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Len Edgerly interviews the woman behind the Nancy Pearl Librarian action figure in this week’s KND Kindle Chronicles Interview

August 6, 2012 by KND

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview:

Librarian as Action Figure!

Len Edgerly Interviews Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust, More Book Lust and Book Lust to Go

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

Nancy Pearl has always thought that entering a used-book store is one the happiest and saddest experiences in her life.
Nancy-Pearl
“I see on the shelf all these wonderful, wonderful novels—books that I’ve read that I absolutely loved that are no longer available,” the revered librarian told me during an interview last week in Seattle.

Most of us would simply accept the bittersweet experience of beloved books falling out of print, but for a librarian who has inspired her own $39.99 action figure—complete with “amazing push-button shushing action!—it gave rise to a decades-long dream that finally became a reality this year.

“I’ve thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific if we could do a series of reprinting just some of, very selfishly, my favorite books,’” she said.

The idea gestated. She offered it to her first publisher, Seattle-based

Sasquatch Books, which has published her best-selling titles Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, More Book Lust, and Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers.

Sasquatch turned the proposal down, as did all the rest of 20 publishers—including every major publisher in New York, according to news reports—that were approached on Nancy’s behalf by her agent, Victoria Sanders.

Amazon Publishing, the upstart New York publisher set up by Amazon last year, made a different evaluation and decided to accept the proposal, even though it could not have looked like a money maker.

“It’s an awful lot of work for the publisher,” Nancy explained, “because we have to get permission, copyright reverted to, in this case, Amazon. We have to locate who owns the copyright—it’s an awful lot of work.”

You might wonder why a company described by the managing director of UK bookseller Waterstones as “a ruthless money-making devil” would take on so much work for out-of-print books that had not even been hits when they were first published years ago.

David Streitfeld of The New York Times suggested one answer when he wrote in February, “Was Amazon sincerely trying to rescue lost classics or was it cynically buying a local hero’s endorsement to cover up its aggressive tactics?”

I have no desire to drag Nancy Pearl into yet another round of the debate about whether Amazon is a devil or an angel, because she has already been unfairly burned in that flame war. After all she has done as a librarian and bookseller in Detroit, Tulsa, and Seattle, as well as her pioneering of the one-book-one-city reading initiative, she deserves better than that.

What I will say is that I can understand the gratitude she expressed to me about the one publisher who shared her dream of making great, unsung books that didn’t get enough attention in their time available to a new generation of readers.

As it happens, I had a chance to meet Nancy’s editor at Amazon Publishing, Alan Turkus, at BookExpo America in May. What I remember is how he went on and on about what a joy it was to work with Nancy Pearl on the Book Lust Rediscoveries series. His enthusiasm was infectious, and it was one reason I approached Amazon’s PR Department to see if I could interview her.

So if Amazon was “cynically buying a local hero’s endorsement,” they forgot to send the memo to the senior acquisitions editor at Amazon Publishing, which is the title I found for Alan Turkus at LinkedIn.

It’s easy to get swept up in Nancy and her editor’s exhilaration about these rediscoveries. The first novel of the series, A Gay and Melancholy Sound by Merle Miller, is the heart-breaking story of Joshua Bland, a child prodigy unable to accept love as an adult. I read all 584 pages on my Kindle and ended up impressed at how Miller had managed to make me care so much about such a deeply flawed character. How did the author do that?

“I think that Joshua brings out all the compassion that we have available to us as readers,” Nancy replied. In her introduction, she described the book as the purest example of the novel as autobiography that she’s ever read, which I took to mean that Merle Miller himself must have been a difficult person to love.

Miller’s work is now handled by a literary executor, a woman who told Nancy by email, “Merle was not a hugger, but I suspect he would have hugged you.”

My conversation in Seattle with Nancy Pearl helped me understand why any book, whether it is read on paper or a Kindle, still matters.

“I think that every book you read makes you a better person, because it gives you insight into the way other people live and think,” she said. “One of the great things, important things, that we librarians do is that we—through giving you books you’ll love, without judgment—make the world a better place.”

Four of the 12 books that Nancy Pearl has chosen for Book Lust Rediscoveries are available for order and pre-order at Amazon.com. In addition to Miller’s novel, they are After Life by Rhian Ellis, Fool by Frederick G. Dillen, and The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage.

It would have been sad if these books had never had another chance to find readers. It took an action figure of a librarian, working with a publisher who sees things differently than most, to bring about a happy ending to this story.

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Nancy Pearl in its entirety at 9:14 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast episode 209.

