In a recent drama, MacMillan made it publicly known that they were having problems with Amazon over the pricing scheme of eBooks on the Kindle platform. MacMillan was apparently already in talks with Amazon for quite sometime about the prices being raised from Amazon’s current $9.99 maximum price.
Whilst everyone can see that over pricing digital content can really backfire (look at digital music or movies for lots of examples), it seems like MacMillan has been really hell-bent on increasing the pricing based on their latest agency model. Under this model, MacMillan would like to make sales through agents, who would charge the normal 30% commission that standard throughout the industry. The extra cost of course gets pushed on to the buyers and this is where Amazon did not want to comply with MacMillan’s requests.
After negotiations broke down, Amazon took off all MacMillan books from the Kindle store. However, even then the Kindle makers acknowledged that MacMillan owned too many important titles for Amazon to be able to keep those books away from Kindles. And true to their predictions, Amazon ultimately had to give into MacMillan’s demands to increase the prices.
Under the current model, the eBook prices will be capped at a maximum of $14.99 instead of $9.99 as per existing models. The average prices are supposed to start from $5.99 and go up to $12.99 but the real situation would be that most important titles will be priced between $12.99-$14.99. MacMillan gave everyone a glimmer of a hope saying that they will bring the prices down dynamically. However, that simply means that they will gradually reduce prices on existing titles but will likely price newer titles high.
These new prices put Kindle costs on the same level as those on iPad, making the gap between the two become much smaller when it comes to pricing.
Kobo's service is currently online at kobobooks.com
Borders, in association with the Canadian publishing company called Kobo, has become the latest company to venture into the world of eBooks. This includes both reader devices and the selling of eBooks through an online store. Although a Borders spokesperson has clarified that Borders will not be involved in the reader devices and they might not carry the devices being developed at the moment. Borders thus constitutes a growing number of competitors for the Kindle and hence for Amazon’s burgeoning eBook business. Of course, it is no secret that the market is expected to explode sometime soon. So even though companies like these are late into the game, they are still entering the market at a nascent stage.
Sure, it would be pretty interesting to see what the devices are going to be like but Borders’ intention to make the platform completely open is even more interesting. It seems like the Borders and Kobo initiative will try to please as many people as they possibly can. And by that I mean that the service will support multiple devices and will be completely platform agnostic.
According to the Chief of Indigo Books & Music (the company behind Kobo), the idea is to free the user from obligations to only one device. Once they buy something from Kobo, they will be able to read it on their readers, their iPhones, their Blackberries and anywhere else that supports eBooks. The service will be based on the open ePub publishing standard, which is already supported in nearly every reader that is there in the market right now. They intend to offer free eBooks from the Internet, as well as paid for eBooks that will start from around $10. They are looking to target light readers who “buy a couple a books a year”.
Of course, everyone is jumping into the eBook thing. And that too before Apple arrives with their market altering tablet and makes everyone feel like they need to go back to the drawing board. So in an attempt to be all ‘me too’, Foxit has made its own eBook store. I just hope they don’t think that they can take on the Nook or the Kindle with this. It’s just not happening.
Foxit has its own eBook readers eSlick and they are actually pretty handy. The devices have recently been updated to support ePub and eReader. It already supported PDF and TXT, so now it is a well-rounded reader in terms of formats. I also like the fact that it started with PDF support built in. We all know by now how important that is.
This new store from Foxit offers over 60,000 titles to its customers. That is pretty nice on paper but when you realize that industry juggernauts like Barnes and Noble are in the game as well, you know that this store from a relatively small company is can’t be all that big a deal. And it actually isn’t. The major titles that you get on the Whispernet and on B&N’s store will probably not appear in this store soon enough for eSlick readers to choose this store over the other two that I mentioned.
But hey, more competition is always a good thing for the end users. There’s always more innovation and better prices in a market that is stuffed to the gills with products. Look at the mp3 player market for instance. No matter what your budget and needs, there’s one for you somewhere in the world. The direct relationship between price and quality will always be there but you can still get a 16GB player for around $50 if you look hard enough. So here’s to a better eBook future.
News about several major publishers delaying e-Book releases in 2010 have been circulating for some time and eventually made it to Wall Street Journal (article about Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group, article about HarperCollins). In case you haven’t heard, several major publishers are adopting a policy of publishing digital versions of certain bestsellers (the most frequently mentioned being Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue”) several months after the hardcovers on which publishers typically made significant chunk of profit.
