Would Gary Price—the founding info-maven of ResourceShelf—buy The Case for Books in an electronic or paper edition?

TeleRead promised an answer, and directly from Gary himself, here it is. – D.R.

The winner? The e-book version, which I’ve been reading on Kindle for iPhone. A few of the reasons why:

1. In all of the last-minute stuff I needed to do before a trip, I didn’t have time to go to the bookstore.
2. I purchased the book the night before my trip. I could have even bought the book in the taxi on the way to the airport or while I waited to board at the gate.
3. Like it or not, Price. It was about one-half the cost of the print edition. By the way, some/all of the essays are likely available for free via New York Review of Books.
4. It seems I’m always losing things so this way I had nothing to lose (except my iPhone, which I would be taking with me anyway) and one fewer item to place in my already-overflowing carry-on bag.

Have I read any of the books on my actual Kindle device (1st gen) since I returned home? No, I continue with my iPhone.

I still have issues with low-light reading. An Amazon rep suggested I could buy a book light and attach it to the Kindle cover. Well, I have a book light and have attached it to the cover. It’s a mediocre experience at best.

Alas, Project Gutenberg and most other public domain sites aren’t optimized right now for devices with small screens and slow browsers.

And free Kindle download guides—with links to public domain books—are not as easy and convenient to use as they could be in my opinion (TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba offers his thoughts later in this post).

What’s more, free editions of more than a few public domain books are AWOL in the Kindle’s bookstore. To my surprise, I couldn’t dig up one for A Journey to the Center of the Earth, the Jules Verne classic.

The glories of FreeKindleBooks.org

Enter FreeKindleBooks.org.

It will take you to thousands of Kindle books organized by author. I don’t know the exact title count, but the site at least passes the Upton Sinclair Test, as I’ll call it: I could find 21 of his books such as a The Money Changers.

Jules Verne (right photo) showed up with 34 titles. including Journey.

59 Dickens works, 49 by Twain and 7 by Austen

Fifty-nine works by Dickens (left photo), 49 by Mark Twain and seven by Jane Austen (less prolific than the other two) appear on FreeKindleBooks.org. Simply put, for people who like major public domain authors, this is more than just a vexingly abbreviated collection.

On top of that, you can use the site’s “experimental” mode and locate books by PG number—apparently all of the catalogue. Just go to the real PG and search for the title and accompanying number, then return to FreeKindleBooks.org’s experimental mode to download the actual book. If a desktop or laptop is handy, that might be a faster way to look up the PG numbers.

FreeKindleBooks.org, granted, has flaws. For one thing, there’s a lot of verbiage at the top, rather than the lists of writers (leading to title lists). But just keep scrolling down and you’ll find the lists.

How Kindle owners can use the Web browser with FreeKindle.org

Don’t be scared if you’ve never used the Kindle’s Web browser before or don’t mess with it often.

From the Home menu, just hit the Menu key, scroll down to Experimental, press joystick-style button, then go to Basic Web Browser if you’re not there already, which you should be. Press the joystick button again.

If the enter-Web-address rectangle is cluttered with a previously made entry, hit Menu again and choose Enter URL, using the joystick. Type in FreeKindleBooks.org and hit the return button (under the DEL on your keyboard).

Other possibilities for free easy Kindle downloads…

• Mnybks.net: Unfortunately I found it harder to use for direct Kindle downloads than FreeKindlebooks.Net was.
• Feedbooks.com: Yet another. Use http://feedbooks.com/?format=mobile. Neither it nor Mnybks.net will give you as many selections as FreeKindleBooks.net will with the “experimental’ feature in use. But Feedbooks does offer some of the best-formatted books online.

…Plus a reminder that you can copy books directly from your desktop machine to the Kindle…if the desktop is handy

With the above methods, you don’t need to have a desktop machine handy.

But with a PC, Mac or Linux machine, you can use your Firefox or other browser and download a book directly to your Kindle’s solid-state storage via a USB connection.

The Kindle comes with a USB cable. Plug it in between your Kindle and your desktop. Then do the download from your desktop browser after specifying that you want the file copied to the e-reader (a Documents subfolder) rather than the desktop.

The e-reader might show up as something like Drive K. Whatever is a drive you normally don’t see!

