Kindle users have been kind’a-sort’a able to loan e-books to each other for a while. Today Amazon announced that the Kindle is making a bigger leap in the near future:
Amazon said the library books will be available on the Kindle “later this year,” but the company did not specify a launch date. The free e-books will be available though Kindle apps on smartphones and on the Kindle e-reader device, which can download books over Wi-Fi or 3G internet connections.
The service will work only in the United States.
I’m not sure why the reporter used the word ‘free’ to describe the financial impact of taking out a library book, unless it was to clarify the terms of such a transaction for those who have never had a library card. In any case, the basics of the deal strike me as almost banal in the way they replicate the loaning of physical books. (Libraries will purchase and loan limited copies. Copies loaned out will not be available until returned.)
The one glitch I can imagine is allowing loans via the internet. Libraries have always required that patrons present themselves physically, with allowances made in some municipalities for the physically disabled. Allowing people to download content from anywhere is obviously problematic, but can be mitigated to a great degree by only allowing people who qualify for local membership (meaning they reside in the library’s district) to access content from that library’s site.
How long will it take for somebody to download and pirate/market content from a library system? Well, I have to believe that’s already been done, and will be done again. (If I understand the piracy argument correctly, everything’s already on the web anyway, so why would pirates bother — unless they like the clean, device-ready formatting.)
Interesting times.
– Mark Barrett
If advertising was a villain, it would be a Terminator:
It’s no surprise then that ads have come to the Kindle. The good news — relatively speaking — is that you can save a few bucks by purchasing an ad-enabled machine:
Although the hardware is identical to the standard $139 Kindle, the new Kindle with “Special Offers” will feature advertisements and deals as its screen saver and on the bottom of its home screen. But for that added distraction, the company will take $25 off the price—dropping it to $114.
If ads on the Kindle are inevitable — and they are, as are ads on every imaginable surface and device — I think this is a smart way to introduce them. Rather than inject ads into every Kindle, thereby infuriating all those nice people who helped make the Kindle a success, Amazon is giving the customer a choice and motivating that choice with savings.
Fully one short day after I questioned the utility and validity of crowd-sourced product reviews, the New York Times and PC Magazine post contradictory assessments of the Nook — Barnes & Nobles’ e-reader.
The NYT reviewer finds the Nook…
buggy. In four days, my Nook locked up twice and displayed an “Android operating system has crashed” message twice.
The PCMag reviewer finds the Nook…
might just be the most sophisticated e-Book reader on the market.
PCMag reports no bugs, but does not state whether the device was used for a prolonged period or merely tested for feature compliance.
Read the two reviews and you’ll come away thinking they’re talking about completely different products, with one exception. Read more
Two months ago — two months! — I started digging into the issues facing publishers and authors. Now, eight weeks hence — eight weeks! — I feel like I’m living in another millennium. Or having a dissociative episode.
Back at the dawn of time the Kindle was all that, with Sony trying to chip away at market share. Now, today, the Barnes & Noble reader (called the Nook) seems to have materialized out of thin air and projected itself into the role of New Sensation!
Kindle development time = 197 years. Nook = 2 minutes on High.
Back at the dawn of time Google was getting ready to lock up all written and yet-to-be written knowledge by conspiring with a little-known, self-absorbed bureaucracy that could not pass up the chance to do something important, even if that something was completely and utterly wrong. Now, today, the Internet Archive is doing something just as interesting, without all the lawsuits — and without aspiring to own things they don’t own.
By the way, I found this really interesting:
Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of information the “dead zone” of publishing.
Polarized positions are becoming even more polarized. Analog publishers hate digital anything. Bookstore owners hate volume discounts. Agents hate writers. And everybody hates independent authors ecause they’re not waiting in line to be hand-picked and validated by somebody else: “You’re cutting in line! You suck! You have no talent! You’re only able to find readers because of the internet, not because you survived our rigged system!”
Trying to project the lay of the land on New Years Day only evokes images of supernovae. Oh, and that Yellowstone caldera blowing up.
More here from Kassia Kroszer/Booksquare. And here and here from Nathan Bransford.
– Mark Barrett
This post is in response to a recent series of Huffington Post editorials about the future of publishing. Each voice in these editorials, like each voice in the larger ongoing conversation, has a valid point of view. Ignoring how we got where we are, however, or the realities of this moment, fails to address the future that is hurtling toward us.
