Tag: Kindle

Amazon is Selling More Kindle Books than Paperbacks

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First, Amazon announced that Kindle Books were outselling Hardcovers. Now, Kindle Books have outpaced paperbacks. For every 100 paperback books the company has sold, they have sold 115 Kindle books. During the same period, they sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These numbers are for the United States, of course.

The Amazon Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, of which 670,000 are $9.99 or less, in addition to millions of out of copyright titles.

But why is this the truth?

  • The Price is Right: The Kindle 3 Wi-Fi is $139, and $50 extra gets you lifetime 3G. They will likely continue to try and bring the price to sub-$100.
  • You don’t need a Kindle to Read Kindle Books: There are Kindle apps for every mobile platform, desktop(Linux excepted), and for the Web(full content pending). You can read a book anywhere.
  • Whispersync: Not only can you read it anywhere, but it remembers where you where you left off when device-hopping.
  • Simplicity: Amazon focused on a replacement to the book experience. It didn’t try to make a device that did everything, like a tablet. It may make one of these someday, however. But their design focuses on readability, battery life, etc.

And we say all this being a latecomer to the Kindle, after we thought it was too expensive, during the early days.

Traditional Print Media is Missing Online Opportunities

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Front page of The New York Times on Armistice ...
Image via Wikipedia

We’ve been in the midst of a free trial of the New York Times on the Amazon Kindle platform. We’ve looked at it both on the Amazon Kindle App for Android and on the Kindle itself. And it falls flat. But don’t take our word for it. The New York Times is the number 1 selling newspaper on the platform, and is offered at $19.99 a month. After the introductory offer of $5.70 a week, delivery of the actual Times is $11.70 a week in our neighborhood here in New York City.

If you explain the reduction in cost as being due to no printing or distribution costs, then this should be a phenomenal deal. But it is severely lacking. Many sections and features are missing from the Kindle edition. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Kevin C. Tofel, who is the mobile site editor for GigaOm, when we were complaining about this on Twitter, commented, “yup, after reading today’s NYT for Kindle on the plane home, I agree. More like a local web version than an ebook newspaper.”

Reading the Amazon reviews of the product, you see many people complaining about being unwilling to pay this price for partial news, and missing sections. Why would anyone pay $20 a month to get less than they can get on the New York Times website for free? Where is the value-added product? It is why, like many, we have no plans to continue our subscription past the free trial. Why is the New York Times putting out an inferior version of their product? There were similar complaints in other of the top papers and magazines. Missing content was the biggest complaint.

Most customers want a e-version of their newspaper to be a reproduction of the paper experience and to be formatted the same across multiple platforms(to the best extent possible). We can use the website, but the point of downloading a complete file is that we get everything without the need for constant connection. These issues are not limited to one platform.

Electronic subscriptions are up, but overall, subscriptions are down. If print media cannot put out its A game, then is it any surprise if it fails to succeed in paid digital subscriptions, and ultimately at preserving its relevance in a connected world.

Someone give us a top-quality electronic newspaper or magazine, or even just top quality online content packaged for our use. Give us something worth paying for, and people will pay for it. Not everyone, but those people unwilling to pay for content are not the target audience for newspapers or magazines.

What do you think?

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Digital Content: Do you really own it? Shouldn’t you?

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A U.S. book and its licensed Chinese page by p...
Image via Wikipedia

Earlier, while writing the first installment of our new series, Downstreaming, the issue of digital content ownership came into play. After all, we don’t own digital content, we own a license for it. If you buy a DVD, you own it. If you buy a book, you own it. The fact that we don’t own our content is somewhat disturbing.

Let’s take the Kindle license agreement. The Kindle, of course, was a top seller in 2010. Here is the Kindle license.

“Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may post additional terms for Digital Content in the Kindle Store. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.”

So, we can view, use and display content. We do not, however, have a right to download such content in perpetuity, which makes one wonder what might happen if Amazon changes the configuration of the Kindle store someday in the future. Would the content we have work on the 20th generation Kindle?

The Nook store does not cover the issue in their terms of use.

Then there is Amazon VOD, which we discussed in this article. There, if your content becomes unavailable, even though you paid for it…you are just out of luck.

For other media services, the content is stored locally, but the license requires access to a server to authenticate. And those servers will not work in perpetuity. While we think that if you buy something, steps should be taken to ensure its continuity. Companies should advise you of how they plan to do that.

