New Life for the CueCat Breathed by Kindle Advertising Model
New patent filings reveal some of the Kindle's Ad-Supported plans via this article in MediaPost. One patent:
Filed December 2006 and granted last month, the patent would give consumers who purchase a print book an electronic copy of the physical version, too.
I started thinking, what could you do to use physical media to drive digital sales? And I just thought,m barcodes, barcodes, barcodes, barcodes. There are books all around us, and a lot of them might be worth reading, but book discovery takes some work. However, what's great about most books is the barcode/ ISBN number, guaranteeing a wealth of available metadata...if we could only get to it.
I immediately thought of the CueCat, which represented gadget-hungry tech hubris in a way that made it memorable forever- including prominent placement as one of the ten worst tech products of the past decade by C|net, (I wonder what CueCat inventor Dave Matthews is up to these days.) It was closed and limited, but there was something alluring. For a certain generation, the CueCat has something to offer as an idea, and this was NOT a failure of technology so much as timing, product, and business.
So how about scanning a barcode, or taking a photo of one, and getting a quick license to read that book on your kindle, ad supported? That sounds like a business to me. Users are engaged, publishers get a new audience that otherwise would have flipped through a book and then put it down- it's too easy to let it go away. Not sure if you could also use this for triggering ancillary book content but that would also be interesting.
Go for it, AMZN!
