TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Amazon’ Category

By Chris Meadows

It looks like the ghost of the Amazon/Macmillan feud is still lingering in the air.

The New York Times has a lengthy piece covering the ongoing confidential discussions between Amazon and publishers. Apparently Amazon is up to its old tricks again, threatening publishers that it may stop selling their books if they do not agree to a list of concessions.

Amazon is apparently conceding the agency pricing model for e-books that most of the major publishers want, but if the Times’s sources can be believed it is demanding those publishers agree to three-year contracts as well as stipulate that no other e-book sellers could have lower prices or better terms. Publishers are reluctant to commit to a contract of that length given how much the e-book industry can change in just a short time.

Meanwhile, Apple seems to be asking much the same thing, at least insofar as lowest prices go. And while Amazon is only agreeing to the agency pricing model for the major publishers and trying to keep the smaller publishers on its standard wholesale model, Apple is offering it to all publishers, large and small—which means that if a publisher takes Apple up on it, he will need to insist on agency pricing with Amazon, too, or else run afoul of the lowest-price clause.

And hovering over all these publishers’ heads like a sword of Damocles is Amazon’s ability to remove the “Buy” buttons from its site and deprive them of a substantial source of revenue. If Amazon were to pull this sort of thing again, the outcry would probably be considerable—but that didn’t stop Amazon from keeping Macmillan’s books unavailable by direct sale for a whole week.

There can be no doubt that we are living in interesting times.

By Chris Meadows

Here’s a blog post from Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher who made a title available on Amazon as a free e-book. He reported seeing the sales rate of the second and third books in its series increase at a rate of 20 to 1. He says that digital sales make up 1/5 of the total sales of this particular series so far, and are growing.

Henrion writes:

Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

Funny how publishers just keep discovering this anew, isn’t it?

Further discussion by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, and Nate the Great on his blog The Digital Reader (formerly Nate’s Ebook News).

By Paul Biba

Amazon is now asking for a 3 year “most favored nations” clause from publishers who use the agency model. In other words it doesn’t want any competitor to get lower prices or better terms than Amazon. This is reported in the NY Times which cites industry executives. To make matters worse, Apple, on the other hand, is requiring all publishers, not just ones who use the agency model, not to allow ebooks to be sold by any other retail outlet at lower than the iBookstore price.

This means that Apple is actually tougher than Amazon. Apple wants publishers to sell to all retailers at the Apple price or above, but Amazon is only asking that for price parity on those publishers adopting the agency model, and is evidently trying to limit the agency model to only a few of the big publishers. Thus Apple is controlling all publishers who enter its store, but Amazon is leaving 50%-60% of its content to its standard distribution terms which will still force Apple to compete with Amazon’t pricing.

All this, of course, is a perfectly normal type of thing in retail, but I bet the publishers are tearing their hair out. When the big guys went to the agency model I suspect they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Once you control the price, rather than let the retailer do it, you have all this type of stuff to contend with.

More info here.

By Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation

Originally posted at Kindle Nation Daily 3.17.2010

I’ve been a David Baldacci fan for over a decade, and I’ve easily read over half of the books he’s published since his stunning 1996 debut with Absolute Power. From everything I’ve heard he’s a decent guy — among other things, in addition to spinning a great yarn, he’s a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and he funds his own literacy foundation, the Wish You Well Foundation. I’d love to keep reading his books on my Kindle, and I probably will do so. Since I and many other Kindle Nation readers are conscious both of content and price, it is worth noting that his most recent bestseller, True Blue, is priced at $9.99 in the Kindle Store. There are, also, over a dozen Baldacci backlist titles in the $6 to $8 price range as well as a couple of children’s books and other titles that fall outside that range.

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By Chris Meadows

Amazon has released a Kindle Reader for Mac OS X desktop (Intel-based, running 10.5 and above). It can be downloaded here. According to the articles, it is pretty basic at the moment, but the press release states it will be adding additional features soon. Like the Windows version, the Mac Kindle Reader will download books from your Kindle library, and synchronize your place across all your Kindle platforms.

Like a number of other music vendors before it, Australian ISP BigPond is shutting down the DRM servers for the DRM-protected WMA files it used to sell (before switching entirely to MP3 in early 2009). It is advising customers to back up their music either by burning it to audio CD, or by copying the data files and keys to a backup storage device.

On The Digital Reader, Nate the Great reports that magazine database operator EBSCO has bought the NetLibrary e-book division from OCLC. NetLibrary has been shuffled around quite a bit over the last decade; at one point it owned eReader. EBSCO plans to integrate NetLibrary e-books into its EBSCOhost database, which already provides access to the full texts of various magazines and periodicals.

