Why Can't I Subscribe to an Author?

What do you do when you discover a new author but you've read every book they've written?  You probably go to their website.  Maybe you subscribe to the site's RSS feed.  Perhaps they're a columnist, so you subscribe to the magazine or newspaper they write for (or maybe you just read that content for free online or you grab it's RSS feed).  If they're into Twitter you probably follow their tweet stream too.

The good news is there are quite a few options besides books if you want to keep up with what your favorite author has to say.  The bad news, IMHO, is there's no single service tying all this together.  I subscribe to way too many RSS feeds, so the result is I don't read many of them at all.  I've also been cutting back on magazine subscriptions, so I'm losing that option as well.  And even though I use TweetDeck to help split up the various groups of people I'm following (e.g., colleagues, publishing industry people, sports figures, etc.), I never find myself going from one tool to the next for a particular author.

Here's what I'm talking about: I used to subscribe to The New York Times on my Kindle.  I did so, not because it was my news source, but because I enjoyed getting the latest articles from my favorite columnists including Thomas Friedman.  When I dumped the subscription I realized I wasn't subscribing to The New York Times; I was subscribing to Thomas Friedman (and a few other columnists).  Steve Rushin is another example.  Steve stopped writing for Sports Illustrated years ago but he's active on Twitter.  I follow him there and I even have "Steve Rushin" set up as a constant search on Google News.  (Yes, I'm that big of a fan!)  So I have to check in on Twitter every so often and then look in my Google News tab to see if there's anything recent from him.  What a waste of time and effort.

Why not just have an author feed subscription via the Kindle?  Yes, Amazon sells blog feed subscriptions, but that's a ripoff and I'm looking for more.  I don't want something I can get via an RSS reader for free.  I want a combined feed of the author's blog, their Twitter activity and any publication/website they write for.  All in one.  I'd be willing to pay a modest amount for this ($10/year?), at least for the 4 or 5 authors I care most about.  And heck, go ahead and include some advertisements in it if necessary.

This is all about the convenience of having everything from one author in one source, automatically pushed to my Kindle (via WiFi) on a regular basis.  It seems like an opportunity for Amazon to extend the Kindle's functionality as well as a terrific way for authors to engage with their readers.  On top of all that, it's a great way for authors to let their fans know when their next book is coming, perhaps give them a preview or even a loyalty discount.

How Amazon Could Improve Discoverability

Discoverability is one of the biggest issues facing e-retailers.  How do the right customers know when a new product they might be interested in has arrived?  Amazon knows I buy a lot of books on sports and WWII.  Although I get emails from them every day I don't think they're doing enough to help me keep up with the latest products I might want to buy.

Here's an idea: Why not let me opt in to a service that automatically sends me samples of new books in my favorite topic areas?  I'm not talking about emails with covers and links back to catalog pages.  I'm saying they should deliver those product samples right to my Kindle.

Give me a checklist to fill out.  I'd like samples from all the new titles about baseball, hockey, Roosevelt, D-Day, etc.  Go ahead and send them my way.  My Kindle has plenty of memory and I'll delete the ones I'm not interested in.  Let's not limit this just to topics though.  I've got some favorite authors as well.  Let me sign up to automatically receive samples from all of them too.

Yes, this could lead to a very cluttered Kindle home screen.  That's why Amazon should also create a "Samples" folder with subfolders for each of the topics/authors I'm subscribing to.  Alert me when new samples have arrived...again, not via email to a device I'm not reading on but rather send a message to my Kindle so I can see a summary of what's just come in.

Some customers won't see the benefit of this.  I'm not one of them.  I would greatly appreciate this sort of service.  It would save me from manually going through each topic area every so often to see if I've missed anything.  It forces Amazon to push more content to customers but I'm sure they'll benefit from the additional sales the samples will generate.

Delivereads, eReaderIQ & Amazon's "Sunshine Deals"

Today's post is all about content discovery and great deals.  First up is Delivereads.  This is a simple email service that provides you with short-form content you might not have discovered otherwise.  It's all free, of course, and the content is delivered directly to your Kindle.  Emails come when Delivereads founder Dave Pell feels like sending them, but I generally find at least one piece that's worth reading in each collection.

Next, if you're not familiar with eReaderIQ I recommend you give it a try as well.  Rather than scouring Amazon's site to see what's free or inexpensive today, the folks at eReaderIQ gather all that info for you.  Like Delivereads, eReaderIQ is also a free service and you can expect to receive an email from them every day.

