerstone of his considerable success both as novelist and frequent Hollywood adaptee.

There will always be a market for books so long as people crave them as a key aesthetic element of their reading experience. Boutique houses like McSweeney’s may be well prepared where publishing is going: beautiful editions for those who need that experience, just as there continues to be a market for vinyl records for a certain kind of collector.  But “Democracy In America,” the kind you find in supermarkets, will increasingly go electronic.  Deal with it.

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Shuffle play has its place, but I still love to listen to albums start to finish, letting the artist present their music in their own context.  After playing around a bit last week with Smart Playlists, I’m pleased to offer this post on filling your iPod/iPhone with random albums.  Doing this has brought up a lot of forgotten favorites and released space on my portable device from newer albums that I liked, was tired of but couldn’t bring myself to delete.  It’s entirely refreshed my whole portable listening experience by digging out records I haven’t thought about in years.

Here is an easy step-by-step for getting it done:

1)    In the Control Menu, set Shuffle to “by Album”

2)    Create a new Playlist Folder for your iPod or iPhone.  (For the rest of this post, I’m just going to call it an iPod, OK?)

3)    Create a regular Playlist for your “Musts,” the albums that you still feel like you absolutely must have handy – or perhaps albums you’ve recently acquired.

4)    Drag your Musts into that list and note at the bottom of the iTunes screen how much hard drive space they take up.

5)    This is the critical step. Create a Smart Playlist.  Use the three setting shown in the illustration below:Artist contains [press Space Bar once], Media Kind is Music (to keep out pesky Audiobooks and Podcasts) and Playlist is not [the name of your Musts Playlist], which prevents duplicates.  Use the “Limit” line at the bottom to be however many GBs are remaining on your iPod after you subtract the amount of space reserved for your Musts from Step 4 plus anything else you keep on your iPod (Podcasts, Photos, Videos, etc).  You can add on more lines to fine-tune it for your needs by adding lines like “Last Played is more than 90 days ago,” excluding certain artists or genres, or whatever you fancy.

6)    Now plug in your iPod and select it from the left sidebar.  On the Music tab, select Sync Music: Selected Playlists and deselect the “Automatically fill free space with songs” button.  Down below select the Folder that has your Musts and Random playlists.

7)    Sync and be happily surprised next time you’re out & about with your iPod.

You likely wound up with a few dud albums on your Random Smart Playlist.  Use the Grid View to delete it.  The list will automatically refill to your level of GBs.  Sync again and you’re set.

An important note about maintaining your Random Smart Playlist:  Because you are filling with Albums to some level of GBs, you will inevitably have an incomplete album at the bottom of the playlist.  My suggestion is tonever sort the random playlist in List View.  That way you can always go into List View to delete those fragments from the bottom of the list.  If you don’t do this, after refilling your Random Playlist you will wind up with a number of incomplete albums, obviously an undesirable situation.  Of course you can always Go Nuclear and delete everything in your Random Smart Playlist to refill from scratch, too.  Happy listening!

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Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Nowthat would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

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One big surprise right off the bat is the loss of Amazon’s Recommendations engine. My Kindle account is linked to my main account, where I have literally ten years of purchase and browse history stored.  My Kindle recommendations appear on the Kindle Store home page, as can be seen in the picture at right.  At best, I would regard these as ‘generic’ recommendations that have little to do with what I’ve ordered either in the past or over the Kindle. I also have 25 books stored in my “Save For Later” tab as well as a number of samples I’ve ordered.  Many of these are books about media & marketing, yet not one single business book recommendation.  Clearly these aren’t playing into the recommendation intelligence.

The Kindle Top Sellers proves to be pretty much useless as well as a discovery engine.  As you can see in the screen shot, the Top Sellers are a pretty weird bunch with little relation to today’s accepted Bestseller lists like those in the USA Today or New York Times.  What’s going on here?  With the exception of the Glenn Beck book, all of these are free.  While this certainly shows the power of price elasticity in the store (and again supports Chris Anderson’s Free, dammit), it also supports my earlier point: if you make it fun & easy to shop, people will buy books in droves – even titles they might not want that much. Sherlock Holmes making the Kindle Top Sellers list shows that people will ‘buy’ pretty much anything if it’s free.  At minimum, you’d hope that Amazon could separate out backlist or classics from the true contemporary bestsellers.

This goes to show an easy fix that should go on each line – there’s no easy access to price information! I have to open a link to each book to find out what I’m going to pay.  While the Kindle is advertised as having most books at $9.99, I can tell you after a few months of ownership that most of the books I’ve been interested in – many of which are true Bestsellers – are not $9.99.  I’d be curious to see a price distribution graph if anyone’s done the work.

The Sample Chapters program is half-baked. Their easy availability ois a great idea but in practice gives unsatisfactory results with no apparent rational oversight of content selection.  On Amazon proper, you can select a “random page” in most books just as you would in a bookstore; when you pick up a physical book to browse it, you naturally open to the middle not the Foreword.   All of the Sample Chapters I’ve received have been just the Forewords, not the ‘guts’ of the book, which is what I’m really interested in.  Worse, in many cases half or more of the sample is just the credits at the front of the book!

Finally there’s no linking from reviews and other sources, a longtime basic function of hyperlinking which Amazon supports with its open affiliates program.  Every Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review in search of ideas for things to read.  You’d think that the NYT on Kindle could at least have links into the store.  Even if that’s not feasible, there could at least be a menu on the home page (or even within) for “Recently Reviewed” by newspaper or magazine.  Instead I’m left to search, with each click making it a little less likely that I’ll make a purchase.  And then of course there’s the issue – key for all E-books – of whether all books will even be available when they’re reviewed.

All of these are solvable problems.  If even one of these can be fixed, I predict a huge increase in the vitality of the Kindle.  One wonders if these will be better addressed in the upcoming competitive devices from PlasticLogic and others – and if Amazon’s strength online will be an Achilles heel for its E-books business.

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