Entries tagged with “amazon” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales
Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009
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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.
Amazon Acquires Lexcycle
Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009
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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?
Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader
Mac Slocum
March 19, 2009
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Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale:
Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices.
In the exclusive TeleRead interview, Steve [Haber, President of Sony's Digital Reading Division] emphasized that this program is part of Sony's commitment to an open platform, as opposed to the closed platform of its major competitor (hint, hint, the name starts with an A). The ePub conversion is being done by Google itself, as noted; and Sony and Google are exploring ways to make copyrighted ePub material available.
Catalog expansion and mobile devices are propelling recent ebook/e-reader announcements. Google Book Search opened mobile access to its archive of public domain books in February, and Amazon recently made its Kindle titles available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through a free iPhone app.
Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific
Mac Slocum
March 16, 2009
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Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices:
For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures. [Link included in original post.]
Kindle Comes to the iPhone
Mac Slocum
March 4, 2009
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Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:
The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.
Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.
Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App
I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.
Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion
(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)
Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.
First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone
(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)
... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.
Kindle for iPhone Review
(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)
Read more…... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.
At TOC: Video from Yesterday's Kindle Announcement
Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009
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Courtesy of Phil Torrone at makezine.com, here's video from yesterday's Kindle announcement:
Amazon Announces Kindle 2
Mac Slocum
February 9, 2009
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I've got just enough time between TOC tutorial sessions for a quick Kindle 2 post.
As anticipated, Amazon unveiled Kindle 2 this morning. The $359 update is thinner (0.36 inches) and lighter (10 ounces) than the original Kindle. It also includes updated navigation, more storage (2GB; approximately 1,500 titles) and a screen capable of handling 16 shades of gray. Kindle 2 will be released on Feb. 24.
The one feature that really caught my eye is the Kindle's new text-to-speech function:
You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free.
Amazon Dropping Non-Amazon Ebook Formats (Sort of)
Andrew Savikas
January 27, 2009
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Via Publishers Weekly, Amazon announced Monday it will stop offering ebooks in formats other than Kindle and Mobipocket:
In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.
A contact at Amazon has clarified that apparently this change only applies to the Kindle:
This does not apply to eDocs because they are not DRM-protected. This only applies to DRM-protected eBooks.
A follow-up question about Kindle support of EPUB resulted in a polite but firm redirect to "the Kindle team."
I know Amazon is a big company, and I know all too well how difficult intra-office communication can be even at a much smaller company like O'Reilly, but with Amazon in particular it's really easy to get the sense that the left hand has very little idea what the right hand is doing (or perhaps "third left tentacle doesn't know what the right tentacle is doing" is more appropriate).
"Amazon Tax" Moves Forward in New York
Mac Slocum
January 14, 2009
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A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press:
The law applies to companies that don't have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent -- someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.
In this case, "agent" is synonymous with "affiliate." Amazon and other online retailers share a cut of revenue generated by affiliate referrals. If further appeals go against Amazon and, as expected, other states jump on the sales tax bandwagon, affiliate programs of all sorts could take a major hit.
The AP notes that the law applies to "companies that have $10,000 or more in New York sales." There's some confusion around this $10,000 figure -- does it apply to companies that run affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon) and generate $10,000 or more in New York-based sales, or does it refer to affiliates who earn $10,000 through revenue share agreements? According to Law.com, the company that sells the products is held to the $10,000 standard. As such, a company could not skirt the law by cutting off individual New York-based affiliates before they reach $10,000 in referral sales. To avoid collecting New York sales tax altogether, companies would have to limit the combined income from all New York affiliates to less than $10,000.
Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog:
The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.
Human-generated Mechanical Turk results can be a wildcard -- and the lack of instant gratification is a disadvantage -- but this method could theoretically expand mobile product apps beyond text messages and barcode readers.