Speaking of great values, have you heard about Amazon's new "Sunshine Deals" program?  It's a deep mark-down of more than 600 older ebooks in the Kindle catalog.  Prices are either 99 cents, $1.99 or $2.99.  Several publishers are featured and I scanned all of the 650 titles the other night.  I was prepared to buy quite a few books, saving a ton along the way, but I only wound up buying 3.  That's right.  I looked at 650 titles and only found 3 worth spending no more than $2.99 on.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I did.  Be sure to review the list soon though as the campaign ends at midnight on June 15th.

Sharing Within Your Kindle Account

Both Amazon and B&N have long offered lame solutions for the ebook sharing problem.  Why limit the share period and why only allow it once in the life of the book?  Ebooks should be more powerful than print books but here's a great example of how the market leaders are trying to make them less powerful.

I don't see the situation changing anytime soon but I wanted to mention a partial solution that works well for me: sharing within my Kindle account.  Our family now owns three Kindles.  Every time I buy a new one I just add it to my original Kindle account.  Now all three of the Kindles have access to the same common library.  There's no reason for us to buy any ebook more than once.

Until recently I assumed pretty much every Kindle owner was aware of this option.  I've mentioned it to at least three others in the past couple of weeks though and none of them had considered it before.  That's why I'm sharing it here.

Obviously this in-account sharing doesn't address the larger problem of being able to share with all your friends but at least you can share within your family (assuming you're all configured to use the same account).  And yes, Whispersync complicates things when two or more are reading one book at the same time.  That's why I always bookmark my last location before I close a book!

Why Isn't Twitter Connected to Amazon's "Look Inside" Feature?

One of my complaints with the first-gen Kindle was that there was no way to quickly tweet book excerpts.  The new Kindle lets you tweet as you read, of course, but it's a cumbersome process.  How many key combinations does it take to send a single tweet?!

Process aside, I'm very disappointed with the way Amazon handles the excerpts you want to point to.  For example, I'm reading Jane Leavy's terrific biography of Mickey Mantle called The Last Boy.  I came across a cool link in the book pointing to a simulation of a tape-measure home run Mantle hit at Yankee Stadium in 1963 (go here and click on mantle_hr_63 to see it yourself).  Here's the result of tweeting the excerpt:

This wasn't at all what I expected to point my Twitter followers to.

If you go to this book's Amazon page you'll see the "Look Inside" feature has been enabled for it.  That means you can flip through the book a bit before you buy it.  Why in the world doesn't Amazon take Twitter followers right to the book page I tweeted via "Look Inside"?  Followers could then read more than what I included in my tweet.  More importantly, they'd be right there on the product page, able to "1-click buy" it on the spot.

The Twitter functionality shown above is a small step forward from the complete lack of Twitter connectivity Amazon offered with Kindle 1.0.  But Amazon is really missing the boat here by simply showing the short excerpt I pulled for the tweet.  And just to add salt to the open wound, why isn't that url in the excerpt live?  I know Amazon hates sending customers to sites off amazon.com, but jeez, they're doing customers a disservice by making them type in that simulation link.

I hope Amazon takes this to heart and utilizes "Look Inside" in some future release of the Kindle platform.  I don't see a lot of value in tweeting any more excerpts without "Look Inside" connectivity.

Kindle Likes & Dislikes: Another Point of View

Today's post is a contribution from John Holdcroft, one of my O'Reilly colleagues.  John is also a big fan of the Kindle and offers these likes and dislikes about the platform:

After coveting all sorts of e-reader gizmos from friends and colleagues, I finally bought my first Kindle last summer. Amazon found my sweet spot of $139 (now down to $114 with embedded ‘special offers’) and my excitable fingers did the One-Click dance in a hurry. At first, it was the novelty of having an e-reader device that excited me, no matter what the experience. I imagined stuffing it into my back pocket for a stroll in New York City, or showing it off loudly at a proudly independent Seattle area coffee shop. Now, after buying and downloading everything from popular fiction, cycling histories, and primitive board games for my seven-year-old, I am hooked deep. Some quick thoughts for you about my reading and consuming journey: 

Likes
Ubiquitous reading experiences. Amazon has done a great job of not just building a great reading device, but building better places and formats to read at any time. I love reading a couple of chapters of Steven Levy’s In The Plex at night, then synching up the next morning as I wait in line at the post office and pull out my iPhone and continue reading exactly where I left off. This seamless connection of reading makes all the difference in the world. 

