temporus | Entries tagged with ebooks

A week or so ago I was having a conversation with my friend Erin (

abennettstrong ) about a book my son enjoyed about robots. When I went on Amazon to try and look up the book, I ran across quite a lot of books about robots in the children's section. While trying to narrow down the list to find the one I wanted to share, I came across the fact that there were Kindle editions for books at very young age ranges. I was shocked to see that there were six books listed in the Baby-3 years age category. (Actually when you go in and look however, four of them are in my opinion mislabeled. A book about educational toys for you kids is not a book for ages 0-3. And why a US Military manual is listed in the Baby-3 year old section is beyond me.) I clicked over to the 4-8 year old category, which is the appropriate age level for my older son, and lo and behold they have 11 books. All of which appear to be in the target range.

So that got me thinking, just how many Kindle books are there for infants. A quick check and there's ~1400. Wow. I was a bit surprised by that, granted, there might well be a fair number of mislabels, such as I noted above when searching for the robot stories, but a quick glance through the first few pages reveal them to be reasonably accurate, such as the classic Pokey Little Puppy. Sure, I expect the Maximum Ride series is not appropriate for an infant, and nor likely is Artemis Fowl, but on the whole, there seems to be quite a lot of books there that are appropriate for the infant through toddler age. I was impressed.

I also checked out how many are there for the 4-8 year old crowd. About 4100 was the answer, which is a nice amount, and seems to have a pretty broad selection of books. I was, once again, impressed.

All of this got me thinking, however, what would be a reasonable age to give a child their own ereader? I considered the possibility of getting my old K1 repaired, as far as I can tell it's just a bad screen, but the cost was too high to justify it, sadly. If I did, I'd consider giving it to the Little Man. He simply devours books, and I'm thinking I can get him to master the kindle reader basics if I can just convince him that it's not a touch screen. Of course, he's not too used to books yet that don't have a picture on every single page, but my wife and I were discussing recently if it might not be time to start easing him into chapter books in any case. I have to admit, it would be nice to take some advantage of ebooks and let him discover books at his own pace. Of course, I'd want to be able to control what books go into his library. Hmm...that might be a feature Amazon could implement, a child saftey lock much like my TiVO has, so that I could let him have a device but prevent him from just downloading anything on the account. Frankly that wouldn't be too hard if I had a wifi only device, and just didn't configure it for the home network. By the time he was old enough to figure that out on his own, I probably wouldn't be too worried about what he's reading.

But that's just it, I'm not likely to drop $100 or so on a device for a child who might just stand on the thing....because. It's one of the reasons I really want to see the e-ink screens continue to come out, and to continue to fall in price. Get me something below $50, and I just might buy one for him. In the short term, I've been toying with the plan to reburn a PC for him, give him his own system to start using. And if I do, I'll probably put the Kindle App on that PC, and pre-load it with some age appropriate books. I'll have to see if there's a way to lock down the app so he can't just pull in any book from our account he wants. I'd rather have a bit more control until he's old enough.

So what about you, would you give your child an ebook reader? (and by child I mean someone younger than a teen). Do you have kids that read ebooks already?

Tags:

ebooks

Here's the news blurb from Amazon.

There's not a whole heap of details here to work with. But still and all it seems pretty cool. One thing that jumps out at me that is neat is that your margin notes, and your last page read get saved on your device, so that if you take the book out again later, you still have all that info. But wait, there's more, if you turn around and buy your own copy of that book, you get to retain all that info too.

However, what's missing here in the press release is details people are going to want to know about. Such as how many times can someone take out a book. How long do you get it?   How does the library have to account for it?  Is it a license fee per user who takes out a book, do they have to purchase the book, then get a limited number of downloads to customers before they have to repurchase, etc? And when can we expect to see this arriving at those 11,0000 local libraries.

I'm sure we'll hear more about it as the year goes on, but I'm pretty excited. I'm a big library fan, and anything that helps libraries keep up with the times is good in my book. I think that it's good for libraries to have options to be able to support their customer base. With Kindle currently (for however much longer that might remain true) in the lead as far as ebook sales/market share, it's good to finally be able to offer Libraries to get in on the sharing of Kindle editions to their membership. This is an area that Amazon has been lagging in overall, but trying to catch up. (With the lending in general, and now with Library lending.)