If you use a laptop instead of a desktop, just substitute the word “laptop” for desktop.

Additional thoughts—from Paul Biba: He favors download guides over a FreeKindle.org approach

After this post appeared in its original form, Paul kindly shared his own thoughts:

“There are two Kindle catalogs that I, personally, find more convenient to use than the web browser method that David mentions above.  These are actual catalogs of the holdings of MobileRead and Feedbooks.  You download them to your Kindle, either by using the browser or by downloading them to your desktop and then adding them as a book, and then you can open them and use the search function of the Kindle to find what you want.

“Both catalogs are updated frequently, I think weekly, so you can re-download them whenever you want and keep up to date.  They are especially easy to update because both of them have links on their front page which will automatically fire up the Kindle browser and download the latest catalog to your Kindle.  The only thing you have to do, then, is to delete the old catalog as the new one does not overwrite it.

Needed: Easy downloads off the Gutenberg site

I would strongly urge Project Gutenberg to build a mobile site for Kindle-style machines, if that isn’t already planned—yes, more than just for the Kindle itself. PG seems to be moving in that direction. While cellphones are important, Gutenberg shouldn’t forget owners of Kindles and similar devices. Ideally the post I’m making now will soon be obsolete.

Granted, Sony and other vendors have Google Books ties, but PG is special because volunteers can choose which books to digitize (a plus that I wish Gutenberg would play up more often).

The ePub issue: I would vastly prefer that the existing FreeKindleBooks.org use the ePub standard. But meanwhile TeleRead will continue to serve the here-and-now needs of Kindle owners.

My discussion of The Money Changers: Here, on my Solomon Scandals site. Upton Sinclair’s expose of the financial industry is still terrifyingly timely.

(Updated 10:28 a.m. EST to include Paul’s thoughts.)

Apparently. Fron the Kindle Facebook page:

“Kindle Customers, We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year. – The Kindle Team.”

(Thanks to John Hagewood for the link)

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

Well, the secret is to use the Manage Your Kindle page. At the very least it can send a day’s worth of postings to the app—I don’t know about blog subscriptions on a permanent basis. You might also try this for newspaper and magazines, although there may be problems.

Within the “Manage” page, scroll down until you see the “Deliver to…” options for individual purchases. Go with “Transfer to computer.” When your browser comes up, you’ll probably be on a “downloads” page. Arrange for the file to be saved or sent to your Kindle for PC app.

I tried this with an old Washington Post edition and got an error message, either because this won’t work with the Post and other newspapers or because something had expired. That’s why I don’t know about magazines and newspapers.

The “Deliver to” tweak worked fine with a day of posts from the TeleRead blog subscription, however (except for some weird formatting).

Of course, you could read blogs directly for free with RSS feeds, but for those who prefer the paid subscription approach, maybe the above tip will help. Anything to modify or add?

Related tip—for people wanting to email book to their Kindles: If you’re having trouble getting your Kindle to pick up books mailed to it—including those to be converted from Word, PDF, TXT, etc.—don’t forget to specify your sending address within Manage Your Kindle. Cost per item is 15 cents.

Well, interactive books have finally come to the Kindle—except that these books are actually thirty years old. Amazon has begun selling Kindle editions of the venerable “Choose Your Own Adventure” series.

These are the books that those of us who are old enough remember where each page or multi-page section ended with a reader choice: if you take the left fork in the road, turn to page 8. If you take the right fork, turn to page 9. And so on.

Although they were not the first interactive stories, they were the best-known, and spawned many imitators (including a line from Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR).

With interactivity touted as “the future of e-books,” I find it amusing that the first major line of interactive e-books is actually just reprints of paper books that are three decades old.

Without doubt, Sony’s Steve Haber and Adobe’s Bill McCoy have been more sensible on DRM than Amazon, with more flexible approaches. I applaud their efforts. But we’re a long way from nirvana. Gang, what do you think of this snippet from Boing Boing?

I recently talked to Sony’s Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer’s respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won’t: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. … We’re obligated to have DRM but we don’t pull content back."

Um, as long as there’s DRM, Sony isn’t offering  genuine ownership of your “protected” books, a category that unfortunately includes most bestsellers. And remember, “Buy on any device, read on any device” is just a hope—and can really be achieved only without DRM or with social DRM (which could embed your name into an ePub file without destroying the ability for it to be read any ePub-capable machine). Operating systems and apps come and go. It is inherently impossible for the e-book industry to come up instantly with up-to-date, DRM-capable apps for every gizmo.

