TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Amazon’ Category

By Jane Litte

There were rumors this summer that a new Kindle would be released in October/November. Then Amazon doused that rumor. Now we have pictures of a slightly less fugly NEW Kindle. (Note to Amazon, hire a new designer, seriously).

Photo via Gizmodo. More pictures available through BoyGenius.

Sony unveiled it’s newest device, the PRS 700, complete with a touchscreen and integrated front light (click link for picture). Read Paul’s account of the new Sony. It’s like a battle between form and function. Want wireless, got to go with Kindle. What style and an integrated front light, then Sony is your choice.

By Paul Biba

Yesterday I attended the Sony press event announcing the release of their new PRS700 ebook reader, to be priced at $399. Pictured above is Steve Haber, President of the Digital Reading Business Division, who made the presentation.

There has been a lot of talk about the new hardware on the net, and I’ll speak about it in a bit, but there was far more important news that came out of the event. It is now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sony is committed to ebooks and the Reader platform. This gives all us ebook mavens a reason to contemplate the future with optimism.
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By Chris Meadows

We’ve mentioned before that the iPhone seems to be outpacing the Kindle in e-reading popularity. Now no less a publication than Forbes has taken notice.

Write Andy Greenberg and James Erik Abels:

Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple’s (nasdaq: AAPL - news- people ) iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.

By comparison, Citigroup estimates Amazon will sell around 380,000 Kindles in 2008. Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey expects Sony’s (nyse:SNE - news - people ) Reader will sell only a fraction of that number. In other words, Apple may have inadvertently sold more e-readers than any other company in the nascent digital book market.

The article highlights the growing popularity of the iPhone platform compared to the Kindle, and it even-handedly points out the pros and cons of the iPhone’s smaller but faster-refreshing LCD screen compared to the Kindle’s e-ink. This is all to the good.

But in basing their comparison only on Stanza’s public-domain library of titles, with no mention at all of Fictionwise’s eReader or the Bookshelf/Baen Webscriptions collaboration, the Forbes writers are comparing, well, an Apple and oranges.

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By Chris Meadows

In a recent blog post, Peter Sunde—co-founder of the popular and embattled Swedish BitTorrent site the Pirate Bay—requested that someone send him a Kindle. He did not mention why he wanted the device (which is not currently available outside the United States) beyond the cryptic statement that, “I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…” and a link to a Digital Renaissance blog post about the potential of book digitization to change the publishing industry.

When Wired asked Sunde for more information, his only response was a coy, “Sponsor me with a Kindle and I’ll answer? :-)”

One Kindle blog wonders if this could be the “start of a wave of e-book piracy.” (Only the start? I wonder where they’ve been for the last ten years.) Nonetheless, they may have a point. Sunde and the Pirate Bay in general seem to be consummate attention-hounds, continually staging new publicity stunts and merrily tweaking the noses of the publishing industry groups who try to shut them down.

Case in point: the Pirate Bay recently accused a Swedish book publishing organization of “copyright infringement” for scraping its torrent database to gather information for a report. The report revealed that 85% of Sweden’s best-selling books are available via BitTorrent. Peter Sunde admitted to being “a bit sad that it’s not 100%.”

Returning to the mysterious Kindle request, the question on bloggers’ minds now is, is Sunde planning to start a Kindle-ready pirate website? It might not be too hard, given that Kindles are already able to load Mobipocket and other third-party books with a little tweaking. It is hard to imagine Amazon not immediately blocking such a site from access via Kindle’s wireless service, however.

By Paul Biba

One of the definitions of irony, according to dictionary.com, is:

5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
6. the incongruity of this.

According to Wikipedia Lessig is:

… founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.

Put the two together with a DRM’d version of his book from Amazon which has just gone on sale, and we have a perfect example of the definition quoted above.

By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

Now that I’ve had my Kindle for a few months, I recently noticed a pretty dramatic impact on my reading habits.

In my pre-Kindle days I’d spend my reading sessions going through a few magazines as well as a chapter or two of whatever book I happened to be immersed in that week. 

