Entries tagged with “ebooks” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

New info on upcoming Ibis Reader from @liza's threepress -- another books-in-cloud model

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via web from Andrew's posterous

"E pluribus tunum: Uniform prices for online music are no way to maximise profit"

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

This research suggest maximum value in a digital media market like iTunes (for both producer and consumer) comes from a combination of subscription/membership fee and per-item purchase:

"Charging an "entry fee" for use of the service and then a small, fixed per-song cost for downloads turned out to benefit both the seller and the buyer. The most revenue, according to the 2009 survey data, would be generated by charging the students $21.19 for entry and 37 cents a song. This could raise the producer surplus by 30% compared with uniform pricing. Consumer surplus would also rise in this instance, because some people would buy songs they would have not have done at a higher uniform price. Spotify, a rival to iTunes, has a model somewhat like this for its premium service, where it charges a monthly fee for songs without limit."

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/economicsfocus/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14699573

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we've learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O'Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned"

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

O'Reilly Ebooks Now in Aldiko Online Catalog for Android

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The iPhone gets a lot of the attention when it comes to smartphones, but signs point to Android playing a huge role in the growing smartphone market, with 20+ new devices by the end of this year worldwide (like the Motorola Droid). O'Reilly readers with an Android device can now browse and buy via the online catalog in the Aldiko ereader app.

Buying through Aldiko gets you the same DRM-free ebook bundle offered on oreilly.com (and there's even a 15% discount applied at checkout).

The catalog is implemented using a prototype of the OPDS spec, part of the BookServer architecture.

Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store

Andrew Savikas
October 9, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there's a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.

While I can't speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it's a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren't Amazon's idea), because we want O'Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.

Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I'm happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O'Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who's already purchased one of our Kindle books. Here's the Product Details section from The Twitter Book on the Kindle Store:

As a reminder, most O'Reilly books aren't yet available on the Kindle in large part because the Kindle 1 doesn't yet support tables. But you can buy a Kindle-compatible Mobipocket version directly from oreilly.com as part of our "ebook bundles," which also include EPUB and PDF formats, which provide a nice alternative if you have a Kindle 1 and run into a table from one of our books that's difficult to read.

Just to be clear, our desire to make these books free of DRM does not mean that we are allowing our readers to redistribute copies to their friends, but to allow them to read the book on all of their own devices, and to otherwise make use of them without artificial encumbrances. If you're interested in multi-user licenses, talk to us.

Thanks again to Amazon for working with us on this.

Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

Andrew Savikas
October 8, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data).

They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each category of app into a corresponding quadrant:

They note that books fall squarely into the "use a lot for a short period of time" category, which is not unexpected:

In Quadrant II, we find categories like Books and Games, among the two largest app categories in both the App Store and Android Market. These application categories are characterized, on average, by intense usage over a finite period of time. Because games and books offer content that typically is consumed only once, the user usually moves on after reading a book or finishing a game.

They also draw some interesting conclusions on which categories are suitable for subscription vs. a la carte models.

Note this data comes from the set of apps using the Flurry software (they say more than 2,000), so is by no means a scientific sampling. Interesting reading nonetheless.

Anecdotal Evidence from the Digital Shift

Andrew Savikas
October 6, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Back in 2004, when I spent most of my time doing format conversions and production automation, I had the privilege of turning much of what I learned doing things like batch running Word macros from the DOS command line with Ruby into a book, Word Hacks. Like our other Hacks books, it's a lesson in the value of curation and convenience -- much of the contents came from existing information, culled from blog posts, help forums, and other sources (all with permission and attribution, of course).

While it sold quite modestly, it was reviewed well, I earned out my advance, and as recently as September I ran into someone who told me the book has helped them do their job more effectively (their job being substantially similar to the one I was doing at the time I wrote the book).