Overall, I'm happy to see this, but I hold back final judgment until I see the final details, and if it will really work.   I suspect my wife will be happy to hear this option available, as such an avid reader, she's always clamoring for more, and she, like I am, is a big fan of public libraries, and I suspect being able to borrow digital books will give her more options now that she enjoys reading digital editions.

What about you, if you have the opportunity to borrow digital editions from your public library, would you?  Or would you still prefer the physical edition?

Tags:

ebooks

Today, apparently, begins "read an ebook week."   Who determines which week is which anyway?  On whose authority do they get to proclaim that this week, out of all 52 in a year, is the one where we should be encouraging people to read ebooks?   That's what I want to know.

Well, not really.

What I wonder actually is, when will we start to see: read a physical book week?   A year from now?  Three?  Ten?   At what point do you think we'll have stopped reading physically for the most part, and be reading almost exclusively in ebook formats?  For my wife and I, we're very much on the crux of that these days.   More and more I pick up books electronic only. Sure, I've got a stack of physical books three stories tall (that's story as in building height, not story as in tale) that constitutes my "to be read" pile. I chip away at it when I can. But for the most part, I have been reading ebooks at a ratio of almost 5 to 1. Just this weekend my wife commented to me how different (I think the word she used was delicious) it was to go back and read a physical book again after so many novels she's consumed via electronic format since I got her her own kindle.

So perhaps this week, maybe we should be reading a physical book instead of an ebook, since we have converted to the "wave of the future" or whatever other hype you want to toss on the shoulders of ebooks.   Yeah, that's it, I'll pluck out something physical to read, ebooks be damned. Well, okay, not damned. I like them too much for that. But I'll send the ebook into the corner for a timeout how about that?  Yeah, that could work.

But seriously, what are you reading to celebrate read an ebook week and in what format are you reading?

Tags:

ebooks

Well, they said they were working on it, and just before the end of 2010, Amazon delivered their new lending feature. In many ways, this version of the feature mirrors what Barnes and Noble has done for their ebooks. The specifics can all be researched here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320

The jist of it for those that don't want to follow the link is you can loan out books to others, whether Kindle owners, or just users of the various Kindle Apps for a period of 14 days. However, much like the B&N version, you can loan out each book only once to just one person.  While the book is out on loan, the original user can't access and read the book. I think that it's quite reasonable to set up the technology to work in this fashion, such that as long as the book is out on loan, you can't read it yourself. That mimics the way it would work for a real book. Of course, unlike a real book out on loan, you get it back automatically after 14 days. Whether your buddy is done reading it or not.   Good for you, of course, but not so good for your friend if you didn't appropriately coordinate the loan.

I'm disappointed that you can only lend each book once. I get that the publishers don't want to have people buying a book, then lending it to every friend, and thereby losing all those additional sales. But often, I'll loan out the first book of a series, and that's all I need to loan out to friends to get them interested in an author. So some books, I loan a lot, whereas others, even by the same author, I don't loan ever. Perhaps if there was a way to reset the clock, maybe once every few months, or even once a year would be nice. It would be a shame to loan out a book my one and only time, only to later learn that the person didn't even get the chance to read or finish the book. It would also be nice if there was a built in feature that tracked how far along the reader was in the book, and perhaps allowed you to extend the loan for a few extra days, maybe even just once, so that the borrower can finish if they hadn't gotten all the way through the book.

But this cuts back one of the most common complaints I've heard against ebooks, and it really is about time that Amazon caught up on this feature, because it's something the public wants. Whether they'll actually use it?  Hard to say. But it's here, and perhaps over time, the feature will be refined and improved with user feedback.

Like many of the other features, however, this one is controlled by the publisher. Which means that the publisher has the say on whether they want to allow lending of their books. Keep that in mind. The pressure is on Amazon, now that there's a lot of competition. Let's see if they will keep their pack leader position, or if they will give it up.

Tags:

ebooks,
kindle

So Google's gone and done it, they've entered the bookselling market. Up til now, you could use Google Books to read some scans of out of print stuff, and do some great searches on it. But today they launched their much anticipated (well, by Google at least, if not anyone else in particular) bookstore. Of course, need I remind you this is the company that seems to have conflated the concepts of out of print with public domain?  The one that pissed off a lot of authors by trying to assert the right to scan in and provide copyrighted works as if they were free to use?  Yeah, them. So amidst all the ooohing an aaaahing about how nice it is that Google is now in this market space, I think perhaps folks should keep the Google Book Settlement in mind.

