E-I-E-I-OH

PowerByHand, which distributes electronic books (or, as the company likes to call itself, “the premier provider of mobile content delivery solutions”), has changed its name to eReader:

The new site, www.eReader.com, offers customers a choice of more than 13,000 popular titles from more than 40 categories, with hundreds of new books added every month. eReader eBooks can be viewed not only on the Palm OS, but also on Pocket PC, Windows and Macintosh platforms.

To illustrate the lack of differention a name like “eReader” brings to the game, here are just a few of the competitors for the “eReader” headspace:

• Adobe Reader: for reading PDF docs, one format of eBooks — indeed, Adobe has a whole section of its website devoted to eBooks, called eBooks Central.
• Microsoft Reader: Sure they’re a tiny company, but they may be big someday. Their tagline for this product? The new standard for eReading.
• Amazon eBooks: eReader claims to be “The World’s Largest eBook Store.” Even if that’s true and they have a larger selection than Amazon (which began selling eBooks nearly four years ago with 1,000 titles) that situation could change very quickly. Yes, eReader IS in fact a store, as their tagline reminds us; but Amazon is a powerful BRAND, and they have demonstrated repeatedly that they can move into an online retail sector and own it. How is a humble, descriptively named product with a descriptive tagline going to capture the imagination of the consumer when Amazon is only a click away?
• E-Reads: “Quality Books for Quality Readers,” just not quite enough quality to land a conventional print publisher.
• eBooks.com: Their tagline, “the digital bookstore,” is very helpful for those who could suss out from their name what they sell.
• ibooks: Your source for ebooks. Say it altogether: “ibooks – your source for ebooks.” As we’ve said repeatedly, we don’t make this stuff up.
• TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home. Advocating Well-Stocked National Digital Libraries.
• ebook.com: Belongs to the eBook software product DeskTop Author.
• estory.com: Interactive books for kids.
• in e books (.com): Where, “You become the hero of your favourite books….”

An important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the world what business you are in or what your product does. Intuition dictates that this will save you the time and money of explanation, which actually turns out not to be true. Why not?

Let’s consider the larger sector of online bookstores, to which eReader also belongs. Here are a few of their names:

1bookstreet	Classbook
A1Books	CoolBooks
allbooks4less	Ebooks
AllBookstores	eCampus
alotofbooks	eSuccessBooks
BookCloseOuts	gobookshopping
Bookland	Gobookshopping
BookNetUSA	HalfPriceBooks
BookPool	nwbooks
BooksAMillion	Textbooks
BookSense	Textbooksatcost
books-forsale	Textbooksource
BooksNow	Textbookx
Bookspot	TheBookPeople
Bookwire	TrueBooks
CheapyBook	VarsityBooks

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, it was billed as an “online bookstore” just like all of the above, and since it was one of the first such companies, there was even more reason to go with a descriptive name, right? Otherwise, how would anybody know what the business was about?

Bezos knew that someday his company might want to sell more than just books, and that someday it might even have an offline, not just online, presence. In short, he understood that the name should be bigger than just “books” or “online,” and further it needed to distance itself from all the competitors who would surely follow. He needed a name that could become a powerful brand. In “Amazon,” he found just such a name, and the list above confirms that the competition came in droves, though a key difference is that they are forever relegated by their names to selling only books.

The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support, which, when you think about it, is impossible. The name will appear on a website, a storefront, in a news article or press release, on a business card, on the product itself, in advertisements, or, at its most naked, in a conversation.

There is simply no imaginable circumstance in which a name will have to explain itself. This is fortunate, because having a descriptive name is actually a counterproductive marketing move which requires an enormous amount of effort to overcome. A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack. It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors. Which brand are you more likely to remember, Amazon or one from the list above? Where are you more likely to go online to buy a book?

In a related back flip, eUniverse, Inc. announced plans to change the Company’s name to Intermix Media, Inc., which at least doesn’t begin with the dreaded “e”, though they do, unfortunately, produce “sites and solutions that engage.” If only someone would come up with a “solutions” solution. Perhaps it would have to be an “eSolutions” solution.