This weekend my quarterly royalty statement came, and even I was struck by the relative proportion of sales coming from digital sources (this is from Q2 2009). Please note this is totally anecdotal data from a single book that probably hasn't been on the shelves in most retailers for years, so do take with the appropriate grain of salt:

Less than 20% of sales were for the print book. This is something we've seen for other "long tail" titles that show very little demand when viewed through the lens of retail print sales (i.e., Bookscan). Making titles available in digital form means the opportunity to capture sales long after a title has left most bookstore shelves.

There's still (a few) spots open for TOC Frankfurt next week on Oct. 13. Use discount code TOC09BL.

Microsoft/O'Reilly Alliance Means DRM-free Ebooks Coming from MS Press

Andrew Savikas
September 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth calling out specifically here:

I'm particularly excited that as part of this agreement, Microsoft has committed to make its ebooks DRM-free and device-independent. One of our goals at O'Reilly has been to make sure that ebook customers can read them on any device, and have the ability to keep using them even if they change their preferred device. Having Microsoft Press join us in this commitment is a big step forward towards an open ebook market.

We begin transitioning distribution (including digital) in December, which means there will be lots to show and tell at February's TOC Conference.

Mobile as New Medium

Andrew Savikas
September 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (21) | Listen

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation about textbooks and iPhones, and couldn't help but weigh in on the question of how to handle some the issues like cross referencing and annotations on the iPhone compared with in a textbook. Several people suggested the comments were worth sharing with a larger audience:

These are relatively minor technical problems that generally already have solutions. The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as "how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone" is framing it wrong. The challenge is "how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses -- eyes, ears, and a mouth -- along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the 'job' of educating a student." That's a much more interesting problem to me than "how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen."

Mobile is big on the agenda at TOC Frankfurt, TOC New York, and I'm sure will come up during the upcoming TOC online event.

O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks

Adam Witwer
September 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

As Andrew has discussed in some detail recently on this blog, O'Reilly has started publishing many books as iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Over the past couple of months, we've received a considerable amount of feedback from customers who have purchased the apps.

To address some of the most common questions we get, I recently added a page on oreilly.com. I cover three main topics:

• "Hidden" features -- handy things you can do that aren't always obvious in the UI
• Long code lines -- my attempt to help users deal with the question we get most often on the support queues
• Extracting the EPUB files -- yes, there is an EPUB file in that app, and you can get to it quite easily

I hope this page is useful to you. As we continue to receive feedback from our customers, I plan to add more tips and information.

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

Andrew Savikas
August 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see the images.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. That trend has continued (and accelerated), and right now about 60% of our App sales are coming from outside the US:

When I've talked with other publishers about our success with iPhone Apps, they typically discounted what I said because I was talking about iPhone: The Missing Manual, a title particularly suited to the device. And to a degree, that's a fair argument, and I don't expect very many other books-as-apps to sell as well as that one. But the results for the next batch of 17 titles is instructive. For the two-week period of July 20 to August 2 (the first two calendar weeks the apps were on sale), five of the 17 titles sold more units as iPhone apps than via print (as measured in Bookscan). Here's a comparison across all 17 titles:

That got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

In the App Store, each country has its own top 100 lists (overall and for each category, and for free as well as paid). Something that's #1 here in the US may not even register on the top 100 in another country. Here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for the "Classics" App, the #1 paid book app right now:

Classics is one of the most popular paid book apps in nearly every country with iPhone service (the list actually goes further down than shown above).

Now here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for "Twilight" which has been holding steady in the top 25 paid apps here in the US:

Yup, that's it. Just the US. Presumably this is a rights issue -- Hachette either doesn't have the rights to sell this book as an App anywhere else, or they're choosing not to. But taken in light of our own sales of nearly 2/3 outside the US and the data from Classics, that means a publisher who can't (or won't) sell their app outside the States is missing a lot of the market. Here's the current rankings for the "A Twilight Trivia" app, which is ranked above Twilight in the US (and is not affiliated with Hachette or Stephenie Brown):

So there's clear interest in the Twilight content on the iPhone outside the US -- enough interest to keep this app well into the top 100 paid book apps in dozens of countries.

