Too Little, Too Late

The iPad isn't even available yet but I've already decided it's time to ditch my Kindle and switch to the Apple platform. Why? In short, I'm disgusted with Amazon's glacial pace of Kindle innovation. The device's functionality is pretty much the same as it was when it launched more than 2 years ago.

Anytime I've suggested Amazon open their platform up to third-party developers, just like Apple's done with the iPhone App Store, most folks questioned the idea. They asked what kind of cool apps could really be developed for an ereader. These are probably the same people who figured all a cell phone needs to do is make and answer calls.

Amazon recently announced their upcoming Kindle Development Kit "for active content." It's about time. Seriously, why did they wait this long? The timing came across as a desperate attempt to divert attention from Apple's iPad announcement.

Regarding the question of what sort of apps could be build for the Kindle, check out this post by Jared Newman entitled 8 Amazon Kindle Apps We Hope to See. (FWIW, I've been pleading for Twitter integration on the Kindle for a long, long time...)

Although Jared offers some great ideas, I've totally lost what little Kindle enthusiasm I still had. Call it iPad envy. As a result, I'm ready to wind down Kindleville. To be honest, I haven't invested much time in it for the past year anyway. Paul Higginbotham has done a nice job keeping Kindleville afloat. If you'd like to join Paul to keep Kindleville around, just let me know. Otherwise, keep an eye out for what I hope to do next on the iPad platform...

Here comes another one

How many "Kindle-killers" have been announced or released in the past two years? I've lost count. Yet despite the flood of killers on the market, the Kindle is still doing quite well, thank you. As you've no doubt heard, Amazon announced that for the first time ever, Kindle book sales surpassed physical book sales on Christmas sales.

Of course the rallying cry of Kindle scoffers has been "B-B-B-But just wait until Apple comes out with an e-book reader!"

It would appear that very day is near. January 26, to be precise. That is the date that Apple has (allegedly) reserved at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where they will (allegedly) introduce the long-anticipated iSlate(tm), the mega-super-mondo-all-in-one tablet device. The rumored feature list grows everyday, and includes everything from gesture-based page turning to video playback to mammography screening.

One thing that everyone is certain about, however, is that it spells doom for the Kindle.*

In a recent blog post -- re-published by the Huffington Post -- tech blogger J.S. McDougall gushes over the possibilities.

I'm not going to reveal any names, but I have it on very good authority, for example, that--unlike the Kindle--the new Apple tablet will, indeed, have a color screen. Might it also ... play video?! (Please pardon the sarcasm.)

It's amusing to consider the evolving criticism of the Kindle. First it was "It will never replace the physical book!" Now with Apple's digital marvel on the way, the Kindle criticism has turned into "The Kindle is too much like a real book! All it does is display text!"

"Digital books should include author interviews, instructional videos, pop-up definitions of esoteric terms, instant foreign translations, optional soundtracks, links to helpful web sites, and anything else publishers and authors can dream up to increase the value and effectiveness of their content," asserts McDougall.

Really? Do we want our books to do all that? In an age when we're constantly surrounded and bombarded by audio/video stimulus, don't we just want to sit down and relish the written word on a plain page occasionally? One of the great things about the Kindle is that it does not get between the reader and author. As Stephen King pointed out back in 2008, after a while the device simply becomes invisible, allowing the reader to become fully absorbed in the story. Also, the Kindle offers no distractions to get in the way of reading (Sure there's a web browser, but it's so bad we're never tempted to actually stop reading and use it.). I see that as a positive.

Aside from that, the Kindle's two biggest strengths are e-ink and wireless access to Amazon's vast selection of e-books -- neither of which the iSlate will have (allegedly).

So why might Apple's Kindle-killer succeed? The same reason the iPod became the number one MP3 player despite that fact that it was neither the first nor the best of its kind: it's made by Apple. Say what you want about Apple products, but the brand carries a hipness and smugness that outweigh any consideration of features and price.

There's no doubt the iSlate will sell big, regardless of what features it does or doesn't have. That's the power of Apple marketing (warning: contains some NSFW language). But after the strongest holiday season ever for the Kindle, and with Amazon's on-demand e-book selection growing every day, is the Kindle really in danger of losing its core audience of people who just like to read? After all, despite what Steve Jobs has said, there are obviously still quite of a few of us around.

A Christmas gift from The Book View Cafe

 

Sue Lange, one of the authors from The Book View Cafe, is offering one of her stories for free for your holiday reading pleasure.  Head over to BVC to download a free copy of "Jump" from Lange's sci-fi satire short story collection Uncategorized.  It's only available for a limited time so grab it soon.

You can get the whole collection of stories for $1.99 via the BVC. It's good, bawdy sci-fi fun from start to finish.  If you like your science-fiction with a little cheek (or a lot, even), you'll dig Uncategorized. 

Book View Cafe embraces the Kindle

When you read a lot of news about the Kindle it's easy to get discouraged about the attitudes of publishers and authors, some of which are finding themselves being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Ebook is a four-letter word to many in the business, and digital distribution is seen as the road to piracy and bankruptcy.

Fortunately there are those who "get it" -- who see the benefits of delivering their books via ones and zeros as opposed to pulp and ink. One such group is The Book View Cafe. Part online publisher, part bookstore, the BVC consists of a group of best-selling authors who assembled in 2008 with the goal of building a web site to deliver their works digitally directly to their readers.

Recently they announced a new project called Book View Press, which will consist of works written and edited by BVC members and distributed not only via the BVC but also via the Kindle and Sony eReader stores. Their first offering, Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls, is a sci-fi anthology from thirteen authors.

Kindleville recently chatted with Sarah Zettel, the Project Manager for Book View Cafe, about eBook publishing and their new support for the Kindle.