This move seems to be nothing more than an act of desperation. Several quotes of publishing executives pretty much speak for themselves:
“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback. We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”
— Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster
“The future of hardcover publishing is at stake. You don’t have a lot of time left to save it.”
— Nat Sobel, a partner at Sobel Weber Associates
Unfortunately for the publishing industry the train may have already left. e-Book readers are probably the most wanted Christmas gift. Nook and Sony readers are sold out. Amazon Kindle not being sold out is a small miracle giving it’s killer sales in November that (I guess) are going to be topped by December sales. Sweet $9.99 price point may be only part of the reason. Let’s not forget that in order to enjoy cheap e-Books you need to make the initial $200 investment in eBook reader device (reading on PC and iPhone may get you hooked but after some time most likely you’ll either go for eInk or drop reading e-Books altogether). For me personally the biggest reason for choosing e-Books over paper books is convenience. I will not go into details here about I find e-Books convenient – just read this blog. While book reading was declining for years now, e-Books have revived it.
So why would publishers so desperately want kill the very thing that seems to be saving the books? Because they don’t control it. They have been comfortable with the old model of chopping trees and making books out of them for authors and then promoting these books because authors didn’t have the resources to do it themselves. The system has worked for centuries until the Internet arrived. With Internet you no longer need to chop trees to get your word out to large number of people. The concept was out there for anyone to see for years but publishers ignored it. It’s hard to blame them – when you have a well-oiled machine that has been generating cash for centuries it’s hard to always stay on your guard and constantly look for ways to improve the machine. After all there is always the risk of the breaking the machine instead of making it better. And this works… until someone else who is a newcomer and has nothing to lose comes by and completely reinvents the machine. That’s just the way everything evolves.
With Amazon Kindle publishers don’t control the final price. Amazon is cutting in their current profits by selling the e-Books for $9.99 to establish a market share. Once the market share becomes big enough, Amazon can then either raise the price or tell publishers to lower their cut because then it will be “digital sales or no sales at all” Publishers understand this all to well but they will not be able to turn the tide. While they may succeed in thwarting Amazon’s attempt at becoming a e-Book monopoly, 10 years from now most of the books will be digital (whether though Amazon, Google, B&N, Sony monopoly or no monopoly at all) – there is no doubt about it. With technology advancing as rapidly as it is, using paper hauled by fuel burning trucks to transfer information seems as outdated using horses to plow the field in the age of tractors. I have no illusions – eInk is not perfect – far from it in fact. We already have Mirasol displays coming in color e-Book readers in 2010. Then there’ll be some other technology. But even today’s imperfect eInk and DRM digital books beat the heck out of paper books in many aspects.
Publisher’s side of the story is similar to the one of music recording industry:
If new hardcover titles continue to be sold as $9.99 e-books, the eventual outcome will be fewer literary choices for customers, because publishers won’t be able to take as many chances on new writers.
— Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins Publishers
“The music industry has lost most of their national chains, and the ability to expose a lot of new artists.”
— John Marmaduke, CEO of Hastings Entertainment Inc., a book and music retailer
While fewer new artists may be exposed now, I don’t feel a shortage of music that I like to listen to. In fact I like the fact that major MP3 music retailers like iTunes, Zune and Amazon offer DRM-free music that now plays on my PC, XBOX360 (that I use as media center), iPhone and MP3 car stereo without useless limitations. It may be more correct to say that publishers will get fewer chances with new writers since e-Books open self-publishing possibility to anyone.
Publishing industry has my sympathies, they do not have my wallet though. Personally I’m so hooked on e-Books, that waiting for several months for digital version is not a problem for me at all. The book will be as interesting for me to read in a couple of months too and meanwhile there are other books that I haven’t yet read. The situation is similar to DVD and Blu-Ray disks coming out months after theatrical movie releases. The idea is not to cannibalize movie ticket sales by giving people the ability to watch the same movie at home. I might be a non-typical consumer but for the this dilemma is resolved in exactly the same way – I wait for DVD release while I watch other movies that were already released. Truth being told I’m even to lazy to go to local Blockbuster or even my mailbox for that matter. If I can get the movie via Zune Marketplace or Netflix “Instant Watch” on XBOX360 that’s what I do. It’s not that I’m ultra-greedy and don’t appreciate movie theaters. I do. But my schedule just doesn’t allow me to go to the movies that often. And movies that I really cared about like “Lord Of The Rings” and “Star Wars” I watched in the movie theater regardless because this is the right way to watch them for the first time. Period.