Perhaps the most important "digital rights management" at stake right now is that of the rights to sell digital content globally.

If you're planning to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, producing and selling digital and mobile content from a global perspective will be a big part of the program at TOC Frankfurt on Oct. 13.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

Andrew Savikas
August 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.

Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.

Andrew Savikas
July 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap:

However, the past six months have reportedly seen the critical pieces fall into place. Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction. He's since cemented the device in the company's 2010 roadmap, where it's being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple's internal affairs.

That means that the device, which is expected to retail for somewhere between the cost of a high-end iPhone and Apple's most affordable Mac notebook, is bound to turn up any time between January and March, should there be no last minute setbacks. Analyst's following the Cupertino-based company may consider factoring first full-quarter sales of the device into their models for calendar Q2.

The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a "Kindle killer" that will upset Amazon's apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It's understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it's doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an "ereader" any more than it sees the iPhone as "a GPS device." (The speculation stems from a piece in the Financial Times quoting an anonymous "publishing executive" and saying Apple has been talking to publishers.) Apple also talked to major newspapers before the iPhone launched, but they didn't build the iPhone as a mobile newspaper.

Some have been speculating about whether Apple would ink deals with aggregators like OverDrive or Ingram Digital to secure ebook content for a tablet. But that assumes that Apple sees a need to directly deal with ebooks the way they deal with music, and I don't believe that's likely. While it's possible they'd beef up the native PDF capabilities in a larger device, I think it's much more likely they'll establish the market (the App Store) and the platform (some variant on the iPhone SDK), and let developers and content creators take care of the rest, the way they have already on the iPhone with games.

Seeking Alpha has a nice analysis of Tablet Fever, and correctly places any discussion of news or books in the context of the App Store, where it firmly belongs:

Steve Jobs has mentioned that he has never seen anything like success of the App Store in his career. If he is saying that, then I'm saying that this 9.7 inch iTouch that has been designed to optimally utilize the apps will become the flagship Apple product... The order of operations for the iPhone are phone first, iPod second, Apps third, and Internet browser fourth. This new iTouch is principally designed to take advantage of the App Store gaming, books, news, entertainment, social networking, etc...

What Ebook Resellers Should Learn from Scribd

Andrew Savikas
July 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (13) | Listen

Scribd made a splash when they opened up a "Scribd Store" for selling view and download access to documents. Their terms (80% to the document publisher) are quite generous, though one reason publishers keep so much is that most of the merchandising (including pricing) is self service -- Scribd could learn a lot from other media retailers if they're interested in really promoting document sales.

But one area where existing ebook resellers could really learn from Scribd is in terms of data access and reporting. During one particularly frustrating conversation with an ebook reseller just last week, I learned that we'd be lucky to get sales reports nearly 6 weeks after any sales. These are digital sales. On the Web. Paid by credit card. No inventory to track, no shipping, no check or invoice processing.

Compare that to Scribd, where I get an email every time a document is sold telling me how much it sold for, and the total lifetime earnings for that document. I can also view a graph showing document views over time:

And every single day I get a detailed summary of document activity (this is a very small excerpt):

Here's your daily summary of what's happened with your Scribd account since 
you last checked out the site.

 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "Apache 2 Pocket Reference by O'Reilly Media"!     
 7 minutes ago
 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "JRuby Cookbook by O'Reilly Media"!        
 7 minutes ago
 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "Analyzing Business Data with Excel by O'Reilly Media"!    
 31 minutes ago
 ------------------------

Maria added your document "Tomcat: The Definitive Guide by O'Reilly Media" to their list of favorites
        
 39 minutes ago
 ------------------------

There's also quite a variety of reporting formats and interfaces in the wild among ebook resellers, meaning lots of time is spent by either IT staff or accounting staff (or both) parsing and processing each flavor of report. Though there is a Digital Sales Report format, I haven't heard about any reseller actually using it (if you know of one, tell me in the comments).