By Chris Meadows

A reader, Edward, posted this as a comment, and it seemed like a good question to pose as a “Does Anybody Know” column.

I am a specialist author of business books who self-publishes. I sell direct yet with 2 million copies sold in 20 languages I would say I am good at what I do.

I have not sold on Amazon.
I have not sold digitally.
I own my rights [except in some foreign languages.]

I am going to launch digitally through Amazon and through my own new webstore.

My target industry is very networked and the chances of people forwarding an ebook like mine is very likely. Thus I have not sold digitally thus far.

Yet my industry is not technically competent. So I am not too concerned about people ‘unlocking’ DRM individually UNLESS someone unlocks then forwards.

I think many people would have ethical reasons with forwarding if the titles had ‘do not forward as this is stealing…’

What are your views?
On my site, DRM or NOT?
Strong DRM or simple?

My own advice would be to forego the DRM. It just adds extra cost, and makes it harder for your customers to read your books on the platforms of their choosing. But you should listen to what others say and make up your own mind.

By Paul Biba

Received this email from Dave.

I saw a note on the Lexcycle forum that Stanza was no longer listed in iTunes US Store. I just checked and it is no longer available in the Canadian store. I also noticed in the forum a rare posting from one of Stanza’s creators stating that there is currently no plans to update the application for iPad. One has to wonder what Amazon is doing… It is definitely worrying.

Wow! I just checked the US App Store and the Kindle App is still there, but Stanza is gone.

By Chris Meadows

BusinessWeek reports on the current popularity of iPhone e-book apps, which now outstrip the number of game apps on the app store by over 1,600 titles.

The article mentions appbook creator Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media, who switched over from games to e-books back when there were only 700 book-related titles in the app store. Now his company sells three of the top-ten most-purchased appbooks in the Apple Store.

By and large, the piece mainly talks about appbooks, with a mention or two of other programs such as the Free Books app from Spreadhouse that provides access to over 23,000 public domain titles, the impending iBooks, or even the Kindle Reader app. This is not too surprising given that the vast majority of those book-related titles are appbooks; still, it is a little disappointing that eReader and Stanza do not rate a mention.

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By Chris Meadows

The Financial Times reports on the experience of University of Virginia students in the Darden School of Business, who were issued Kindle DXes as part of a pilot program to see whether they could successfully replace paper textbooks. (Note: The Financial Times has a paywall; if you cannot view the article, search “No substitute for a paper read” in Google News.)

It turns out that for most students, the answer is “no”: although most agree they make great personal reading devices, almost 3/4 of the 63 students participating in the project said they would not recommend the device to an incoming student for use in school work.

For reading fiction, they work well, but the lack of color and zooming options for PDFs mean that they can be problematic for reading textbooks. It is also much harder to take notes than with a pencil or computer.

However, the college’s professors say they are still working on converting their course materials to e-book formats, and feel that the iPad might correct some of the deficiencies the students noted in the Kindle DX.

By Chris Meadows

Another long-standing e-book holdout has finally given in. All 23 novels by popular suspense novelist John Grisham are now available in electronic form via Random House, only 14 months after the initial announcement.

On Amazon, new Grisham titles are $9.99, with older titles at $7.99 or less. Kobo (nee Shortcovers) sent an email alerting customers that it has Grisham books for about the same amount (and for two days using the coupon code “grisham” will get $1.50 off of any e-book purchase). They are also at Barnes & Noble, and presumably other places as well.

Who knows? Maybe someday J.K. Rowling will change her mind as well.

By Chris Meadows

Terry White has an article in Adobe how-to magazine Layers looking at how to export documents from InDesign into EPUB format for use with Adobe Reader or other e-book devices. I don’t have nor have I used InDesign so I can’t really say how good the instructions are.

However, the first half of the article talks about the rise of e-books and e-magazines, discussing the Kindle, the Kindle app for iPhone, and the Zinio e-magazine reader. White doesn’t really mention many of the other e-book options apart from these, but at least he does agree that the PDF format really isn’t best for reading e-books on portable devices.

He seems a little more optimistic about the efficacy of Adobe’s DRM than I would be, though.

By Chris Meadows

Jason Epstein, who was interviewed by NPR for the e-book pricing story we mentioned yesterday, also has a fairly lengthy editorial printed in the New York Review of Books this week in which he looks back to the birth of the printing press, and ahead to digitization’s replacement of its fruits.

(I discovered only after writing this piece that Paul also mentioned Epstein’s editorial back in February, even though it has a date of March 11th. Time travel? But my piece is much longer than Paul’s was, so I’m posting it anyway.)

In digitization, Epstein sees both a blessing and a curse. It will be possible for anyone to become a publisher, “and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping". Publishers will have “imprints” in this digital world, the way they have brand names in bookstores today.

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