Getting back to the Sarah Palin book… If you search of “going rogue kindle” on Amazon you get an interesting list of results: the Kindle edition of the book that is currently available for pre-order for $7.99 (I guess this is Amazon’s way of giving customers extra incentive to wait for the digital version) ranks 3rd after 2 books that are available for sale right now that are only remotely related to the original book in question. These books may be ranking higher because they sell while the book customers really want is stuck on pre-order. So while publishers may be gaining some hardcovers sales, they are also loosing sales to different books that aren’t on a several month hold.
PS: Although I find e-Book reading more convenient, there are some places Kindle or any other eBook reader can’t go. I read paper books to my daughter as she goes to sleep and during the day. Even if I had 12″ color e-Reader with LCD-like response time, 3D holographic animated pictures and surround sound, I still don’t envision myself “reading” it to her. Some books will stay on paper for quite some time just as we still have sail-boats in the age of affordable air-travel and combustion engine.
Skiff, owned by Hearst Corporation, specializes in delivering digital content like newspapers and magazines. Come 2010, they are going to launch a new service that will rival with Amazon and the Kindle in some ways.
Skiff intends to start delivering digital content directly to consumers who want this content. The aim is to distribute it to all available channels and that includes dedicated readers, smartphones and tablets. This platform seeks to do exactly what other platforms do for various products.
Skiff will bring publishers, advertisers and consumers together on one forum. The idea is to deliver content to the users and help publishers generate revenue through advertising like they do now. The main focus, as mentioned earlier, is on newspapers and magazines. These publications already generate revenue this way, so it won’t be anything new for them.
They are also planning to sell books through this platform. The question now is whether they can survive in a market that is currently growing extremely fast. To help things along, they are planning to launch a dedicated ebook reader that will be using the Marvell chipset and Sprint’s 3G EV-DO Rev.A network for wireless connectivity to the store. This dedicated reader is supposedly coming in 2010, which means it should already be in the labs getting prototyped.
There are multiple ebook readers that use the Marvell chipset at the moment and adding wireless support to one will not be a big deal. Spring Design’s Alex, Entourage’s eDGe and Plastic Logic’s Que use this chipset. Skiff may be looking at re-branding one of these readers for their purpose. My guess would be Spring Design’s Alex because it looks like they could use a partner.
If this service becomes a hit with publishers of periodicals and newspapers, it will become a leader in that niche and the Kindle will not be all that affected. But if it starts carrying a massive number of books, both new and old, then Amazon might have something worry about on their hands.
The Kindle is a great device. It’s owners are by and large satisfied with their purchases and no one will argue that the Kindle makes eBook reading anything but a breeze. But what about the eBooks themselves? Is the format innovating at the same pace as the devices we read it on?
There’s a great Op-ed at Computer World about how eBook publishing could be improved. It isn’t an attack on the Kindle, or other eReader devices, but more a critique on the eBook publishing industry. The largest point of the article is that publishers should offer bundles where a customer can buy all versions of the book (physical, eReader, mobile phone, audio) for one discounted price. The full list of suggestions is:
Bundles of all book versions
On the fly revisions/corrections to books
Audio books that can be borrowed (Sony will be supporting loans of eBooks, but there is no word for the future of audio books)
Social networks created around each book’s reader base
Early release for the eBook edition
Make audio books cheaper
I agree with these arguments for the most part, but I want to point out that Amazon already does some of this. You can’t get audio books as part of a bundle, but audio books have to go through a whole extra set of production in addition to the physical/digital versions. Amazon does let you, however, buy books for the Kindle and then access the same books on your mobile phone. Whispernet will even keep your current page number synced between devices, so transitioning back and forth is effortless. Also, Kindle additions can have corrections made to them without buying a new edition.