A recent Pew study found that 65% of users have paid for online content. On the media side of that:  33% was music, 18% was newspaper or journal content, and 16% were movies or TV shows. The average expense being $47 per month for material downloaded or accessed overall, be it subscription(23%) or individual file access(16%) or accessing streaming content(8%).

These numbers will only be going up and these questions should be answered by companies. But they likely won’t any time soon. Companies would prefer that online, rental prevails, with no purchase. Why not make you repurchase something you’ve already bought before with no value-added…just a chance to continue to make money off their property?

It is why, despite our love of technology, physical books and physical copies of media are unlikely to die any time soon. As long as companies can rescind our ability to use something we’ve lawfully purchased, other pros and cons aside, they are not going anywhere.

Some Observations on the Kindle and E-Book Reading

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Amazon Kindle PDF
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Over a month ago now, our editor went out and bought a Kindle. This was a hard decision, as we had spent a lot of time over here at Gadget Wisdom talking about how we weren’t going to buy a Kindle. Of course, when we said that, it cost significantly more than the $139 we paid to buy a Kindle.

Amazon announced this week you can now give Kindle books as gifts to anyone with an email address. This is a tremendous boost in possibilities. You get to give more thought to a gift than an Amazon gift card. And if the person doesn’t like it, they can get the gift card instead. We eagerly await the day we open up an email and discover that someone has gifted us a book.

The latest generation Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces, and measures 4.8 by 7.5 inches. Mashable suggests the true audience for a dedicated e-reader is someone who travels frequently, has overcrowded bookshelves, or read books for hours at a time. We focued on the overcrowded bookshelf issue. One commenter on the same story described the Kindle as “the ideal bridge for those interested in moving to a paperless environment.”

So, why did we go with the Kindle? We already had the Kindle App on Android, along with the Nook App, the Borders app, and Aldiko Book Reader. We read an entire e-book on the Droid, and it is doable. But it is a little screen. The 7″ screen is such a good, yet portable size, we’re already wondering about 7″ Android tablets(but that’s another blog post entirely).

We don’t really like DRM. If we have a choice between DRM and DRM-free, the DRM-free gets our business. So we buy O’Reilly books directly from O’Reilly, and then port them to Android and Kindle ourselves. But, with the Kindle app available on all platforms(save Linux), making it relatively easy to use your property anywhere, it is hardly the restriction that some DRM programs are.

Earlier today, we tried a free trial of a magazine on Kindle…a magazine we used to read every month. While we quickly cancelled our trial, as that title did not provide the value we desired, we still wished to read more content off the screen and on the Kindle…which is where Calibre, which we previously mentioned, comes in.

Because, as many have said before. With all the information overload that we experience with real time information sources like Twitter and such…it is nice to have a device where we can focus on what we are reading.

The next step we may do is the elimination of our classics sections in favor of Kindle books. Kindle versions of the classics are free of charge. And the shelf space would be most welcome. We’ve bought too many books to have room for more without losing something And that is why the Kindle works.

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Fun with Instapaper

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Image representing Instapaper as depicted in C...
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In the course of reading and assembling topics to write for Gadget Wisdom and other sites, we come across many different articles we may wish to reference later. Which means, as there are never enough hours in the day, we end up with stuff we need to read or review later.

You can bookmark the site, as we did, but keep doing that and you end up with a very crowded bookmark list with things that stay there long beyond their usefulness.

Recently, we decided to try Instapaper as an alternative. We set up folders for our categories, and a pull down menu of bookmarklets that save the current displayed URL into them. We use Google Reader to read blogs, and it offers a Send To function for stories that will send them right to Instapaper.

On the Android, we are recommending Instafetch, as the paid version supports folders, unlike the free Everpaper. If you want to save money, of course you can move things into folders later.

If you don’t have the desire for any apps, you can forward emails with links directly to a special Instapaper email address. Or, our personal favorite, email your Instapaper articles as a Kindle book to your Kindle for reading.

Instapaper is not new, but being as we just started using it, it seemed worth a a bit of a review. Try it out. And if you have thoughts for improving our workflow, send them on along.

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Why You Might Finally Give in and Buy a Kindle

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booting up the Kindle 3
Image by The Shifted Librarian via Flickr

It is time to revisit the pros and cons of the Kindle, which has finally plummeted into the land of reasonable pricing. Let’s go back to some of the reasons we quoted for buying and not buying a Kindle last year, and update it a bit.