Kindleville: For most readers e-books are still a relatively new phenomenon, but it looks like you saw the shift coming a couple of years ago. What made you want to move toward e-publishing?

Sarah Zettel: Sheer practicality. Publishers, no matter how good, can only keep so many books in print, and bookstores, even the huge chain, can only stock so many on the shelves. Ebooks allow an author to keep their books in print and available for their readers, and to constantly attract new readers.

Did you see e-books as the future of publishing, or were you just dissatisfied with traditional publishing?

I've been around long enough to have seen several waves of attempts at ebooks, and ebook readers, and each time I've said to myself, «when the hardware is finally truly workable, this will take off.» Then, along came the Kindle, and I said, «Okay, now.»

What was the initial response from readers when you first launched BVC?

We have had very good response from readers and the media right from the beginning and have experienced a gratifying steady growth in user traffic and sales since we opened our virtual doors.

Has reader reaction changed over the years?

Where we've witnessed the biggest change has been mostly within the writing and publishing community. We were met with a great deal of skepticism when we first started out. With the continuing growth in the e-book market, that skepticism has started to turn around.

Book prices at BVC are quite low. Was it a conscious decision to keep prices down or just a benefit of e-publishing and skipping the middle man?

It was a conscious decision. As a cooperative organization without outside investors we need to keep happy, we have the luxury of being able to be somewhat experimental in our pricing.

Some major publishers have said publicly that they disagree that e-books should by definition be cheaper than physical books. What is your opinion on that?

From what I have seen, it is cheaper and easier to produce and distribute a good e-book than it is to produce a good paper book. They are also a more disposible product than, say, a hardback book. All this says to me in makes sense to price them lower.

Some feel that publishers are destined to repeat the failures of the recording and motion picture industries by fighting digital content rather than embracing it. Do you agree?

It's very possible. But I also think that money talks very loudly in these cases, and the data show that the market for e-books is growing by leaps and bounds, especially with the development of the new generation of personal reading devices like the Kindle.

Why do you think so many publishers fear e-books?

Traditional publishers have a multi-billion dollar investment in the production and distribution of paper books. They operate within a system that has been refined for at least the last 100 years. Frankly, it would be surprising if they weren't resistant to change.

You have quite a wide variety of genres represented at BVC. How do you choose your authors?

We need a wide variety of books because we hope to appeal to the full diversity of the reading public. Our authors must all be professionals, that is, they must have at least one book published with a traditional advance-and-royalty paying publisher. Other than that, they have to have the time to volunteer to help with the work of BVC. We operate on what might best be described as a shoestring, so everyone has to pitch in.

How has your experience dealing with Amazon been?

From the beginning, Amazon has proved to be expert at designing infrastructures to get books into the hands of readers. The Kindle support infrastructure is as seamless and easy to use as the system for ordering paper books

How could Amazon improve the Kindle experience, either for readers, authors or publishers?

Zettel: For authors and publishers, I'd say perhaps some additional support could be available for formatting books for the Kindle. For readers, I'd like it to be a little easier to browse new titles and authors, For readers, I'd like it to be a little easier to browse new titles and authors, beyond the «you might like» and «also bought» options.

Francis Hamit: An Author's Point of View

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.

Coming Soon to Your PC: Kindle Books

First there was the Kindle iPhone app and now Amazon is further hedging their hardware bet with this announcement about the future ability to read Kindle books on your Windows PC. No word on Mac support, btw.

The most important point in this announcement is captured by these three words: "No Kindle required." You probably won't want to read on your laptop for hours at a time, but a netbook/tablet device becomes a more viable option, even with a backlit display.

Just as printed books will never go away I can see where dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, Sony Reader, iRex, etc., could be around for quite awhile. And while they'll offer a reading experience that's easy on the eyes, I've said it before and I'll say it again: More and more reading will take place on multi-function devices, not one-trick ponies like the Kindle.

Amazon obviously realizes that too and is taking the initial steps to ensure they remain relevant as an e-content provider on other platforms.

The Asus Eee-Reader: I Don't Get It

Have you seen the leaked photos of the upcoming Asus Eee-Reader? If you missed it, here's a short article on CNET with a picture. OK, I get the lower price. Sure, that's something the market is clamoring for as the Kindles, Sony Readers, etc., are destined to be nothing more than nichey luxuries as long as they're $300+.

But what's with the 2-panel hinged display? Why take a relic of the print book and force it into an e-reader? Think about it. There's not a single time in the past year where I've said, "gee, I really wish this Kindle had a second display that hinged onto this one." Never.

Why? First of all, I can only read one screen at a time. OK, things get more interesting when you can have full color with hi-res so that images pop. Um, that's not the current state of the Kindle (or Sony) technology though, is it? So a second screen is just there, waiting for me to get to it. Oh, and btw, it costs more to make. And since this new device won't be using eInk display technologies, it's basically a pair of LCD screens that suck more juice from the battery. What's there to like?

They talk about using the second screen as a virtual keyboard. Anyone who owns an iPhone will tell you the thing they like least about it is the virtual keyboard. Heck, even the chicklet Kindle keyboard is better than a virtual one. (Wow, did I just say the Kindle has an interface feature that's better than the iPhone's?! That's the only one, btw.)

The article goes on to talk about how the device will have speakers, a webcam and a microphone built in. Sounds great, but isn't this starting to smell a lot like a netbook? Asus has been in the netbook space for a few years now and they're just tweaking their product a bit and calling it an e-reader.

I'd rather just have a netbook. And if there's one thing I've learned in 2009 it's that the dedicated e-reader doesn't have much of a future. Sure, they'll still be around in a few years but the real action will be with the multi-purpose devices like mobile phones and tablets.