I would however like to see some sort of digital tie in with physical book sales. You can walk into a record store and buy a new album on vinyl, and half the time it will include a code to download a free digital version. The music itself has already been paid for and the record label can eat the minuscule overhead that digital downloads add. Why can’t Amazon throw in the Kindle version for free every time someone buys a physical book? Not only would the cost to them be relatively small, but it would also encourage customers to take a closer look at eReader devices.
According to a leaked internal document, Time Inc. may release their own eReader device. Consumers would be able to buy subscriptions to Time publications (such as Time, Sports Illustrated, and People) in bundles that would be delivered to the device together. Time’s plans also mention the strategy of forming a joint venture with other companies to share the new platform.
Besides the bundling of subscriptions, and a desire to create a “consumer-facing brand” for the gadget, it’s not really clear what the marketing strategy will be. If Time tries to sell the device for super cheap, or even give it a way for free, they will need to rely on a surge of subscriptions due to the ease of “bundling.” If the device is too expensive, people either won’t be convinced to switch to eInk or they will choose a more general device like the Kindle.
Speaking of which, Time magazine is already available on the Kindle. Since eReaders are already available that offer magazine subscriptions, anything produced by Time will need to find a way to compete against Amazon. A full color reader that completely mimicked a real magazine could be successful, but I’m not sure how they could keep the price of the device low enough. Nobody will shell big bucks for something that is limited to only a handful of magazines.
BlogKindle.com is now available as subscription and can be wirelessly delivered directly to your Kindle along with 4,400+ other blogs currently in the blog section of Kindle Store. Since Amazon recently simplified the process of self-publishing blogs on Kindle Store the amount of blogs skyrocketed from 1,400 to 4,400 in just a few days.
Amazon itself decides what the subscription price is going to be. Publishers have no control over it other than pulling their blog from the store completely. Currently BlogKindle.com is valued at $1.99/month.
I don’t believe that in my case 30% commission will make me a fortune. I mostly did it to get extra exposure for the blog. Kindle Marketplace seems to be a very logical place to have Kindle related blog. Of course the blog will still be available as it is now so you can read it in any browser or RSS reader of your choice.
Scribe Media discusses the future of books, and how e-books could possibly be the future – or at least part of it.
Its a fascinating discussion with Bob Stein who is the Director of the Institute for Future of the Book – futureofthebook.org – and it well worth listening if you have a spare 40 minutes.
If e-book readers are to ever catch on then they must be able to display all kinds of documents and information, from novels to picture albums to technical documents. This presents a challenge for publishers right now because whist e-book readers are catching on, they don’t posses the technology to display anything other than just words and simple black and white images. A lot of publishers are wanting to put their technical documents on to e-ink devices, however technology in the e-ink industry is limiting how those documents can be displayed.
Once such publisher is Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Programmer which publishes technical programming books, as you can imagine, programming books will be full of diagrams, tables, code lists and images — they are really tricky to reproduce for e-book viewing.
This is what Dave had to say
About once a week, we get a request from a reader to have our books available in a format that can be read on an eBook reader (typically, nowadays, the Amazon Kindle).
In fact, we’ve had a prototype form of that capability for a while now, but we’ve always held back. Frankly, we didn’t think the devices worked well with our kind of content. Basically, the .mobi format used by the Kindle is optimized for books that contain just galleys of text with the occasional heading. Throw in tables, monospaced code listings, sidebars and the like, and things start to get messy. The .epub format (used, for example, by Adobe Digital Editions) is slightly more capable, but it also has issues.
You can see exactly what Dave is talking about because he has uploaded his tests, you can see the results here;
Dave goes on to say getting to this stage required a lot of hacks, for instance the code listings have been converted to images so that they render better, however they don’t scale when the user changes the font size — i’m sure many more hacks were used to get to this stage, Dave finises with a good question:
So… what do you think. Is this workable? Should we make these available, even though they’re not very good, or should we wait for a later generation of eBook that’s closer to the capabilities we need? Comments are open… :)
What do you think, should publishers wait or press on knowing this is the best possible outcome given the current technology?
The Kindle has been around since November 2007 and Amazon has yet released any sales figures. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Amazon has sold anywhere between 40,000 – 140,000 Kindle units per month and that e-book sales are on the increase accounting for 12% of title sales at Amazon.com. Whilst the Kindle hasn’t been a runaway success for Amazon, it has been a hit amongst readers and is slowly gaining acceptance amongst consumers.