The key point is that the majority of my time was spent reading books.

Book time vs. newspaper time

Nowadays I spend just as much time reading as before, but it’s all centered around my New York Times subscription, my Kindlefeeder RSS feeds and either Time magazine or my most recent addition, MIT’s Technology Review magazine.

I purchased and started reading three other books on my Kindle, but I haven’t touched any of them in at least two weeks.

Information snacking

So for some strange reason, I’m finding the Kindle experience to be more useful when it’s focused on shorter length, more time-sensitive content. Jeff Bezos has spoken before about our current culture’s tendency towards "information snacking", or spending more time with shorter-length works. 

Amazon’s e-reader is supposed to help us embrace longer works (like books) again, but if my experience is any indication, the Kindle (and its wireless functionality) is turning out to be yet another device that enables even more info snacking.

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By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

Have you ever tried to cancel a Kindle subscription?

I originally signed up for the AP U.S. News feed, as a couple of other Kindle owners told me it’s worth the $1.99 per month. This was before the advent of Kindlefeeder, of course.

Much of the "news" this feed sent me it sent me wasn’t exactly news.

So I figured I’d drop that subscription and switch to the Latest News from The New York Times, also $1.99 per month. Switching to the Times feed was a breeze, of course, but how do you stop an existing feed? You’d think it would be simple, right from your Kindle. Nope.

As with so many services these days, it’s easy to sign up but the provider often makes it difficult to stop. It’s not as bad as the old horror stories of canceling an AOL subscription or, more recently, XM Radio, but it’s still more of a hassle than it should be.

Psst! Unsubscribe tips

Here’s how it’s done: Select the Manage Your Kindle option on Amazon’s top nav bar. On the resulting screen scroll down to the heading "Your active Kindle subscriptions." You’ll see a "Cancel Subscription" option for each of your active subscriptions. Just click on that link for any subscriptions you want to terminate.

Canceling a subscription is actually pretty simple, assuming you’re doing it from your computer. And while it’s conceivable to pull up the same screen on your Kindle, that’s more of a hassle than it’s worth. I think Amazon should just add a "cancel subscription" button inside the feed rather than force you to use a browser.

By David Rothman

Some 85,000 users of the iPhone and iPod Touch had downloaded Stanza as of August 12.

Now, just five week or so later, the cumulative number has shot up to 300,000, consistent with the fast growth of eReader as well. Stanza at this point would appear to be drawing more users. Just a few minutes ago it was #32 on Apple’s list of free iPhone apps for the U.S., one notch higher than this morning. eReader doesn’t show up in the first 50, but certainly isn’t hurting, with 300,000+ downloads of books from paying customers.

A major reason for Stanza’s own popularity could be its tight integration with Feedbooks via Feed’s API. You don’t just get a currently-free reader. From within the program, you can effortlessly download thousands of out-of-copyright classics—works from Charles Dickens’ to Edith Wharton’s—as well as Creative Commons books like Cory Doctorow’s. You don’t experience all the hassles that public domain sites require if used directly. May FBReader follow on the API front! Hey, guys, didn’t we suggest that? Care to do the integration to take full advantage of Android’s debut?

Marc Prud’hommeaux, the main developer at Lexcyle, responded to our e-mailed questions with other news about Stanza:

Congratulations to Steve Pendergrast and the rest of Fictionwise on their extraordinary number of e-book sales! As it happens, we just passed 300,000 users Stanza iPhone/iPod last week, so 300K seems to be the number of the day. We don’t currently have detailed information on the number of books downloaded, since the book files themselves are usually hosted by our catalog partners like Feedbooks, Munseys, and other catalogs that are in private beta. But we do know that well over 1 million books have been downloaded to date through the Stanza Online Catalog, and the count may well be closer to 2 million.

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By David Rothman

Ficbot and Chris Meadows aren’t the only ones seeing promise in the iPhone/Touch for e-reading.

Both the MediaBistro Galley Cat blog and TheBookSeller have just run items—here and here. Our buddies at The Cat are looking for people who read on the iPhone, and I very much hope you can help ‘em out.

