New Magazines...But Have You Heard of Them?!

Amazon is up to a whopping total of 20 magazines for the Kindle. 20. The device is more than a year old...all those magazines you see on newsstands and we can only get 20 of them for our Kindle?!

Here's a blog post about the two recent additions to the list. Have you ever heard of either of these? I haven't, and apparently neither have most people...despite their newness to the device, they're currently sitting in last and next-to-last place on the Kindle magazine list. Did I mention they're both priced higher than any of the Kindle edition magazines that typically sit in the top 5 slots (Newsweek, Reader's Digest, Time, MIT's Technology Review and The Atlantic)?

Will we ever see more of the mainstream, highly popular magazines in this service? I let my print BusinessWeek subscription expire with the hope that it would soon appear on the Kindle. I'm starting to lose hope. I just got a subscription offer for 25% less than the earlier offers BusinessWeek had been sending me...maybe it's time to swallow my pride, cough up the $30 and read it on dead trees again. Bummer.

Spanish Titles on the Kindle

I just noticed that the Spanish translation of William Young's wildly successful The Shack is currently #6 on the Kindle books list. #6! The title is La Cabana and sits ahead of blockbusters like American Lion, The Audacity of Hope and even the English language edition of The Shack itself, which is #7 on the same list.

I tend to think of the Kindle as an English-only success story but clearly there are quite a few people out there who prefer to read books in Spanish. This is the first Spanish title I've seen for the Kindle. Given how well it's selling I wonder how long it will take for Amazon to make translations of other bestsellers available...

"The Kindle is DRM Agnostic"?

That's what Jeff Bezos supposedly said, according to this Medialoper post. This, from the CEO of the company who has built a pretty solid DRM (digital rights management) fortress around the Kindle...at least for Kindle content you buy from Amazon. The post goes on to say that, "publishers have the option of selling DRM-free eBooks for the Kindle and that he (Bezos) believes publishers might do just that once they become comfortable with the idea of digital content distribution."

Every Kindle product you buy off Amazon's site today comes tightly wrapped in DRM. I wonder how many people realize you can get DRM-free content for the Kindle from a variety of non-Amazon sources, including some well-known publishers. For example, my employer, O'Reilly Media, Inc., has been selling DRM-free ebook bundles since earlier this year. These bundles allow you to get all the popular formats in one transaction, at one very reasonable price. You say you'd like to buy the PDF version of a book but would also like to have one that looks nice on your Kindle? No problem, and we throw in EPUB format for good measure (at no additional charge). Good luck getting all those options from Amazon.

So if Bezos really feels Amazon should be more open and customer-friendly, why not offer the same model we do at O'Reilly? Wouldn't it be great if the next time you bought a title for your Kindle it also included the PDF and EPUB versions, all without DRM? Let's take it up a notch... The next time you buy a print book from Amazon, why shouldn't that purchase include DRM versions of all these e-formats as well?...

I hope Bezos realizes there are a number of publishers out there like O'Reilly who are already quite comfortable with the idea of digital content distribution. Now we need to eliminate DRM and come up with new, interesting distribution and pricing models to helps expand our industry, not sit around complaining about how the old model is drying up.

Why I'm Cancelling My Kindle Time Magazine Subscription

It only costs me $1.49/month but it bugs me. I'm talking about the Time magazine subscription for my Kindle. I eagerly signed up for it several months ago because I used to have a print subscription and let it lapse. I always enjoyed reading Time but decided it wasn't crucial. But for $1.49/month I figured how could I go wrong?

It's not how I've gone wrong, but rather how Time has gone wrong. Their presentation of the content on the Kindle is embarrassingly poor. Going into it I knew there would be some print content that wouldn't make it into the Kindle edition and I was OK with that. What I wasn't expecting was the awful formatting and complete lack of personality that seems to come through in the Kindle version. It's like trying to read a bad RSS feed. I'm talking about awkward line wraps, figure/image callouts that appear in the wrong place and disrupt the reading experience, etc.

I tried to overlook this at first but I've gotten so tired of it that I haven't even bothered to open the last 4 or 5 issues. I found myself wondering why I should pay anything for something I'm not using and I don't enjoy reading.

This is an important lesson for all magazine publishers considering the Kindle. I want to encourage more Kindle magazine options but please, please, don't force it. Make sure your content ports well to the Kindle format.

Now I'm off to Amazon's site to once again figure out how to cancel a subscription. Could they make it any harder?!

More Thoughts on Audible on the Kindle

I got through my first Audible book on the Kindle and overall it was a decent experience. It's nice to be able to switch to an audio book when your eyes are tired at the end of the day. And while I was pleasantly surprised by the various controls the Kindle offers for Audible books, they need to take it a step further.

Being able to go forward/backward by 30 seconds or hop to the next/previous section simply isn't enough. The controls need to let you go anywhere in the recording. Anywhere.

This problem was exacerbated by the Kindle's often delayed display for the roller wheel. Have you run into that before? You go to the home screen, select a title and press the wheel in, but the display was actually still being updated and it opens the wrong item. This situation is a bummer with standard content but it's a major hassle with an Audible title. I had stopped in the middle of a section, thought I was pressing "Play" but it turned out the screen was refreshing so what I actually pressed was "Next Section". Argh. I spent the next 5 minutes pressing "Back 30 seconds" till I found my place.

Amazon, please fix this via a software update!

One Author's (Beta) Novel Experience on the Kindle

Thanks to Kindleville reader Francis H. for passing this one along to me. It's one author's story of using the Kindle as a beta book platform and the lessons he learned along the way.

I especially liked the point he made about the lack of customer feedback on the book's product page. It makes you wonder if Amazon should try do do a better job allowing (and encouraging) customer comments within the Kindle book interface itself. How about a "Post comment" option from the main menu within a book? Even if the Whispernet switch is turned off the device could hold your comment and push it to Amazon as soon as you reconnect. That might encourage more customer feedback...

A Full Color Book on the Kindle?

I was surprised to see a book like Scott Kelby's The Digital Photography Book, Volume I ranked so highly on the latest Kindle bestseller list (#76 for all products). Kelby's got a fantastic brand name in this space and his print books always do exceptionally well, but what kind of user experience can you expect for a full color book on the black-and-white Kindle, particularly since the book is loaded with lots of rich color photos?

I got curious and downloaded the free sample. Unfortunately, I still have no idea what the user experience is like. The sample showed up but it ended before I even got through the table of contents -- what good is that?! Seriously, Amazon, you guys need to rethink the whole sample process. Don't just take the first x% or x% of the book...give us something meaty that makes us comfortable forking over our ten bucks for the whole book.

I still can't see how customers would be as happy with the Kindle edition of this book as they'd be for the print version. The former is only $2 less than the latter and there's no way the black-and-white rendering of all those color photos brings the usability anywhere near the level of the print book.