Since its launch in 1995, Amazon has become a leviathan in the publishing industry, this spelt good news for the consumers, but not so good for the publishers. Amazon flexed its might in March this year by declaring that if publishers didn’t use Amazon’s in house print on demand wing called BookSurge then the “Buy” button on the Amazon page for their books will be removed. They could then only sell their books on Amazon through a third party.
This amounted to a antitrust suit being filed against Amazon in March of this year, the case is ongoing, Amazon filed for the case to be dismissed, the judge will decide on August 21st if the case can proceed.
The once mighty publishing industry is facing troubling times, with tighter margins on books and more competition from magazines and online publications, publishers are left with little option but to bow to Amazons wishes. Amazon’s cut is 65% when publishing book on the DTP and 25% when published on Mobipocket which gives Amazon even more power over the publishers. Removing their books from Amazon is not an option for many publishers simply because of the amount of revenue they will lose, precious revenue they cannot afford to lose.
The Kindle seems has tightened Amazons grip on the publishers, and as Kindle growth surges it will put the publishers in an even worse position.
Esquire Magazine celebrates its 75th birthday this year. To celebrate this milestone Esquire has partnered up with a Cambridge, Massachusetts based technology company, E Ink Corporation (the same company which makes the Kindles e-ink display), to become the first magazine to be printed-or should I say manufactured-with an e-ink cover.
The special 75th anniversary issue will focus on exploring the ideas, people and issues that will be the foundation of the 21st century.
“This cover is both a breakthrough for magazines and an expression of the theme of our anniversary issue,” said David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine. Whilst the cover uses “rudimentary e-ink technology” primarily because the cost associated with having a high resolution e-ink display is still very high, Mr. Granger hopes this is only the beginning of an explosion in the use of e-ink technology.
Mr. Granger, also has high hopes for the covers place in history saying “I hope it will be in the Smithsonian [...] Magazines have basically looked the same for 150 years,” adding “I have been frustrated with the lack of forward movement in the magazine industry.” – you can include the publishing and the newspaper industry’s to that also.
Whilst some might see this as a marketing gimmick, Esquire is hopeful that the technology behind the device will last, Mr. Granger thinks “The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones.”
Esquires publishers have had to invest a six figure amount in order to get the project off the ground, so a big-time sponsor was needed in order to turn a profit, Ford was brought in to help with some of the costs in exchange for a 2-page e-ink advertisement.
The Esquire team has been planning to use an e-ink cover for a long time, back in 2000, Mr. Granger visited E Ink Corporation in Cambridge for a technology demonstration, but conceded that it was too premature for magazines. In 2006 the technology had improved sufficiently that only limitation to creating an e-ink magazine was having a battery small enough to power it-and the associated costs-, so for the past 16 months Esquire has been working with a Chinese manufacture to create a battery which will fit inside a magazine, the battery is expected to last 90 days.
It would be interesting to see what magazine stands would look like in a decades time if the e-ink cover catches on. Magazine stands are already a visual assault on the eyes, every magazine is competing for you attention with bright colours and scantily clad women, one can only imagine the stands if they were filled with animated e-ink covers!
Now I suspect that the e-ink display will be a segmented type as opposed to a high resolution graphic type available on the Kindle, given the cost of manufacturing. The Esquire cover will probably have a few frames of animation or some flashing text – nothing fancy, but still quite cool. Esquire has an exclusive deal with E Ink Corporation on the use of e-ink technology in print through 2009, however only a 100,000 e-ink covers will be produced, they will only be available on Magazine stands and the 620,000 Esquire mail subscribers will get a printed copy of the issue.
Back in May we got wind of a new social fanzine site especially for science-fiction and fantasy readers, Tor.com was due for launch we were told imminently, but as with these things the launch actually didn’t happen for a couple of month – over the weekend Tor.com was launched.
If you read the earlier post you know that had you signed up for the newsletter, Tor was giving away a free e-book every week in their weekly newsletter. Now that the site has launched, Tor will make available all 24 titles that were given away in the newsletter–only till the 27th of July, so head on over to the site and download them–in their Freebies Bonanza, there is a selection of artwork for download as-well, some would make an excellent desktop wallpaper.