In any case, yes, the big G is now a book retailer. Or etailer. Or whatever buzzword of the day is. It means you can purchase books through a site that will help you search for the books you might want to buy. Yeah, even I can see how that'd be quite useful from their perspective. I don't know the fancy marketing terms enough to be sure, but I think that might fit what I've heard called Pull marketing. Okay, enough making it sound like I'm villifying Google, because I'm not. I'm mostly pretty neutral on that front.

It's curious to say the least that they aren't supporting out of the gate the Mobi/PRC file format that would allow Kindle users to read these books.   Anyone out there really believe that a major computer programming company that can turn the entire world on its ear and take over an already crowded marketspace to the point that they are THE dominant force in search engines think that they just couldn't manage to handle a file format?  Yeah, me neither. So okay, looks like the big G is taking on the big A. Well, that seems natural to me. For all that iPAD may be dominating in device sales, Kindle still seems to be where the books themselves are selling. Frankly, I don't believe that Apple has dislodged Kindle nearly so much as a lot of so called data seems to be working around the net suggests. I think people are much more likely buying iPADs to play Angry Birds than they are to buy it as an ereader. I wouldn't be surprised if more people use the B&N app to read books than use the native iBookstore. Same for Kindle. And as Google hasn't (yet) announced any device they intend to produce (why bother, let the manufacturers use Android underneath and pull in a license fee) the way to take on Amazon seems to be in the format wars. Throw in on the side of ePUB, and you get all the competitors to Amazon on your side. (Until they all realize that if you can buy your book from Google and read it on your Nook, why bother with B&N or any other source???)

So we're back to format wars.   Yay fun. I still don't know how this is going to pan out. With so many against them, it seems hard to believe that Amazon won't cave and begin to support ePUB. I mean, how hard can that really be?  They were able to add in PDF in response to consumer demand, can we really believe ePUB would be out of the question?  I doubt it. But I don't know if that's going to be on the horizon any time soon. So who will win this staring contest?  Amazon? Google?  Neither?

Oy. I hate the waiting game. But what other choice do we have?

So what do you think, is Google entering the ebook market a good thing or a bad thing, and why?

Current Location: home

Tags:

ebooks

Dear Amazon, as well as assorted publishers....

If you want to know why we're all skeptical of your pricing schemes when it comes to ebook editions of your work, it's things like this below that makes us so.

I mean, am I the only person who thinks it strange that out of all three of these books, the cheapest one is the new book in the series? Odd and fascinating at the same time. Mind you, I'm at least happy that the price for the Kindle edition on all three is cheaper than the physical editions (though only by about 50 cents each) but still, it strikes me as just plain weird.

Tags:

ebooks

Tags:

ebooks

I've reached a point now, where a lot of my mindset on digital versions of books is shifting.

Let me explain.

Year's ago, when I first got my Kindle, as an early adopter, I made the assumption that I would enjoy using the device. But with just the one in the house, it seemed unlikely that my wife would ever bother to read on my Kindle. Granted, I keep it with me nearly all the time, which would make it just that much harder for her to read anything on it, but still, if I'd have thought she'd use it I would have gladly left it home for her to use. It just didn't seem at the time likely, and she didn't seem all that interested. After all, we've got a house full of books, so despite the fact that she reads about three times or more the speed that I do, there are often more things for her to go and read.

Once I had the Kindle that left me with a bit of a dilemma however. What format to buy books. My wife and I overlap in our reading preferences. We're not identical, by any stretch, but if you made a Venn diagram, you'd see two circles that much more than 50% overlap. And I'd even go so far as to say the interior lines of the circles, have become fuzzy lines such that we each have expanded our original circle of reading. Something like this:

What that meant for me was, any book I knew my wife would read, or even just thought she might read, I had to buy physical copies. Not really a problem as that first year, though books came out for the Kindle, things in those early days were spotty. You might get some new books, and not others. Understandable as all the publishing houses took some time to get on board with the new system. But as things got better, the decision got a bit harder. The only thing that helped me decide in some cases, was my feeling that once I started buying a series in one format of book, I wanted to keep buying it in that format. Of course I've since had that philosophy bite me in the ass in a few ways.