Reasons to Buy a Kindle

  • It’s Great For Travel
  • You can email files to your Kindle address. With the new Wi-Fi option, you can do so for free. Over 3G it costs a few cents. But you can set a threshold to avoid overcharging
  • It looks great. Especially in graphite. The screen is much more conducive to long periods of reading than a conventional LCD screen. They’ve really improved the contrast. It is still in greyscale, but this is for reading. You want color, go to your computer.
  • Almost any book is available. And publishers and content owners can pull out old and out of print books and sell them on the Kindle as there is only a small cost to start out. Crunchgear reports the U.S. Kindle store has over 700,000 books. Barnes and Noble claims more, but includes public domain books in its tally, something Amazon apparently does not.
  • It is the future. Paper books won’t die, we don’t want them to.
  • You can switch seamlessly between your Kindle and reading the book on your computer, smartphone, etc. as Amazon has released Kindle apps for most major platforms.
  • Amazon is a large, stable company and the likelihood of them discontinuing the Kindle and taking your e-books with them is probably slim.

Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle

  • Books…old ones at least, can be cheaper.
  • There is still a value to the printed book
  • No expansion slot, but the new one has 4GB of memory, which is an estimated 3,500 books.
  • It must be charged. Your paper book never needs any batteries. Admittedly, advertised battery life is measured in weeks, not hours like most devices.
  • You are locked into the Kindle format. Your property is licensed, not owned, and you cannot move it to other platforms.
  • It doesn’t support EPUB format, which means you’d have to convert any book delivered in that format.
  • It doesn’t support lending, which the Nook limitedly does.
  • You can read periodicals for free online, why do they make you pay to subscribe to a blog?

Just remember, when we started advising against the cost of an e-book reader, it cost about four hundred dollars. For that price you could buy a computer. Now, at $139 for the wi-fi only version that we bought, or $50 more for adding 3G, it is at a price point that makes it more realistic. We’d like to see sub-$100 pricing soon, at least on the wi-fi version. The Kindle has estimated sales of about 5 million since it launched in 2007. The latest one is so popular it keeps getting sold out. The Nook, by comparison, has sold 1 million since it launched last year.

Books are are an over twenty billion a year business. About eight percent of U.S. readers use an e-book reader and in a recent poll, twelve percent of Americans said they are likely to get one within the next six months. Of course, the same poll indicated that e-reader purchasers were more likely to read(not a big surprise) and that the majority of them read more now than they did six months ago.

“”Customers tell us they love the freedom and flexibility of our Buy Once, Read Everywhere approach because they always have their full reading library at their fingertips and never lose their place in a book-whether they are reading on a Kindle or one of their other favorite devices,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle, in a recent press release announcing an update to Kindle for Android. The idea is this. If your platform is locked down, but you can get it on any device, is that not the type of DRM you can live with? The biggest complaint about DRM is the lack of portability. We’d like to see things more open, but given the choice between DRM content and no content at all…

In the music business, choosing between DRM-music and buying a CD kept us with CDs, which could be turned into DRM free music. We’ll see what happens. For the Kindle, the issue of library lending has to be handled. the revenue from selling licenses and services to libraries can be a wonderful one if they unveil a system to do so. Why should Overdrive Media Console and Adobe Digital Editions have this market?

To go back to the issue of EPUB and loading your own stuff onto it…you can load PDF files onto it. And if you don’t want to hook up via USB, you can email it to username@free.kindle.com to get it over Wireless. username@kindle.com to be charged for over 3G. And programs like Calibre, which we will get into in another post, can be set up to not only convert e-books from Google and Project Gutenberg, but support Kindle profiles and assemble news sources into an e-book format and autotransfer it to the Kindle every day, so you do not get charged(which you will if you subscribe to same through Amazon).

There is one final thing we have to get to. Many of us, including our editor, are Android phone users. Reading books on a 3-4 inch phone screen is doable, but it is small and can hurt one’s eyes. so, while it is doable for short periods, there is still a market for a device more conducive to reading.

And even with the larger LCD screen, the iPad hasn’t killed the Kindle yet, has it?

What do you think?

Didn’t Buy an Ebook Reader – But We Were Alone

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The front of the Kindle 1 (Left) and Kindle 2 ...
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For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

Update: Since this post, we have now purchased a Kindle. The price is now manageable. See below link to current Kindle offering.

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Should You Still Wait to Buy a Kindle?

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Amazon is cutting the price of its Kindle 2 to $259, the second drop in the last few months. It is also offering an ‘international’ Kindle for $279, with shipping to begin on October 19th. Books downloaded internationally will cost an extra $1.99. This does free up a gap in the service, namely overseas, and connects Amazon to AT&T over Sprint.

