Amazon’s first connected car app, Amazon Cloud Player, went live last week, allowing its customers to pull their music collections out of the airwaves and into their Ford dashboards. It’s certainly a new milestone for Amazon, which is adding the car to the growing number of devices and platforms it supports. It also got me thinking about what Amazon’s next connected car app might be, and the answer seems obvious: the Kindle.
Books have always been Amazon’s bread and butter, and much of Amazon’s ebook strategy has focused on finding more ways and identifying new devices for people to enjoy the pastime of reading. The car is the logical next step, considering how much time people spend their automobiles on their daily commutes and simply running errands. In fact, a lot of drivers already do plenty of reading in their cars with audiobooks, using both physical and digital media. Some people have even managed to cram Amazon’s Audible books into their car stereos using USB drives or auxiliary ports.
Amazon stands to gain plenty by embracing that trend, and I don’t just mean by selling audiobooks in the car. (In case you’re wondering, it’s not possible today to stream an Audible book through Cloud Player). While there is a healthy segment of readers who just want audiobooks, I bet there’s a far bigger market of people who normally read their books in ink — in either the printed or digital variety — but would like the option of switching to audio when they get behind the wheel.
No large-scale development required
For Amazon to make that work it would have to supply its books in dual-media formats. You would then read from your Kindle or Kindle smartphone app when otherwise unoccupied, but once you stepped into your vehicle the device would automatically pair with the Kindle app in the car, which would immediately start reading your book aloud at the exact point you left off.
Amazon already has much of this technology in place. Last year, Amazon introduced Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to pair an Audible book with an ebook for a few extra bucks. Amazon isn’t just selling the same media in two formats, it’s integrating them. A narration feature allows you to listen along as you read from the Kindle — after each word is spoken the text is highlighted on the screen. Customers can switch between audio to visual-only formats with just a touch of the button.
It would be cinch for Amazon to integrate that technology into the car. It would merely have to develop software for the Kindle and Kindle apps that would integrate with the various automakers’ connected car interfaces, just as it’s done for Cloud Player on Sync AppLink.