My own answer to the related "How many?" question would be, "Very few within the book biz itself, but lots of potential here."

Looking beyond the people in the book biz

For the bigger picture, The Cat might check out iPhone siphoning off Kindle buyers, says Fictionwise and eReader iPhone/Touch app after a month: On 130,000 devices, with 35,000 owners buying e-books for that platform. As of August, moreover, Stanza had claimed 85,000 users.

These iPhone apps are hardly going to destroy the Kindle. But the numbers, at such an early stage, show the risks of the book business becoming too Kindle-centric.

Updates, please, Steve and Marc

And now? I’d love to hear from Steve Pendergrast at Fictionwise and Marc Prud’hommeaux, the Stanza developer—what are the very latest stats. My guess, nothing more, is that the number of people who’ve downloaded books for the iPhone/Touch might even be north of 500,000 or at least getting there.

Stanza, as I write this, is #33 among the top free apps showing up on within my iTunes store here in the States, and it might be doing even better elsewhere. Hello, Hadrien? What’s the latest from France?

Given all the millions of iPhones out there, the number could represent a nice niche, even if few people in the book business itself are reading off phones right now.

Turning readers into customers

For publishers and retailers, the challenge will be to turn readers into customers. I continue to believe that nonDRMed ePub, which works great with Stanza, offers the most promise for the iPhone and other mobile platforms.

Tech keeps changing, especially in the mobile phone area. Standards are the best way for the book business to keep up. Any tech barrier for customers is a sales barrier.

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By Chris Meadows

  Found via BoingBoing, a New York Magazine article (single-page, multi-page) examines the various crises currently facing print book publishing. Said crises include the practice of paying out advances that are far too huge, the declining number of serious readers, clashes of personality, the huge amount of influence being wielded by megastores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and so on—but there are some words spared for Amazon’s Kindle as well.

The article trots out the "iPod of e-books" expression that is rapidly becoming a cliché, and then gets to the heart of the matter:

The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.

But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.”

Other e-book vendors, such as eReader and Fictionwise—or the entire existence of e-books at all apart from Kindle editions, for that matter—are not even mentioned.

Correction, 11:16 p.m.: The original source was New York Magazine, not the Times. Fixed.

By David Rothman

Some wonderful, talented people are behind Wowio. It’s one more reason why I’m sorry to see traffic on the decline, following the controversial changes in the ad-supported site. In fact, Wowio is now actually a bit of a bookstore in disguise.

"I have influenced more then 1,000 people to stay away," one user writes in, "and I will continue to boycott." Verifiable or not, that statement shows the extent to which Wowio is in trouble. My biggest problems are with the obnoxious, intrusive ads, as well as charges for PDFs that were once free.

Granted, the Alexa traffic-tracker is imprecise, and you can’t confuse site popularity with profitability, but it’s clear that the reborn Wowio is far from a hit. If Wowio’s new owners can’t make a go of it, maybe they need to sell the site to a publisher, Amazon, Google or another company with enough resources to make the advertising model work in a user-friendly way.

Related: Wowio founder’s defense of the changes, my rebuttal and the latest on Wowio’s business difficulties.

By David Rothman

If you want to read Indignation, Philip Roth’s latest novel, you can buy a Kindle edition, not just a paper version. Trouble is, I don’t see one bleepin’ Roth novel available in Amazon’s Mobipocket format. I can read Mobi but not Kindle; eBabel strikes again! Forget about an eReader or PDF version as well, at least for now. Too bad. I’m a Roth fan, and an L.A. Times article about Indignation really intrigues me. Here’s to reader choice; talk about "indignation"!

Meanwhile The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s novel about a fictitious Jewish settlement in Alaska, apparently still isn’t in E more than year after its publication. From what I know, Chabon is no dummy about tech—he even paid tribune in his book to his Mac writing software. Time for him to have a heart to heart with his agent?

Related: Have we read the end of book publishing as we know it? in New York Magazine, as well as an informative Mike Cane rant on the inanities of the book trade—in addition to his eBook Test blog devoted to the issue of what’s in E and what isn’t.