Amazon has said  that Kindle books now represent 48% of total book sales when both Kindle and paper versions are available, up from 35% in May and 13% in February, but no statistics have been revealed on how many units have been sold, but Kindle owners seem to buy a lot of books.

So, with the latest price drop, is it finally time to buy a Kindle? Maybe. But we’d prefer it to hit around $200 before it becomes too tempting to resist, especially with the bulk of new e-book readers coming and Google’s E-Book initiative.

Competition produces innovation. Amazon has said it would not mind selling Kindle books to people with other E-book readers, which would be a smart move for the company. But either way, in another few months, the price will likely be where we want it to be. What do you think?

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We Still Want a Kindle – But We Don’t Want To Want It

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Amazon Kindle
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Last week, Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle to $299, a reduction of $60. We want a Kindle, but we don’t want to want a Kindle. It is still a bit pricey for its limitations.

What does that mean? Well, the Kindle is the greatest e-book reader out there…not because of its hardware, but because of the sheer amount of titles Amazon offers and the ease of getting them through the Kindle. The smartest thing Amazon could do is license the Kindle source to anyone, and we still await that.

Reports indicate that Amazon is exploring ad-supported Kindle books for additional revenue. Publishers are afraid Amazon will force them to lower their profit margins on e-books. Publishers hope new players like PlasticLogic, FirstPaper, ScrollMotion, and Google‘s e-publishing service could help turn the tables in their favor. But so far, Amazon has an early lead.

We are hoping competition does come along. Google plans to sell readers online access to digital versions of various books, and the books would be cached in their browser when offline. This seems like an improved system. A simple browser plugin could handle this. They appear, for their early copyright-free public domain books, to be working with the ePub format, which is an official open standard.

Our fondest dream is to use the Kindle to free up space. We have so many shelves of books. Some of them could be digitized. We’ve done this when we rid ourselves of most of our VHS cassettes and started to replace audio cassettes with CDs.

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Why you Might Rethink Buying a Kindle

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A while back, we commented on why a Kindle might not be so cost-effective.

Today, things change. On Wednesday, the Kindle DX was introduced. It will be an alternative, not a replacement for the Kindle 2. It boasts a 9.7-inch display with auto-rotation, high-speed wireless access to 275,000 books, 3.3 gigabytes of storage(roughly 3,500 books), native support for PDF documents, with no panning, zooming or scrolling necessary.

The product will begin shipping this summer and will cost $489. Three newspapers will offer a reduced price on the Kindle DX in exchange for a long-term subscription: The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. This is where one might reconsider the Kindle, if the reduction is enough to justify the purchase. However, this apparently will only be offered where Home Delivery of the papers are not. That may be offered through the Kindle 2 as well. Details are not yet available.

The Kindle DX eliminates some of the problems with the Kindle…namely that documents are printed on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper most commonly, and the Kindle 2 is half that size at 6 inches. The DX has 2.5 times the surface area. Amazon has reached agreements with three leading textbook publishers that represent 60 percent of the market: Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley(But not McGraw-Hill Education.). Thus, the Kindle DX will be a perfect tool for college campuses, where textbook savings(hopefully) can be applied toward the device. Students will try out the Kindle DX this fall at Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Reed College and Pace.

As Techcrunch pointed out, for the 275,000 books that are available on the Kindle, sales are already 35 percent of the same books in print. That is a shocking statistic.  But while we continue to be impressed by the Kindle and its variants, the price tag is still a matter of concern. BusinessInsider pointed out devices you can buy for less than $489, including a netbook, iPhone, AppleTV, Wii, Xbox 360, 22″ LCD HDTV, etc.

Which is our point. When given the choice between a netbook and a Kindle, we opted for the netbook, where we can read the New York Times and most news sources free with a net connection. It isn’t a dedicated device, which has its pros and cons, and it lacks the always-on connection included with the price of purchase(which is certainly an advantage) Web anywhere for life is certainly a pro as well.

On the software side of things, we feel certain a Kindle Reader will come for the PC(although Linux will no doubt take more time), as they already have an iPhone reader and they want to corner the e-book market. Barring that, you can always turn a netbook into an e-book reader with something like FBReader, which supports most non-DRMed formats, and buy your books from non-Amazon sources(More on this in a future post).

What it comes down to is that we love what the Kindle represents, and we are impressed by its continual evolution, but we are staying away for now.

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