Flash forward a bit. My wife, picks up Anna Karenina, and after reading it sends her wrist into spasms of pain. Big, substantial books of the type that my wife often enjoys to read become more painful. This is probably at least in part due to having children, and all the picking up and holding of small children that such entails. Painful wrists meant that big books stopped being the joy to read. Later my wife observed that while feeding the younger son, that ever time she turned a page, it would distract him.   Enter husband's solution. New Kindle for the wife.

At first, she wasn't certain about it, but she decided to give it a shot. Since January, she's read more than half a dozen books on the Kindle, and often, it's easier for her to read this way now. I'm not sure it's accurate to say she prefers it, but certainly it works just fine for her. So I'm now in a very different space when it comes to considering in what format to purchase a new book. Should I buy a book digitally because I am more likely to share the book with my wife?  Do I buy a physical copy because I want it on my shelf?   What if I want to get a signed edition?   I've never really been one to ooh and aah over "autographs" in my life. But the more I've been a part of the community these days, the more friends I have made among writers (both in person, and online), the more I find myself enjoying getting someone to sign a copy of their book for me. It feels like I'm joining in with their celebration of a successful launch of their book. That makes it worth it to me to get a signature, which of course means I want to have physical books....

Ah, the twisted trail of logic leaves me baffled.

I think I get further complications as my boys get older, and I hold out hope that they might also enjoy the same types of books that we do I have to wonder, will our digital libraries still be available?   The short answer is: yes, they should be, because even if the Kindle device itself goes away, the physical files will probably lounge around in my hardware for years to come.   If my still functional, and occasionally booted up Commodore Amiga is any signal, I don't let old technology go until I have little choice. But of course, the realistic question is, will it be convenient?   I know Amazon is hoping the answer to that question is yes.   I do too, I mean at this point I've got some vested interest in it. But if not, well, there are some books I'll probably buy in physical copies, you know, just in case....

Tags:

ebooks

Tags:

ebooks

So, two quite interesting things revealed recently in regards to the Kindle. One is the fact that the K2 is due for an update soon. So if you've got one, sometime this month, you should get it. Most important thing in this entire update: ability to organize your collections. Finally! (More details here.) Unfortunately, this is not a release for the K1, so those of us still using a K1, sadly out of luck.   However, there is word out there that Amazon will be providing this feature for K1s, so there will, hopefully, be an update for the K1 sometime in the "near" future. As an aside, the Kindle for PC app also got a recent upgrade. Some slight improvements. Seems a tad faster, and more options for reading. (Black text on white background, white text on black background, sepia tones, and an ability to control the brightness.) Nice bits, but doesn't change my general opinion that the PC app is just on the OK side, not so good as the actual device or the iPhone/Pad app.

So clearly, Amazon is under the gun, and working hard to get these apps up to speed. I mean, we're at one month post iPad now, right?  So, yeah, Amazon's got to work to keep things positive in their court. On the other hand, it's probably not helping their PR much that they are having some fights with Penguin group over Kindle editions. Right now, you still can't get Jim Butcher's latest novel in Kindle format (in the USA) and in response, Amazon is selling the hardcover for the price it wanted to sell the ebook. I'd call if funny, but in reality, it's just the kind of frustration that consumers hate to see: two big corporations bickering with the consumers losing out no matter which way the penny falls.

Last little bit here, was a little revelation by Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's, that they have approximately 4,000 Kindle subscribers. All I can say about that is BINGO. That's exactly what I was talking about when I said the SF &F magazines need to get out some Kindle editions, and reap some of that benefit. Which I think was good advice, however, it appears, from what several respected editors are recently telling me that there are backend issues from the Amazon-side preventing them from being able to provide their magazines as Kindle Magazines. Several have recently begun handling them as "books" from a Kindle POV. I think its a good effort on their part to try and make things happen in any fashion that they can. However, the problem as I see it, is that the steady income stream I'd envisioned for such magazines isn't likely to be as straightforward. Instead of turning the millions of Kindle owners into potential subscribers in a literal sense, they are instead forced back to a "newsstand" approach where they've got to get their wares out on the "racks" where they hope to attract each individual buyer every single month without fail. That's going to be more of a challenge than they might want, and I suspect that the return on investment there will be comparably smaller than if they could get into the official Magazine list. The benefits of not being a magazine subscription do have some compensating factors. For example, I cannot share my Asimov's subscription with my wife. It's locked down to my Kindle. If I saw a story I thought she'd really want to read, I'd have to swap with her. Further, if I should trade in my K1 at some future point, I might lose my "back issues" of Asimov's. I know I could transfer the live subscription to a different device, but not so sure that I can read the back issues elsewhere.   At least with the issues I've picked up in "book format" I can share them with the wife, or to other devices, etc. A small bit of silver lining for the customer.

