Ebook Pricing

It seems everyone has an opinion about the high price of the Kindle itself but there's not a lot of discussion about ebook prices. Perhaps once you choke down $400 for the device just about any book price seems OK.

I came across this insightful post about pricing on the Digitalist blog. The simple fact is that most consumers are likely to balk at an ebook price that's the same or very close to the price of the same book in print. Publishers and authors certainly want to protect the value of their intellectual property but consumers will immediately point out that the cost of goods has essentially disappeared with an ebook.

What to do? If you're a publisher you need to think about what other features and services you can add to that ebook. Perhaps Amazon will serve as a vendor for add-on services for the Kindle down the road. If not, maybe the publishers or some other enterprising organization will be there to fill the void.

As Sara Lloyd notes in that Digitalist post:

I think there’s a very real risk that publishers price themselves out of the market altogether, allowing new, tech-savvy companies to move into the content delivery space, develop a pricing model that appeals to consumers, develop direct relationships with authors on the one hand and consumers on the other, and wipe the floor with all the traditional players.

Sounds an awful lot like The Innovator's Dilemma to me...

What Did the Kindle Prototype Look Like?...

Everybody has an opinion about the Kindle's physical design. Granted, it's far from anything Apple would produce, but I tend to think Amazon did a fantastic job, particularly when you consider the original Kindle prototype. Click here to see a picture of what the Amazon engineers originally had in mind...

Kindle Printing

The Kindle News blog raises a good question in this post. In short, why is printing content from a Kindle such a clumsy process? My guess is this has to do with content protection and a limited feature set in Kindle Version 1.0.

On the content protection side, perhaps Amazon didn't want to scare off publishers and authors by making the content so easily reproducible. Then again, in this day and age, it's hard to imagine a laser printer being that big a threat. Regardless, I'd like to think this is something Amazon will make more customer friendly down the road.

Speaking of which, they had to draw the line somewhere for this first product. Like any other new gadget, there was probably a lengthy list of additional features they just couldn't get to or couldn't afford to incorporate in the first generation Kindle. Wouldn't it be nice one day though if a future version would let you plug your printer's USB cable into the Kindle's USB port so you can print directly from the Kindle, without the need for a computer in between? (Btw, be careful what you wish for as this would add another layer of complexity to the Kindle: Amazon would have to make sure all the zillions of printer drivers out there will work with their product.)

Is Kindle Losing Momentum to Sony Reader?

Google Trends is one of my favorite tools. It lets you compare phrases to see which one is being searched most frequently in Google.

I got curious earlier today and decided to compare "amazon kindle" with "sony reader." I expected to see a major spike last November in the former and a flat line for the latter. Here's a link to the results. What do you notice?

There's definitely a spike for the Kindle and it's interesting to see how Sony benefited from that surge as well. But what's most interesting to me is how the Kindle's rate has dropped so significantly in such a short period of time and now the Sony line sits above it. Granted, the gap between the two has narrowed in the past few weeks, but still... With all the sizzle and visibility the Kindle has garnered, I was very surprised to see Sony ahead on searches.

I've got to believe the out-of-stock situation is what's killing the blue line in this graph. People are getting more impatient and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some are going with Sony instead. As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression, so I hope Amazon can fix this inventory situation soon; it's hard to imagine they'll get as much buzz down the road and this graph makes it appear that they're squandering the current opportunity.

Bethanne Patrick Likes Her New Kindle

My favorite blogger at Publishers Weekly, Bethanne Patrick, talks about her initial reaction to her Kindle in this post. The bottom line: She likes what she sees. The reading experience is very pleasant and the Whispernet service is extremely convenient and reliable. Sure, the device itself looks like something from the ColecoVision era, but hey, it does what it needs to do...which got me to thinking...

I'm about as far as you can get from being an Apple/Mac fan. I admire Apple's product line and I tip my hat to their design prowess, but I don't buy a gadget to look at it. I buy it for what it does, not for what it looks like. I have the cheapest MP3 player on the planet but it sounds every bit as good as any other high-end device I've ever listened to; plus, it's expandable via an SD card slot and is tiny enough to fit very comfortably in my shirt pocket. What more could I ask for?

So when it comes to an e-book reader, I guess I don't care so much what it looks like as long as it makes it easy to obtain and read content. Period. I don't care if Kindle 2.0, 3.0 and beyond all look just like Kindle 1.0, but I sure hope the price comes down and the feature set expands in future versions.

Polymer Vision's Readius

Add another player to the e-book device market. Polymer Vision recently announced their new Readius product, a combination cellphone and e-book reader. Wired's Gadget Lab blog was less than complementary in their initial assessment.

The big question for me has to do with service and title availability/access. Amazon appears to be setting the standard with their approach. Granted, the title list remains small and is only a tiny percentage of Amazon's print inventory, but it's highly likely to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming months. The Readius offers an interesting form factor but it all comes down to breadth and depth of content as far as I'm concerned.

Then again, if Amazon were to ever open their model up to support third-party readers, well, the Readius might be an interesting alternative to the Kindle...

What About Books with CDs?

That's the question P. Reitz asks here on the Kindle Forum. It's a problem we publishers have been trying to deal with in the print-on-demand (POD) world as well. Plenty of books in the print world have an accompanying CD. That CD might have videos, content snippets or other ancillary materials; the CD content is usually a pretty important element of the entire book/CD package. So what do you do in the POD or Kindle world?

Unfortunately I don't think anyone has come up with the perfect answer to this question. Ideally a publisher could create a website that's nothing more than a server hosting all the companion CD content for all the books they've published. Buy the POD/Kindle edition and go to the site to download the CD materials. Pretty simple, right?

Two challenges exist with this solution. First of all, you have the customer authentication step. The publisher probably only wants to allow paying customers to access the companion CD content. We've used random questions like "what's the 5th word on page 153" to authenticate customers in situations like this but it's far from foolproof (although probably "good enough" for this use).

The bigger challenge is licensing rights. Most publishers don't own the content they distribute on CDs; they license it from the content owners. The distribution agreements most publishers have signed with these third-party content owners typically only include redistribution rights for CD distribution. They don't include the rights to distribute the materials online. The thought of going back and getting all new agreements signed to allow publishers online distribution rights isn't too appealing. It's a time-consuming effort and likely to result in something less than a 100% success rate.

So, before you buy that next Kindle or POD edition of a book, be sure to check and see whether the print edition includes a CD and if you'll have access to those materials with your Kindle/POD edition.