If your a fan of science-fiction and fantasy books then you might want to bookmark Tor.com, and sign up for access to more advanced community features, whilst the site is still in officially in beta there is a lot there for you to look at and read. There are already some lively discussions going on in the community forum with Tor and Macmillan employees and the blog on the front page is filled with interesting news and stories.
An Amazon.com press release today revealed that 11 top Christian publishers are to make available thousands of e-book for the Kindle.
From the Amazon.com press release;
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that Christian book publishers Augsburg Fortress, Crossway Books & Bibles, David C. Cook, Gospel Light, Group Publishing, NavPress, Strang Communications, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. and Zondervanp have committed to making the majority of their catalogs of books available to Kindle owners by the end of 2008.
….
The response to our Kindle editions has been remarkable,” said Alan Huizenga, Director of Digital Publishing at Tyndale House Publishers. “We are excited to know that for readers who own a Kindle, they can download and begin reading bestselling Tyndale authors such as Joel Rosenberg, Tony Dungy, Francine Rivers, and Tommy Newberry in under a minute!”
“For years Eerdmans readers have enjoyed our extensive selection of titles from the scholarly to the popular,” said Sam Eerdmans, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Eerdmans. “Now Eerdmans is excited to announce that many of our titles will be readily available on Kindle. Fans of Eugene Peterson or Joan Chittister can quickly find and access their new books using the extremely easy interface of Kindle.”
“Thomas Nelson is excited to offer our books in the digital format on Kindle,” said Robert Edington, Vice President of Internet Channel, Thomas Nelson, Inc. “Our readers have enjoyed works by Max Lucado, John Maxwell and Ted Dekker for a long time, and now those who have a Kindle can quickly and easily download them in 60 seconds.”
It looks like more and more publishers are jumping on the Kindle bandwagon, the more the merrier!
BookExpo, the US industry largest annual trade exhibition ended last month in Los Angeles without a clear strategy to revive the industry.
The book industry which is going through troubling times lacks a clear strategy to move forward, with the advent and popularisation of new technologies like the Kindle and the internet challenging the traditional ways of publishing it is forcing the industry to evolve and adapt to change.
Simon & Schuster CEO and President Carolyn Reidy said about the event: “It was quite, very quite”, in fact the entire even lacked interest in the absence of a “buzz book”. Amazon could have been that “buzz book” or should I say “buzz e-book”, in fact the event lacked such interest that the highlight of the event was a pop concert by Prince.
Amazon was praised throughout the whole event with its Kindle reading device, however since Kindle e-books only account for 6% of total book sales it was hardly exciting anyone, having a bigger stage at BookExpo could have increased e-book exposure as a viable alternative to traditional books and as a way of kick starting the industry back into gear. Perhaps Jeff Bezos could have delivered the keynote address instead of the Prince pop concert.
However popular novelist Ray Bradbury expressed some reservations about e-books saying: “There is no future for e-books because they are not books.”
Should Amazon Kindle have had a prominent position at the BookExpo in LA to promote the use of e-books and e-book readers?
Princeton University Press has announced that it will start publishing Kindle edition textbook this fall, according to Inside Higher Education, Princeton will follow other prominent educational establishments like Yale, Oxford and UC Berkeley in offering Kindle edition textbooks to students and faculty. Depending on the success, more university are likely to follow.
The Kindle seems like the ideal device which would appeal to the university demographic more so than any other gadget out there, students and faculty can both benefit from the Kindle. Image if every student had a Kindle, all the course lectures and textbooks could be downloaded the instant they were available, with the amount of reading an average student goes through in an average semester they may be grateful for a device which can help them reduce the weight in the already heavy bags. And university lecturers could add reading material for next week lecture which could be automatically downloaded to a students Kindle, just like a newspaper.
With Kindles search feature students can easily find the right passages instead of searching through the library archives for 3 hours, it can be noted, annotated and bookmarked for later reference.
Anything that help with learning and education gets the thumbs up from us
Whilst tracking Kindle sales is like guess work, tracking US e-book sales is a bit easier, the above graphic shows US e-book sales from Q1 2002 – Q1 2008. Whilst there was a healthy upward trend, the last 5 quarters (Q4 2006 – Q4 2007) only showed a 17% increase in sales according to industry statistics compiled by The International Digital Publishing Forum. However just in the last quarter alone, the industry saw an explosion, up from $1,887,900 in sales in Q4 2007 shooting up 23% to $2,460,343 in sales in Q1 2008.