What’s more, genuine ownership means you can sell your books. Is Sony planning this?

The good news is that Adobe, Sony and B&N are hoping to provide compatible DRM approaches. That’s progress but still no substitute for lack of traditional DRM. It would also be nice to see Sony aggressively encourage publishers either to drop DRM or use social DRM, not just less restrictive forms of traditional DRM. Last I knew—this may be changing—Sony insisted that books in its store use DRM. I wonder what the more current policies of Sony and B&N will be.

With B&N, I’d call attention to the fact you can lend a book to a friend—with a 14-day period—only once as far as I know. Again, this is far from genuine ownership.

Meanwhile, in fairness to Amazon and its Kindle, let me note that you can use the K machine’s Web browser to download nonDRMed public domain books and even commercial books without “protection.”

Detail: I’m curious about Boing Boing’s mention of the Daily Edition as having a nine-inch display. Last I heard, Sony was saying the screen would be seven inches. Is Beschizza accurate here?

Related: How the New York Times was fooled? Sony’s misleading ePub-related news release, in TeleRead, and Seattle’s Bill McCoy, E-Books and Digital Distribution Expert, Leaving Adobe, in Xconomy.

… Once content is displayed on screen by a Windows app, it’s available to any standard screen-capture utility.

Now that Kindle for PC has been released, it’s only a matter of time — probably measured in weeks or at most a few months — before someone releases a “Kindle-ripping” app that “reads” a Kindle e-book using the Kindle for PC app, captures the pages from the screen as images, and saves them as a PDF (or text or HTML) file that can be read on any device. The absence of a Kindle for Linux app gives a compelling motive for Linux users to develop such an app, as the only way to read their legally purchased copies of Kindle Edition e-books on their Linux devices.

I anticipate, of course, the same disputes about the legality of these Kindle ripping apps as surrounded the first apps developed to play legally-purchased DVD’s on Linux computers.

The PC App is free, and people testing it are filling their PC hard drives with dozens of titles from among the 19,890 free book listings in the Kindle Store. Why wouldn’t they?

Of course, they can also use the Kindle for PC app to download thousands of other free books from several other third-party sources, thanks to a new "we play well with others" approach from Amazon. But the Kindle Store is still teeming with traffic from lovers of “free.”

On the Kindle Store’s list of bestselling books—the one that updates hourly and really reflects the comparative velocity of unit sales regardless of price over various recent chunks of time—77 of the top 100 titles were free at one point yesterday or were priced at one cent.

Seventy of the top 81 titles fit one of the free or near-free categories. The number of freebies in the top 100 often hovers around 50 per cent, but 77 per cent of the top 100 and 87 per cent of the top 81 amounted to dramatic new highs. The top 100 bestselling Kindle books included 28 free promotional titles, 47 free public domain titles, one title that was free until yesterday,  one title for a penny, and 23 titles for more than a penny.

Meanwhile, the relative sales rankings of the top-selling paid blogs and periodicals are plummeting, strictly in relative terms (and not, necessarily, in units sold). For instance, the Kindle edition of the Kindle Nation blog, the #1 bestselling paid blog among the 7,453 listed in the Kindle Store, has fallen to an overall multimedia sales ranking of 534 from the 250-to-450 range where it usually hangs out. This is also natural, since blogs and newspapers are not available from within the Kindle for PC App. That may make sense for newspapers, by the way, but why blogs?

None of this is bad for Amazon, the Kindle, the Kindle for PC App, or even for Kindle-available blogs such as Kindle Nation Daily or TeleRead.

There are over a billion PCs in use in the world, and perhaps somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.25 million Kindles. It’s natural to assume that, as word spreads about international (but not universal, right, Canada?) availability of a free Kindle app for the PC, there will be hundreds of thousands of new Kindle readers each day. And this is in addition to many existing Kindle owners who are trying out the additional device.

A natural thing to do, while test-driving the Kindle for PC App before investing much in a library for it, is to scarf up free books. Then, if people like it, they can think about spending actual folding money on a few Kindle books and, perhaps, they might even consider buying a Kindle if the combination of price point and portability work for them.