Tracking Amazon's Dominance in the Book Industry
Mac Slocum
October 17, 2008
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Morris Rosenthal says retail figures point to Amazon eclipsing Barnes & Nobles in U.S. book sales this year:
The book selling wars that began four decades ago with the rise of the mall chains, followed by the growing power of the Barnes & Noble, Borders and BAM superstore chains, has been won by Amazon. Amazon sales are on track for double-digit gains again this year, aided in part by high fuel prices discouraging trips to the regional superstores that have replaced so many local bookstores. Amazon's North American growth in media sales (books, music and movies) may exceed the incredible 23% gain they turned in last year. Amazon is on pace to sell more books in the US than the entire Barnes & Noble chain in 2008, even allowing for a higher music and video mix. If you add Amazon's international stores to the mix, they will easily sell more books than Barnes & Nobles plus Borders this year.
Report: No Kindle Launch in UK This Year
Mac Slocum
October 16, 2008
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Europe's complicated mobile landscape will prevent the Kindle from launching in the UK this year, reports The BookSeller:
In an interview with The Bookseller, Brian McBride, managing director of Amazon in the UK, said it was not yet clear when the Kindle would launch in the country ... "In Europe it is a minefield as there are so many [mobile] operators. If you buy a Kindle in the UK and want to read it on the beach on holiday in Spain, unless we have signed deals in Spain it is not going to work on that beach."
Sony's Reader does not include mobile or Wi-Fi connectivity, which may have expedited its recent launch in the UK.
Open Question: How Can Publishers Capitalize on Hot Topics?
Mac Slocum
October 15, 2008
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You can't fault Newsweek and Amazon for cashing in on pre-election interest with a series of Kindle-only candidate biographies. There's certainly nothing wrong with profitable aggregation of content, either. But the efficiencies gained from ebooks, e-readers and print on demand raise secondary questions I'd like to explore with the TOC Community:
- Can long-form content (print or digital) effectively capitalize on trendy subjects?
- Is there still a market for quickie books? Can they compete with Web content?
- Should publishers use Web/digital as a testbed for hot topics, then provide long-form content down the road? Or, will this technique spread them too thin?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Amazon Launches UK POD Service; Partner Unknown
Mac Slocum
October 7, 2008
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TheBookseller says Amazon is launching a print-on-demand service in the United Kingdom:
Amazon.com owns POD publisher BookSurge in the US, but the UK business has not divulged who will be handling the printing of POD titles in the UK.
In April, a spokesperson for Amazon.co.uk said the company -- at that time -- had no plans to bring BookSurge to the UK.
New Sony E-Reader Has Touchscreen, No Web Connection
Mac Slocum
October 3, 2008
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Web connectivity has always been the key difference between the Kindle and Sony's Reader. With Sony's release of its third-generation e-reader, Web connectivity is still the big separator. The PRS-700 is faster and offers more storage than its predecessors, but it does not include a Wi-Fi or cellular option.
The PRS-700's most notable upgrades are an LED reading light and a touchscreen interface. From CNET's Crave:
Like the iPhone and other next-gen touch-screen phones that have been appearing lately, the Reader incorporates some gesture-based commands. You can swipe your finger across the display to page forward or back (you can choose between a left or right swipe to advance pages in the settings menu). Swiping and holding your finger down at the end of the swipe allows you to advance or rewind through pages at a fast clip.
The new Reader will be available in November for $399.99.
Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo
Liza Daly
September 26, 2008
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Last week I was in New York for the city's first Web 2.0 Expo. I was a member of the program committee and one of our goals was to make it a uniquely New York event. This meant a real focus on measurable outcomes and integrating Web 2.0 principles into established business, in contrast with the more startup-friendly atmosphere of the San Francisco event. The fact that the conference ran during the week of the Wall Street meltdown only reinforced the need for pragmatism in tough economic times.
Naturally I was interested in applying what I learned to the publishing world. If you couldn't make it to the event, here were my big take-aways:
Web 2.0 is social software
Consultant Dion Hinchcliffe's tutorial on the Web 2.0 landscape summed it up best: Web 2.0 means software that gets better the more people use it. This is radically different from traditional software development, which gets better only when programmers add new features. (In the case of Microsoft Word, it generally gets worse.)
The best example in the publishing space is LibraryThing, which has a more accurate book catalog than Amazon.com, but also content found nowhere else. My favorites are the Legacy Libraries, which collect works associated with famous dead people. The Legacy Library project illustrates a related principle of Web 2.0: encourage unintended uses. LibraryThing was designed for individuals to catalog and rate their own books, but this user-driven initiative has added tremendous unexpected value.