Here's a small list of SF & F magazines you can get in Kindle format, but not as "subscriptions.

Clarkesworld
Realms of Fantasy
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Fantasy Magazine

I'll happily add others if folks can point them out to me.

Now of course, you can buy other magazines in PDF format, or even PRC/MOBI format, and therefore would be able to read them on a Kindle. But those you have to go out and look for, and I think that cuts down significantly on the potential sales.

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Took them a while, but it seems as if Amazon has now caught up (in general) with Barnes & Noble with the alternate means to accessing your Kindle books. Today they came out with a Blackberry App. This is good news for Kindle purchasers/owners as it expands the overall reach of diferent devices you can use to read your purchased works.

Of course this won't make a dent in the overall mentality I hear from some folks such as Cory Doctorow that the Kindle is a roach motel that forces you into a proprietary system and that you won't be able to take your books outside of the Kindle. (To be fair, that's a characterization of the way Cory presents it, not a verbatim quote.) He's hardly the only one who constantly insists that Kindle is a closed system. During the whole of Amazonfail, I bit my tongue on more than one occasion, with all the "informed" folks taking stabs at the Kindle spreading a lot of outright false information. The idea was presented quite often that purchased books were only availble on a single hardware format. Which is patently false. You can read a Kindle ebook on an actual Kindle, naturally, but they had an iPhone/Touch app for quite a long time, and for the past several months a PC app. (Unfortunately not available for the Mac yet, they are still listing that as "coming soon.") Never mind the constant intoning that you can only get books for your Kindle through Amazon. Utter hogwash non-sense. But that's would be a whole other conversation I could go into that has nothing to do with what I'm posting about.

We've now got a blackberry Kindle app.

Unforuntately it seems only for a limited selection of supported models, mostly of the newest variety. Gah. That sucks. And worse, there's no details about when they might be expanding this to any older models. I don't like that as it might mean they are just bailing on anything older than what's on the list now. It would surely cut into their potential userbase. It's also only available for US phones. Again, kinda sucks. But, as the iPhone app has expanded beyond our shores, perhaps this will too. And lastly, it seems that like the PC you only get books--no magazines, newspapers or blogs. Well, for me personally no big loss there, since I don't get any newspapers or blogs, and the magazine choices are so limited there's not much incentive for me to get any other than Asimov's. (And that mainly as a space saving issue so I don't have to have unlimited shelfspace in my house as they pile up.) And, no search feature. Bleh.

So, cool that Amazon has finally gotten this out of the gate. But again, the performance looks pretty weak. I'm going to have to give this a C-.
It seems that the reigning champion non-Kindle device goes to the iPhone/Touch. Which, assuming that app will work as is and is allowed on the iPad, that bodes well for users who already have and use this on their existing iPhone/Touch and happen to make the expensive investment in an early iPad. Easy portability to a new reading device.

Tags:

ebooks,
kindle

Tags:

ebooks,
kindle

After giving it a few days to settle down, and to process my thoughts, here's my impression on the new Apple iPad:

Not as impressed as I was wanted to be.

Okay, that's the short of it. Here's the more lengthy explanation of my take on it.

The iPad is essentially a much bigger iPod Touch. There are differences, to be sure, but when you get down to the core of it, that's the essence of the difference between the devices.   For all intents and purposes, it behaves and acts the same as the iTouch (I don't care if that's not the official name, it's what everyone I know calls the damn thing, so tough) the only difference being the larger screen.   That's pretty much what I expected out of Apple, or rather, it's the minimum I expected out of Apple, when they finally jumped into this space.   Unfortunately, as best I can tell before I get something like this in my hand, that's about the extent of it.

Okay, look: this isn't by a long shot a BAD entry into this sphere. And watching the videos, I can tell that Apple has thought about this space hard, the space between a real laptop, and a smartphone and found a niche they believe they can exploit.   It's part of the space that dedicated eReaders currently enjoy. Call it PAD computing, or Tablet, whichever. I think this is a new niche. There are just going to be times when you don't want the whole laptop experience, but the tiny freaking screen of a phone isn't going to cut it.   And I think this device fits that niche.   I'll even go so far as to agree with Jobs and say that this niche isn't well served by the netbooks of this world. Not because they suck, as Jobs implies, but because the ergonomics of them do not quite work as well as we'd hope.