I think the most interesting results will be Q2 2008, if we see another 20% spike in sales like we saw in Q1 2008 then it’s quite reasonable to theorise that the Kindle is having an effect on e-book sales in the US.
Bear in mind that The International Digital Publishing Forum only collects data from 12-15 trade publishers and that the real retail numbers could be as much as double the figures reported above.
A commenter, rizchamps, from the Silicon Ally Insider article on the report writes:
So if we ascribe all the incremental revenue from $2.5M to $3.1M = $600K to Kindle, and assume that $3 a piece wholesale cost, that would be 200K ebooks currently in service. In addition, assume that those with kindles are early adopters who would buy more than 1 book, say 10 book per kindle for the three months period, that would put the active kindle number around 20K.
Then, those 20K in service probably was mostly sold during Xmas season, give it 15K, meaning for an average month, there are 5K kindles entering service (summer time could be less because Kindle has not proven itself on the beach yet). That would translate into annual sales of 70K units(generic), give it a multiple YOY 30%, that would be 80K.
That would mean 90k (units)* (500 (price) + 50 (book per year, since adopters love books)* 10 (price per book) = $90M gross revenue
rizchamps numbers seem well worked and seem entirely reasonable, more so than a certain Citigroup analyst.
Of course all this is still guesswork and we wont know for sure unless Amazon releases Kindle sales figures. Do you think the Kindle is having an effect on e-book sales?
Tor Books is a major hardcover and paperback science fiction and fantasy publisher, one of the largest in the English-speaking world, it announced recently that it was working on a new community website which would be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans, this website will act, in part, as a form of branding and promotion for Tor book titles. The site will also implement light social networking elements and publish original short fiction and nonfiction for free online, all DRM free.
A science fiction and fantasy site not quite like any you’ve seen before, mixing news, commentary, original stories and art, your own comments and conversations, and more. A place on the net you may find yourself wanting to visit—and participate in—every day.
While there isnt any more information on the site Patrick Nielsen Hayden is on the team that is developing the site, he had this to say;
But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day—and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers also posting to the “front page”; in fact we’ve already recruited several in order to ensure coverage of particular niche areas. (Some of these individuals will be familiar to Making Light readers—wave hello, Bruce Baugh—and we haven’t finished recruiting, either.) We know that the site will also feature new original fiction on a regular basis, illustrated under the supervision of art director Irene Gallo, and that these original stories—free of DRM, offered as part of the blog feed and also Available For Your Convenience in a variety of other formats—will have their own associated open comment threads, just like everything else on the blog. We know that there will be lightweight “social networking” features for registered users, including the ability to form mutual-interest groups through tagging and the ability to create journals and/or discussions of their own. Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn’t to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it’ll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.
From what I have gathered from various sources a few dozen authors have already been approached to submit their work, Tor is possible paying upward of 25 cents per word for some of the stories from the prominent authors. Once the titles are published on the site they will also be accompanied by commissioned artwork.
Beta testers can apply to join the private beta by sending an email to tor.betatest@gmail.com, however that maybe unnecessary since the launch may be imminent – it is due for launch sometime in May.
The concept of the site sounds amazing, and there isn’t anything remotely like it anywhere on the web. Even if they implement half of what they are trying to do, the site will be a huge success. So if you love your science fiction and fantasy book, sign up for the newsletter and stay tuned in for the launch.
It all started in late March when Amazon contacted a number of US small presses and self-publishers to say that if they didn’t use Amazon’s in house print on demand wing called BookSurge then the “Buy” buttons on the Amazon page for their books will be removed. They could then only sell their books on Amazon through a third party.
You can read the filing via this link. [PDF Document]
We will keep our eye on this as the story develops we’ll let you all know what happens.
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Esquire Magazine celebrates its 75th birthday this year. To celebrate this milestone Esquire has partnered up with a Cambridge, Massachusetts based technology company, E Ink Corporation (the same company which makes the Kindles e-ink display), to become the first magazine to be printed-or should I say manufactured-with an e-ink cover.
, in previous weeks you could have got your hands on 
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