On Thursday, October 7, Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, posted an editorial titled, Why We Need $4.00 Books. As the head of a company devoted to servicing the e-book market, it’s not surprising that Coker touted the functional and distribution advantages of e-books over published texts, or that he focused on the crushing costs associated with maintaining the traditional publishing model while ignoring e-book costs and the threat of digital piracy. Coker also took notice of the publishing industry’s recent decision to withhold e-book versions of frontlist titles as a defense against cannibalizing book sales:
Many publishers view ebooks with a skeptical eye. After all, won’t cheap ebooks cannibalize expensive print books?
This is the wrong way to examine the situation. Lower cost ebooks help publishers retain customers who might otherwise abandon books altogether in favor of lower cost alternative media options.
Ebooks also hold the promise to expand the worldwide market for books. Hundreds of millions of new middle class and literate consumers have come online outside the US, especially in developing countries.
In Coker’s view e-books equal a larger market share for an industry facing intense competition for eyeballs. This larger market share would in turn compensate authors and publishers for a lower per-copy price. Read more
Having only recently joined the publishing conversation, I’ve been trying to go back in time and do my homework using the trusty WABAC Machine we all call the internet. While I already (perhaps erroneously) feel as if I have my mind around the major issues, I was not prepared to run across something like this:
At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”
Whatever passions the elitism of the Kindle might have aroused in Mr. Alexie, it’s fair to say that confessing a desire to hit a woman aroused a fair bit of passion in others as well. Given that there has been a general social prohibition (far too weakly enforced) against hitting women for a much greater slice of history than the Kindle has been infuriating writers of noble purpose, I have to say that I think Mr. Alexie probably got his fair due.
(You can read a clarification of Mr. Alexie’s position on the Kindle here.)
What caught my attention, however, was not so much Mr. Alexie’s theatrics (and here I assume he is not a misogynist), but the fact that the quote in question came from a New York Times article that was published only six months ago. Because unless I’m badly misreading the tea leaves today, nobody is talking about the Kindle dominating any market any time soon. In fact, I seem to be reading articles today which speculate that the Kindle’s e-content price of $9.99 is too high. And in a world that rapidly seems to be embracing a floor price of FREE it’s hard to argue against such claims.
Six months!
Whether driven by hype or substance — which only time will tell — the evolution in the publishing industry is clearly a firestorm. I had no idea things were moving this fast.
– Mark Barrett
Sony unveiled a new e-reader this morning. Here’s the lede from the L.A. Times:
Sony this morning unveiled its answer to the Kindle 2 — a wireless electronic book reader with a 7-inch touch screen that’s 17% larger than Amazon’s device.
The fact that basic specs of the new reader are defined not in terms of utility but rather competitive advantage tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on in the e-reader arms race. A serious fight is on to see who produce the dominant reader, just as the fight is on to see who will become the dominant content provider for those devices.
Note also, however, that the two fronts in this global war to control the portable text industry are already deeply enmeshed:
Sony’s Readers have another feature that’s not present in the Kindle: All of the devices are capable of displaying digital books that have been borrowed from thousands of public libraries that lend electronic books. The Daily Edition goes one step further by finding local libraries with a digital-books collection and letting users wirelessly download the book for 21 days (provided they have a library card for that particular branch).
The machines enable delivery of more content: demand for more content drives sales of the machines. At some point in the not-to-distant future, this simmering symbiosis — backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns — is going to explode onto popular culture.
Which explains why Google is not simply trying to become the dominant content provider, but why they’ve also allied themselves with Sony, against the Amazon/Microsoft cabal. From Bloomberg:
In March, Sony gained access to more than 500,000 e-book titles for its readers through an agreement with Google Inc. The deal expanded Sony’s e-book store to about 1 million titles at the end of last month, compared with the more than 320,000 Amazon.com offers.
Sony gets content for its e-reader: Google gets a friendly device manufacturer for its content delivery system.
It’s going to be very hard to bet against a Google/Sony alliance, even against the combined might of Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and others. More on this here and here.
(That last link is to a Macworld.com article, because “the new Daily Edition comes bundled with Sony’s eBook Library software 3.0, which is newly Mac-compatible” [emphasis mine]. Whether Apple is thinking about getting into the device business as well — iBook II anyone? — or whether they’re simply throwing their lot in against Microsoft is anyone’s guess. But that Apple seems to be on the sidelines should not be taken to mean that Apple is on the sidelines.)
– Mark Barrett