Anyway you slice it, it seems likely that the number of people reading Kindle content on any kind of device is going to have, at the very least, doubled from Tuesday morning November 10 to, say, December 31, 2009. Sometime between now and Thanksgiving the launch of the Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Blackberry, Kindle for Droid (am I getting ahead of myself) and other Apps will only add fuel to a well-kindled fire. Oops, there’s that word again.

If one out of every 100 PC owners tries the Kindle for PC App, that’s another 10 million people browsing around the Kindle Store. Sooner or later one of them is going to make an actual cash transaction, wouldn’t you think? So the Kindle for PC and all those free Kindle titles are loss leaders, except that since it is all virtual, there is no loss involved.

Let’s pretend your name is Jeff and you want to do a little magical thinking….

If one out of every 50 of those browsers decides to buy a Kindle, that’s 200,000 additional Kindles sold.

And if even half of this comes to pass, authors and publishers will be beating down the door to Kindle publication, and the folks at Barnes & Noble are going to have a new name for Jeffrey P. Bezos.

"Daddy."

Magical thinking?

Maybe not so much.

Editor’s note: Just a reminder that these are Steve’s personal views, adapted with permission from Kindle Nation.  Thanks, Steve! – D.R.

The article lists stuff from UMPCPortal, who is using a Gigabyte T1028M convertable, Late to the Party, using a Toshiba M200, AppScout, suing a Lenovo X200 (picture above) and a video of a Viliv X70.

I did on Comcast. Yes, Ondigo, the commercial was horrible but, mercifully, rather forgettable.

Interesting, isn’t it—how Amazon is advertising on the tube, after having focused so much on its Web site and word of mouth.

Hey, I’m not knocking the Kindle in this case, just the over-cute commercial. I found a commercial done on spec (left) to be far more interesting even if it may terrify more than a few Luddites.

What I want from Amazon for the holidays: ePub and more books with no DRM—or how about social DRM as a compromise? Time to be serious about educating publishers? Harlequin’s already getting religion.

The Kindle does for erotica what the paper bag does for a 40 of O.E.: provide a respectable cover. Kindle owners are free to download anything, regardless of what’s depicted on the cover, and read even the sexiest office romp in, well, the office, with no one the wiser. Although I must warn that if you share a Kindle account with your spouse, as I do, you may get an incriminating email receipt forwarded to you. The Internet, depending on your perspective, has been the best or worst thing to happen to porn since VHS. Given the appeal of anonymity and quantity of free content, the Kindle might do the same for soft core fiction.

So who typically buys dedicated e-readers right now? “…a 47-year-old married man with a college degree and an average household income of $116,000. About 30 percent of e-reader owners use them on business trips, while about 17 percent rely on e-readers during commutes. They read about 3.5 books each month, more than the average Internet user. About 83 percent consider themselves ‘technology optimists.’” The article is rich with other statistics even if we’ve seen a bunch of them before.

Post retail writer Ylan Q. Mui’s article is also notable for the concluding words: "Sony’s Haber argues that if it’s women you’re after, technology is man’s best friend. Pull out a book in a bar and you look lonely. But whip out a Sony Reader and watch the magic happen. "If you want to meet a girl," he says, "don’t get a dog, get a reader." Agree?

An aside: It’s nice to see a Post writer with a decent WordPress site (with help from a friend). I just hope that the Posties’ guidelines don’t inhibit her. They might. The site seems mostly a collection of repros of Post stories. Still, with the articles presented by topic and organized in a certain way, you at least can get a sense of where Ylan Mui is coming from.

Related: The best of today’s e-book readers, in PC World.

Image: CC-licensed photo by Ed Yourdon.

Go over to the nation and take a look at the full article.

Author Francis Hamit emailed me recently about a major frustration he recently ran into with Amazon. Although Amazon generally offers a terrific customer service experience, Francis’ story sheds light on the challenges faced by authors and other content providers. I asked him to write a guest post about his experience and here’s what he had to say:

I’ve pulled the Kindle edition of my novel “The Shenandoah Spy”. Although it was priced at six dollars less than the print version, it sold less than one percent as well as that edition. I saw a post from another author who said he was selling thousands of copies of the Kindle editions of his novels, but at a much lower price. I thought that perhaps if I dropped the price, sales would improve.