Thinking outside the box
That is, outside of a single computer (geeks like to call them "boxes"). More Web applications are either being built on top of other services, or make use of so-called cloud computing. Amazon, Google and other providers now offer a wealth of ready-made software and infinite computing power to allow companies to leapfrog over problems of cost and scaling.
Only a few years ago when I was approached by a publisher to start a project, we would begin at the beginning: purchasing a computer, selecting a service provider, writing some HTML, crunching some data. With services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, there's no longer any need to buy hardware: instantly an application can be deployed on one computer, or a thousand, at very low cost. This makes experimentation much more feasible: if no users come to a new product, no expensive hardware investment has been wasted. If it's successful, a few keystrokes can add 10X the computing power.
Cloud computing has also created tremendous benefit for offline processing tasks, as shown by The New York Times when converting their digitized archive for use on the Web.
It's not just about people, it's about data
Finally, Toby Segaran's talk on "The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data" reminded me how much value publishers have. Toby explored clever ways of finding usually-expensive data for free (for example, rather than paying for Yellow Page listings of restaurants, he scraped the New York City health department Web site, which includes ratings of every food-service facility).
Diving deeper, he emphasized how much value can be added to digital services if they are already full of content. Wikipedia came preloaded with a public domain encyclopedia, as it's much easier to correct or update old content than to enter it wholesale. The more of your content that users can find and interact with (for example, by providing an extensive full-content backlist), the more engaged they'll be.
Speaker presentations for the conference are available here: Web 2.0 NYC presentations.
The Kindle, the Cloud and Mixed Signals
Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008
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Adam Hodgkin notes a discrepancy between Amazon's cloud-computing efforts and the Kindle. From Exact Editions:
If Amazon decides to switch tack on the Kindle and treat it simply as a blank slate on which users can rent rather than outright buy titles, they will have the infrastructure in place to make this change. Amazon is a true believer in the 'cloud' for next generation computing, but it apparently thinks that digital books are different: droplets on the ground rather than nodes in the cloud network.
Amazon and Google Challenging iTunes through Mobile
Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008
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T-Mobile's Android-based mobile phone will include a connection to Amazon's MP3 store. From Wired's Listening Post:
Owners of the device will be able to browse, search, preview and purchase music on the Amazon MP3 store using the phone's cellular connection. In order for purchased MP3s to download, the phone must be connected via Wi-Fi. (The mobile iTunes store, on the other hand, remains completely offline without WiFi.)
CNET Pops the Kindle's Hood and Takes Pictures
Mac Slocum
September 17, 2008
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CNET/Tech Republic cracks open the Kindle and takes an in-depth look at its hardware. Check out the photo gallery.
Kindle vs Sony Reader: Battle of Distribution Channels
Mac Slocum
September 17, 2008
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The face-off between Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader is broadening beyond tech specs and ebook formats. Now it's a battle of distribution channels.
Sony started selling its PRS-505 e-reader and related accessories in Target stores earlier this week. Sony Readers are also available through Borders, Waterstone's, and Web retailers, including third-party sellers on Amazon.
Amazon's Kindle push is limited to one very large Web channel: Amazon. But will that be enough to seize the e-reader market? Joe Wikert recently touched on this topic:
... Amazon has an awareness problem. They might be thrilled with the device's sales rate up to now. It may have exceeded their greatest expectations. They apparently insist on capturing 100% of the revenue for it though, hence their direct-only sales model. Meanwhile, Sony is chipping away by embracing the EPub format and striking distribution deals with Borders and now Target.
The Web has a tendency to amplify messages beyond their natural boundaries, sometimes to the point where Web hits are incorrectly projected as surefire mainstream blockbusters -- be they devices or movies or anything else that generates ample Web interest. Amazon's reach and the Kindle's technology -- especially its wireless capabilities -- have painted the Kindle as the dominant device in Web circles. But hit products need to resonate with the millions of people who don't pour through RSS feeds on an hourly basis, and Sony knows a thing or two about nurturing the mass market. Assuming we eventually receive confirmed e-reader sales figures, it'll be interesting to see how Amazon's mix of online publicity and Amazon-only distribution stacks up against Sony's traditional approach.
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