I think this device will garner a following. I saw many people over the years since the launch of the Kindle decry the current eReaders because they weren't more like what the iPad appears to be.   Add to that the fact that there are plenty of folks who buy into just about anything Apple does, and you can already tell it's going to have some measure of success.   Around the internet you will hear a lot of folks saying this is a game changer. Especially in the ebook/publishing arena.   Apple is the 8 million ton gorilla in the room, and once they decide to jump into a market space they will change the dynamics.   Competition is a good thing. But what we don't need is Apple putting Amazon and the others out of the market space, because then it'll just be Apple dominating the ebook scene instead of Amazon. Thankfully, I don't see that as a short term reality. With Amazon, B&N, and Apple all with strong products in the space, I think it will help the consumer.

The big problem I see with the iPad is the price. It's high. And frankly, with the way I watched the pricing basically not change at all for the iTouch, (they simply retire lower capacity models and keep the prices for the top model in the same range instead of letting the whole device shift downwards) I'm not hopeful that the iPad will come down into a reasonable price range. I'm sorry to say, despite what they seem to believe, a $500 device is NOT something that every family can afford. And it really is not competitive with the range of pricing for netbooks which start in the mid to upper $200 range.   I suspect this will rapidly push the price on the Kindle and Nook down. That's a good thing. In my opinion those devices need to get below the $200 mark to really break out, and now that we have a device that does more than just books and audio, that's going to by needs push the dedicated reader down in price or push it out of the market. But....in order for that to really happen, Apple will need to move their prices down.   I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Kindle get below the $200 price point before the end of the year, and the DX to get down into the $350 range, as a result of this showing up on the market.

I don't think of the iPad as an eReader.   I think of it as an entertainment device. It supports all sorts of entertainment. Books, movies, music, web surfing, TV (through the iTunes store, but possibly other ways I don't know) gaming. You might have heard of the weaknesses of the device: lack of multitasking, and lack of Flash support. I don't know why either of these is the case. Perhaps multitasking on a phone wasn't as critical, so for that form factor it wasn't vital. And so far, lack of Flash support hasn't hindered the iPhone/Touch. But the new form factor will make both of those harder to ignore.  A weakness to be sure, but in the meantime, they bring to the game the best that the iPhone/Touch have to offer.   So I'd call that a wash.

Would I buy one of these?  Not for the money I'd need to spend. And truth is, at this point in time I don't have the need for it. My wife and I have Kindles, and we have a netbook in the house. There's just no point in this particular device for us at this time. If I didn't have both of those....yes, I'd probably consider it. But not in this price point. Also, a 10 hour battery life while good when compared to a laptop...is weak compared to a more typical eReader.  That's the price you pay for a backlit screen. Well that an eyestrain which I could do without. But that's a whole nother story.

To sum up my opinion: a solid entry. Not a revolutionary one.

Tags:

ebooks,
ereader

After giving it a few days to settle down, and to process my thoughts, here's my impression on the new Apple iPad:

Not as impressed as I was wanted to be.

Tags:

ebooks,
ereader

It appears that Amazon has launched the Kindle 2.

Yow.

The new features are pretty nice.   But I'm still processing.   They've got one cool feature:  Read to Me. A text to speech converter!  Wow. I wonder if the voice will annoy me though, because that's usually the deathknell in that regards.

On the other hand, I did just see the new Sony device at Borders last time we stopped in. Which has touchscreen.   Oy.

Either way you look at it, there are a lot of wins going on in the digital book reader marketplace.   The technology is just leaping forward.

What I'm really curious about is this: Will Amazon leave K1 owners hanging in the breeze?  Does this launch signal that they are not going to continue to enhance my experience, and that my only choice will be to buy the new one?  In which case, I expect there will be a lot of upset K1 owners, who might decide to abandon the Amazon platform, and go with something else.

Tags:

ebooks

Tags:

ebooks

Via this link, over on

arachnejericho's blog  there are 240,000 sold. The article she cites goes further to mention an expectation that there could be between another 500,000 and 750,000 units sold in the next four quarters. So let's look at the numbers? Somewhere between 3/4 and a million users.   People wonder why I keep saying: get your SF & F magazines out there for the unit?   There's currently (Well, as of two days ago when I last checked) only 16 magazines available. At all. The only two SF&F magazines available are Asimov's and Analog. But think about this: right now they make up one eighth of the options for customers under the heading Magazines. (If you throw in Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's you find that genre magazines make up 1/4 of the currently available options!)