One of the problems with distributing your work on Kindle is that Amazon.com makes thousands of public domain classics available at 99 cents each. Forget about your contemporaries, you’re competing with Dickens and Trollope and the like, and they have the price advantage. If you have a print edition at $18.95, you don’t want to compete with yourself by going too low on the e-book edition. There is a previous serialized version of this novel, in 14 parts, still available on Amazon Shorts. I decided to lower the price to match at $6.99.
I also noticed that the text-to-speech version had been enabled. This is something that was not part of Kindle when I uploaded the file last year, and something that I have already said I will not permit in a letter to the ‘Los Angeles Times’ earlier this year. But without notice or permission, there it was. My concern again reached back to that “competing with myself” thing. I’m currently negotiating with another publisher for audiobook rights. If there is a text–to-speech feature enabled for the Kindle version, then that will have a negative impact on the sales of an audiobook version that sells between thirty and fifty dollars a copy. And the Kindle sales to date have been, well, pathetic. Less than one copy per month.

But it’s not the reality but the perception that cheapens your brand in the marketplace. Amazon plays power games with vendors like myself. They induced about 400 authors to participate in the Amazon Shorts program and failed to promote the site even within their own pages. (A search for that term will more likely produce links to underwear.) They created quite an uproar over print-on-demand books, threatening to not distribute any that were not bought from their in-house provider. That left me with interesting choices: create separate editions for Ingram and Amazon with different ISBN numbers or lose significant parts of our distribution. Or, as we ultimately did, get a smaller distributor like Pathway Book Service to provide the book to all comers. That meant an offset print run and greater total cost, but more margin per unit.

When I objected to the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle edition I got this in reply:

Hello from Amazon DTP.

I see that you’ve entered the new price for your book, however, it is not updated on our website, as your book was not re-published after changing the price. Please note that your new changes will not be updated on our website, until it is saved and published again. Also, note that whenever any book is published / re-published with new changes, it has to go through the review process by our kindle operations team, it takes up to 5 business days for the review to be completed.

Please note that at this time we are not supporting the feature to manage Text-to-Speech (TTS) settings through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), by default all the books are published with TTS enabled, we are unable to turn it off. We will continue to evaluate options for adding this to DTP customers in the future. If you still have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at dtp-feedback@amazon.com.

Thanks for using Amazon DTP.

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please send us a new e-mail.

Best regards,
Padmanaban Guruswamy
http://www.amazon.com
That’s a document simply amazing in its arrogance. It makes the simple act of changing a price a bureaucratic nightmare. Uploading the original DTP file took three days, and I won’t say we ever got it right because the interior map that is a feature of the print edition could not be included.

That they will not even try to write a line of computer code that could disable the text-to-speech function is simply another example of their disregard for authors’ rights. But, when I asked, they did take the file down, which relieves me of the burden of filing a lawsuit. Copyright reserves the right to control distribution to creators. If you are distributing a Kindle edition of your own original work, it’s a good thing to keep in mind. It’s yours, not theirs.

Amazon.com did send offers to do that file conversion for me, for the amazingly low fee of $99.00 marked down from $299.00. I was not persuaded that this would be a good investment. And while Kindle only produced about one percent of our sales to date, Amazon.com is responsible for less than ten percent of our total sales. Surprised? I was.

I can’t fault their advertising either. They do try hard with all of their book titles, create author blogs, and so on, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the book itself since I have more than a dozen favorable reviews including those five star ones on Amazon.com. (Click here to read them.)

The brick and mortar space still generates more book sales than any other channel. We have the good fortune to have done 16 book signings with the Hastings Entertainment chain, which does stock “The Shenandoah Spy” on the shelves of its 152 stores. We’ve been very aggressive about promotion, and we are following a “slow and steady” marketing plan to build word of mouth because it is the first of five books in a planned series.

I’ve been publishing e-books, mostly recycled trade magazine articles, since 2004. I have to say that this is not the financial bonanza that everyone thought it would be. Although available in multiple channels, these titles are very low demand and produce only a trickle of revenues.
That’s true of the fiction as well as the non-fiction.

We continue to experiment with e-book publishing, but it’s no longer a priority, and any future Kindle offerings will be through Smashwords.com.