Life of Pi

I am sanguine that you all must have read the book by Yann Martel – Life of PI. Though a wonderful book by itself, today’s write-up is about a somewhat eponymous e-book reader named Pi, which has been launched by Infibeam.com – India’s premier shopping portal. This is an indigenous effort in supplanting its more expensive cousin – Amazon’s Kindle. As an Indian we definitely need to be proud of this feat, because the ideation, development and execution have all been done from scratch by Infibeam.

Delving on the technical details is not the reason why I wanted to write this article. However, some technical specifications are required to set the ground for a more strategic discourse. Infibeam Pi is small, sleek, and lightweight with 10 mm thickness and a weight of just 180 gm. With the 6" E Ink (R) display, reading an e-Book on Pi, gives the reader an experience akin to the one while reading a paper book. The 8-level gray scale with no backlit display provides a glare-free reading experience everywhere. The device can store up to 500 standard ebooks in its internal memory of 512MB and also has a SD card memory expansion slot that supports cards up to 4GB.

As any other product, adoption of Pi would follow the same Bell shaped “Product Life Cycle” curve, however, I feel it would be an eventual hit because of the following reasons( I could think of many reasons but these are, in my opinion the most important ones)

• It is an additional channel for content delivery - For long, the content creators and deliverers including the portals were looking for an additional content channel beyond websites and mobile. Pi’s coming of age should be a welcome respite to their long yearning search. To answer the question - why would content creators be interested in Pi? – I could argue that Pi being a mobile (you can carry it along) device could incorporate technological inventions in order to push location based and contextual advertisements to the e-book readers. Few years down the line Pi bundled with technological advances such as “Location Based Tracking” and “Augmented Reality” would be a force to reckon with and could completely change the way how content is delivered.
• It would abet vernacular adoption ­­­in India - Internet users generally preferring to read in local language has gone up from 59% in 2007 to 72% in the year 2008 – this was the message that came out loud and clear from a survey done by JuxtConsult couple of years back. Taking a cue from this survey, Infibeam is working towards a future where newspapers, magazines, books from local publishers, digital content in regional languages, textbooks and educational material would be available on Pi. With vernacular adoption being the recent trend in India, I believe, Pi would unlock the market, if not now but definitely in the near future. This is not to say that I am not aware of the challenges of vernacular adoption. However, challenges such as “Limited PC penetration in the country” and “Non Standardization” could easily be taken care of by the introduction of Pi.
• It is a multipurpose vehicle - Apart from the mundane yet mandatory features to boast about which includes readability, low cost, lightweight and local language support, Pi provides a way to listen to music while reading. Anyone who frequents ‘Borders’ or ‘Barnes and Noble’ would agree with me that coffee and bookstore go hand in hand. Likewise, Pi would provide a convergence platform in which music and book would be inseparable providing a more engaged experience for the reader. I can foresee a lot of prospective collaboration happening between e-book publishers and music companies in the years to come. Is “Tips and Chetan Bhagat” listening?
• It would change the book publishing game - It is a known fact that authors make the least money despite toiling hard for their books. Publishers, on the other hand make the most. However, Social media and Social influence marketing is forcing these publishers to rethink their value chain and their position as B2B companies. I feel, the introduction of Pi would act as a disruptive innovation circumventing the problems besetting this domain.

With the poor digital infrastructure compounded by the postponement of 3G auction, Pi would have an initial lukewarm response. However, as the ecosystem - digital infrastructure, author-publisher nexus, customer awareness - would evolve, the consumers would then realize the benefits of Pi thereby pitch forking its adoption process as a reinforcing loop. I believe “Pi” would curve its own niche in the year 2011.