Success on the Web requires nearly realtime analytics, and that's one area of ebook retailing Scribd seems to really understand.

Inside Look at RAND's $9.95 Ebook Pricing Strategy

John Warren
June 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Recently, the RAND Corporation announced that it has revised the suggested retail pricing on all RAND ebooks to $9.95 each. RAND ebooks are available through a wide variety of wholesale and retail partners.

The press release provided some explanation for the decision, also discussed in Publishers Weekly. I have been asked by Tools of Change to provide some additional insight into our ebook pricing strategy.

There were several things that went into our thinking on, as one of my colleagues appropriately called it, this "new math." Some of these factors will generally not apply to other publishers, though I do believe some factors should, and eventually will, affect other publishers' pricing strategies as well.

• First of all, and this is important, RAND is not a traditional publisher. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. RAND research, which spans a broad base of subjects and is funded through hundreds of resources, is dedicated to serving the public interest. RAND's focus is on conducting objective, high-quality research, and every publication endures a rigorous review processes. These exacting standards are the foundation of RAND's impeccable reputation throughout the world. No consideration is made on whether a particular topic or book might be a good title for sales -- the emphasis is on quality of the research. In addition, RAND's revenue comes primarily from its research and philanthropic support, not from the sales of books and ebooks.
• Going along with the first point, a crucial component of RAND's mission is operating in the public interest. This was written into the our charter, in 1948: "To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." This is one of the reasons why we post all of our publicly available books and reports online for free PDF download; we had ~4.3 million PDF downloads from our site last year. Dissemination is more important than sales. (I do believe there is a compelling argument, supported by many, that free electronic dissemination helps drive sales, instead of cannibalizing sales.) We have posted all new titles since 1998 on our Web site, and sales of book sales have still increased during that period.
• Book sales help support the marketing and publishing program, but the main consideration, as a nonprofit, is to break even, not recoup a huge profit. Book sales need to recoup the costs of printing, distribution, marketing, etc., and with ebooks, conversion costs.
• Previously, we had been pricing ebooks at the price of the printed book, which in our case is nearly always paperback; we publish few hardcovers. This seems to be the most common model for publishers, price the ebook at the print price. RAND prints nearly everything print on demand (POD), and sells the majority of our print titles through our distributor, NBN, so the price of the print book factors in POD and distribution costs. POD cost rises when the book is longer in length and/or has color charts or graphs. Thus one book may be priced at $44 because of color charts, another may be $25 because it is shorter in length and entirely black and white. These factors have nothing to do with an ebook, however. Ebooks are agnostic as to length (except as the length may affect the costs of editing) and color charts and graphs have no bearing compared to black and white in terms of ebook costs.
• We have no manufacturing, distribution, or warehouse costs with ebooks, nor do we have to deal with returns, so the back end is much cleaner.
• I believe firmly that customers have an expectation, which is only likely to grow, that ebooks should cost less than printed books. I believe this is being reinforced, but not driven by, Amazon's decision to make many Kindle ebooks $9.95, even when they must pay the publisher more. I don't believe they pulled that number out of thin air, though that is possible. At $9.95, RAND hopes to make up in volume what it may lose in profits from a higher price on each ebook.
• Library funding is tight. Increasingly, libraries want to buy ebooks on demand, when a patron asks for it, not before. Jobbers and wholesalers are now entering into relationships with ebook distributors to aggregate ebook purchases, and the library market is a key market for us to reach. Libraries may balk at $35 for a printed book, or lack the shelf space to store it, but they can afford and store a $9.95 ebook.
• Since we post PDFs for free download, two reasons we are able to sell ebooks on other sites such as Amazon.com, Books 24x7, EBL/ebooks.com, ebrary, Ingram Digital/ MyiLibrary, netLibrary and Questia, and soon Sony and Overdrive, is from a convenience standpoint (customer has a particular device and wants it seamlessly integrated, or a library subscribes to an ebook service and makes all titles available to their patrons) and/or ignorance (the customer may not be aware that we post PDFs for free). I don't want to bank on customer ignorance, but the convenience factor can hold up over time.