Look, maybe not everyone is going to want to subscribe to magazines on their Kindle. And you can make things available other ways, such as F&SF has as noted here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2008/07/29/fsf-and-kindle/ by Gordon Van Gelder. Now, I'm hardly privy to the details that Amazon is willing to negotiate with publishers. People who want to go out of their way to obtain something for their Kindle will. So, dedicated fans of F&SF won't likely have a problem grabbing their copies off Fictionwise, and loading them up to their devices. Still, I can't help but think that right now, is an opportune moment for the SF & F markets to get in on the ground floor of something.   Being one of the few choices available for new users of the device has got to make your odds of picking up random subscriptions better. I mean, imagine being one of only 16 magazines on a newstand. Don't you think that Asimov's is seeing some kind of uptick in sales being there? (Yeah, that's idle speculation.) When a friend of mine used to work for Ebsco subscription services, he told me that their whole concept, sales-pitch, etc, was based on the idea that somewhere around 4% of everyone who sees an add for something, will buy it. The more people you get your item in front of, the more people you'll get to buy. I have no clue how accurate that is. I'm about as far from a sales type person you'll find. I prefer my life in the caves of the datacenter supporting the salesforce through keeping things running.   But it makes sense to me, that if its easier for me to find something, that's the item I'm more likely to buy. And people who own Kindles will be on the Amazon site. A lot.

Look, if you're something like a Clarksworld, or a Strange Horizons, or Fantasy Magazine, you might want to think about how you could make a go of it. Heck, if you're an online zine, consider doing it as a Blog subscription. Especially if you are currently giving away the fiction for free now.   I mean, why not? Blogs run at $1-2 a month. Okay, so as a blog, maybe you don't stand out to the same degree that you do as a "magazine". There's 374 blogs available, so you might not get as much coverage there. And I don't know what the revenue split is. (I'm sure heavily in their favor.) But odds are good there'll be a half a million of these things out there by year's end. That's a darn large user base to tap into. Get 1/100th of those, 5,000 subscribers to your magazine or blog? Let's see: that's anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a month in raw sales. Even if you only get, say a 0 take: $18,000-$54,000 a year?   I think that'd help pay those authors. And the internet bills. Maybe even a little for the staff too? Yeah, I think that's at least worth looking into. (Now, to play my own devil's advocate: If you all ready get people to donate....perhaps you lose out. Especially if people start to figure that since the cost of the magazine is X, but previously had donated X Y yearly....they might start to just donate X, since they figure that's the cost. Or, they may just switch from their normal donation to the subscription method, and then you'd lose out. See, this is why I stay in the caves, and fix servers. Business models and ideas make my head hurt. A lot.)

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Via this link, over on

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If you haven't signed up for tor.com's free ebook giveaways, there's still time. From what the weekly email is saying, there will be one more week, and one more book made available before the site launch which will be on July 20th. (Right about when I'll be travelling home from Readercon I bet.) And it looks as if they will be making in that final week ALL of the prior ebooks available again. That's right, if you missed one, or you jumped in late, you still have some time to grab free ebooks by the likes of:

( Lots of cool authors under the cut )

All that could be yours for the right to check out Tor.com when it goes live. But do it soon, or you'll miss out!

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ebooks

Writing for Beans

Confice Quicquid Incipiebas

Ebooks and kids.

Library Lending for Kindles, coming soon.

Read an ebook week.

Just in time for the new year: Kindle book lending.

I feel a great disturbance in the ebook market...

Dear Amazon....

Dear Amazon....

Digital shift.

Digital shift.

Interesting Kindle news.

Interesting Kindle news.

Kindle on your blackberry. (If you have the right model)

Kindle on your blackberry. (If you have the right model)

The Gorilla has Landed. (Yes, I'm talking about the Apple iPad this time.)

The Gorilla has Landed. (Yes, I'm talking about the Apple iPad this time.)

And now....the dilemmas begin.

And now....the dilemmas begin.

Wanna know how many Kindles are out there in the hands of the public?

Wanna know how many Kindles are out there in the hands of the public?

It's not too late!

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