Browsability of content. Amazon is right behind Google as far as mastering search, and I can go to the amazon.com page and type in “Jon Krakauer” and find his latest essay in Singles program. One-click and boom (goes the dynamite), I am ready to read. I also dream about a moment when I am on a beach in Hawaii (I used to do such things before I helped sire two small children), think of an author, topic, or newspaper I want to read, find it on Kindle, and have it instantly. This ‘Eureka!’ moment has not happened yet but I know that when it does it will feel GOOD. 

Kindle community and shopping experience. Amazon seems focused on how readers are consuming right now better than other mediums. Front-end early adopters seem to consume bits of data in fits and starts (though I am sure that long, dense novels are not yet forgotten). Kindle Singles speaks to this style directly, and I would hope and expect to see this program mushroom out into new environments soon. Perhaps combining the burgeoning podcast market into a book/audio file experience is also something for the Kindlings to consider. 

Dislikes
Social media shackles. Gee, thanks, Amazon, for keeping my highlights, bookmarks, etc., and adding them to my locker of data that you own. Not that my data is particularly interesting, I just want to own it, see it, track it, etc. I am less interested in seeing 63 highlights of the best lines of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (my choice comes from a description of long suffering heroine Patty, who “tried to make (her son) her Designated Understander”). Also, I should be able to see this data under the Manage My Kindle feature. Right now, Amazon holds it. Let me have it back, or at least joint custody, with weekends visits and every other holiday. Tweeting and Facebooking is suffering right now because of this loss. 

Keyboard. Seems pedestrian at best and blocky and unresponsive at worst. Compared to the fetish-loving iPad users, this looks really bad. Is it that hard to bid out this job to a usability lord and get better results? 

Page numbers. What titles have pages number references, and what ones do not? Which books, authors, are so lucky to be ‘pagified’ first, and why? Why the murkiness of this process, Amazon? And since one must hold down the MENU button to find the page feature, this is hardly an intuitive process. Make page numbers an Opt-Out feature, not Opt-In. 

Overall, I love my Kindle and look forward to seeing the innovations that I assume are on the horizon. It appears that e-readers are a part of the growing digital kudzu that Steven Levy notes in his great new book. Found on Kindle, of course.

Kindle Lessons Learned After a Year Away

I'm glad I jumped back into the Kindle market.  My wifi-only Kindle is getting almost as much use as my iPad.  I recently wrote a post on my iPad blog about lessons learned the first year with that device.  I figured I ought to do something similar covering lessons learned after a year away from the Kindle:

There's nothing wrong with doing only one thing exceptionally well -- I love my iPad, mostly because it's a jack of all trades.  But there's definitely something to be said for a device like the Kindle that pretty much just does one thing but does it extremely well.  (It's still hard admitting this since I jumped ship and did all my long-form reading on my iPad for the past 12 months!)

No free memory indicator -- I'm sure this device has plenty of storage space but I miss the ability to see just how much memory is free.  Unless I'm missing something, there's no way to tell that on the device itself.

No SD slot -- Speaking of memory, would it really have killed anyone to include an SD slot on this model?  It feels very Apple-esque without an option to add memory, particularly since the older Kindles used to support this.

Text-to-speech is a terrific feature -- I didn't have this with my first-gen Kindle and I'm already finding it very useful on my new device.  I'm still amazed there are publishers (and authors) out there who refuse to enable this in their Kindle editions.  Do they really think Kindle edition owners are also running out to buy the audio versions of the same book?  Highly unlikely.

Apps still feel awkward -- I haven't come across a single app that seems compelling enough to buy/install.  I've got dozens on my iPhone and iPad but can't find any that look appealing for the Kindle.  Are there any worth trying out?

The dictionary is even more awkward -- Here's where not having a touch-screen is a huge drawback.  The Kindle app for iPad spoiled me by letting me simply touch the word I want to look up.  The Kindle device makes it more of a challenge where you have to press the up button for every line, then the right button for every word till you get to the word you're looking for.  Ugh.

Experimental seems to have stalled out --  One year and two generations later and yet the "Experimental" screen looks the same as it ever has.  I really wish Amazon would use the R&D potential of this area and start adding some cool options.