These are the main factors influencing our decision making on this new ebook strategy. It will be interesting to see if others follow.

John Warren is marketing director, publications, at the RAND Corporation. He contributes to the Publishing Frontier blog. He was recently selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper, "Innovation and the Future of ebooks," which is available for free download on the RAND Web site.

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times:

Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We don't believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go," he said.

He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover -- typically around $13 or $14.

In addition -- and this is pure conjecture on my part -- Google's push into HTML 5 is a potential shot across the bow of e-reader manufacturers. Assuming it's widely implemented, HTML 5 will further blur the line between standalone software and Web browsers/cloud-based content. Toss in Google's Chrome browser and the Gears plugin and you can see how the dots (might) connect.

According to the Times, Google intends to launch its ebook project in 2009. This effort is separate from the pending Book Search agreement.

Related Stories:

• TeleRead: "Google wants to sell e-book access directly: ePub ramifications? Not just hassles for Amazon?"
• paidContent: "Google Promises Publishers (And Amazon) Will Sell E-Books In 2009"
• New York Times: "Steal This Book (for $9.99)"
• Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader

Amazon's Physical vs. Digital Dissonance

Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

In March of 2008, I wrote about the frustrating experience of trying to get this blog added to Kindle. Fourteen months later, apparently that "rather large ingestion queue" is still full, because the blog never showed up, and I never heard another peep about it. (There is now a self-publishing feature for blogs, but as with their self-publishing book feature (known as DTP), the standard terms of service you must accept to participate aren't something many commercial publishers will be willing or eager to swallow.)

As you might expect, Amazon is one of our biggest customers, and our relationship with them is an important one. They give us far more (virtual of course) "shelf space" than most retailers could possibly provide, and their lean ordering systems mean much less exposure to the risk of significant returns. But much of the efficiency and innovation that is the hallmark of their physical-goods business doesn't seem to be translating into their newer digital programs.

Cory Doctorow has a post over on boing-boing venting his own frustrations with trying to get answers from Amazon:

I love Amazon's physical-goods business. I buy everything from them, from my coffee-maker to my DVDs. I love their consumer-friendly policies, and their innovative business practices. I just wish their electronic delivery business was as good as their physical goods side.

(For the record, we're the "major publisher" Cory references -- I passed his questions along to my own contacts on the Kindle team, and despite repeated attempts haven't been able to get a response either.)

I do understand that many of these are new products and systems, and it's inevitable that there will be glitches and problems; it's often important to be willing to be "good enough" in order to move quickly. But some of these things are bordering on the absurd (like the 14-month wait for ingestion of this blog...). For example,  while we were thrilled they worked quickly to help us get The Twitter Book up for sale on Kindle, for more than two weeks (until just last Friday) the product page for the print version not only didn't show the Kindle version as available, it actually included a link saying "Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle." Sigh.

In the wake of releasing about 200 of our books onto Kindle, more than one customer complained that the Preview wasn't up to par:

@timoreilly I love how the Kindle sample of the Twitter book doesn't even get past the preface for the book. Not much of a sample.

Turns out the default preview percentage is 5% of the book, so we asked if we could dial that up to 20% (in line with the amount included in a preview of one of our books on Google Book Search). The response? Since we're the only publisher that's asked for it, it's not a high priority change they're prepared to make right now. (Note to other publishers: please let Amazon know you'd like the option to increase the preview percentage on your Kindle books.)

Amazon is a business like any other, and they're entitled to prioritize as they see fit. And I hope that all of the new vendors, sites, and services popping up (or ramping up) to sell ebooks create some urgency for Amazon to improve their own programs so they're as efficient in the digital supply chain as they are in the physical one.

Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

Andrew Savikas
May 17, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar:

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.

Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.

Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:

Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)