Exclusive: Our own Len Edgerly interviews Amazon’s Jeff Bezos live in the KND Kindle Chronicles Interview

Article of Faith: “If people read more, that is a better world”

August 3, 2012July 29, 2012 by KND

(Ed. Note: For any publisher or journalist, there are few things that feel as good as a great “get.” So this week, as we join contributing editor Len Edgerly in celebrating four terrific years of podcast interviews, we congratulate him for this week’s “get” of Amazon and Kindle founder Jeff Bezos, and we congratulate ourselves for our “get” of the highly esteemed Mr. Edgerly. –Steve Windwalker)

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor
Bezos
I traveled to Seattle this week to sit down on July 26th with Jeff Bezos for an 18-minute conversation about the Kindle. We met in an unadorned conference room at Amazon’s fast-growing campus of nondescript buildings. He’d brought a dish of cottage cheese and a paper cup containing something to drink. As I tested the audio levels on my Olympus LS-10, Bezos offered this disarming advice: “Usually my laugh eventually blows out the microphone, so hopefully you’re set for that.”

In appreciation for this opportunity to better understand how the Kindle looks to the man who leads the team that created it, I am pleased to present the following complete transcript of the interview:

Len Edgerly: It’s been seven years since you did the early design for the Kindle.

Jeff Bezos: Yes.

LE: When you think back to what you saw then, what’s been the biggest surprise in how it’s all unfolded?

JB: The biggest surprise by far is how quickly it has grown. When we did this, we were very optimistic that Kindle would eventually be a success and that it would accelerate the adoption of eBooks. But what has actually happened, happened so much faster than any reasonable person would have expected.

Today eBooks have become a huge fraction of the books sold, and we wouldn’t have anticipated that. That’s a big surprise.

LE: It sold out in like the first hour and a half [it was actually five and a half hours]. At that point was it evident that this was going to be a faster ride than you thought?

JB: Yeah. We were very surprised right from the beginning. And all throughout that first year actually, we continued to be surprised. So you may remember that not only were we out of stock in our first holiday season, but we were also out of stock in our second holiday selling season. That’s not a good time to be out of stock. And so we continued to be surprised by the adoption rates. That’s a good, high-quality problem, but it’s still something that I look back on and marvel at.

LE: How has the Kindle changed your own personal reading habits?

JB: I think like a lot of our Kindle customers, the biggest thing is that I end up reading more. So, it’s just easier to read more. I can have more books with me. I travel. When I’m traveling I don’t always know exactly what I’m going to be wanting to read from time to time. I can also get new things when I want to, when I hear about them. So if a friend tells me about something, I can get it right away, or if I read about something in a blog somewhere, I can get it right away. I just read more.

LE: I’ve been surprised by how much I read on the Fire, because I was such a lover of the E Ink. What’s your ratio between reading on the Fire versus with reading on the E Ink devices.

JB: Well, I carry both devices, and I really like to read periodicals on the Fire. So magazines and newspapers—I find the Fire experience to be preferable. When I get into a long-form book, reading a novel, I really prefer the E Ink device, I think in part because it weighs less, it’s lighter. It’s easier on my eyes. For extended reading sessions and right before bed, I find I gravitate towards my Kindle, and then for lots of other things I use my Fire.

LE: What do you think will be the same five to seven years or further out about the way we read, never mind how the technology advances?

JB: I think one thing that you can count on is that human nature doesn’t change. The human brain doesn’t change. And so one thing that seems to be very, very fundamental is that we like narrative. We like stories. So I don’t think that any amount of eBook technology is going to change the fact that we humans like narrative. And so I think that linear narrative, where somebody has really put a lot of work into guiding us along in a great story—a great storyteller, that’s what they do. I think that’s going to stay the same.

LE: Do you think that at some point the all-text story will be kind of an historical anomaly because the digital editions, the enhanced audio video and all that will just create a more compelling experience of a story than all text?

JB: I doubt it. We sort of have done that experiment in a way already, because sometimes really good books get made into movies. And even if the movie is a good movie—there’s also the case where they get made into bad movies. But even if they’re good movies, there are things about the book that never get replicated in the movie.
And I think the all-text story, as you put it, is its own medium, and I think that is likely to continue. I don’t think, for example, that audio snippets would make Hemingway better. I’m not sure multimedia would make Hemingway better. So I think it’s its own thing.

Now will there be new kinds of things invented that take advantage of these new technologies? Yes. Just like movies, moving pictures, was a completely new medium. But you didn’t try to do books with moving pictures—they might be derived from a book. But it’s its own art form, and they had to invent all the things that make movies good—all the different ways from cutting from one scene to the next—and it didn’t displace books. And I think that’s what you’ll see happen here, too. There’ll be new kinds of multimedia offerings that people can interact with on Kindles, but they won’t displace all-text stories.

LE: When you’re reading an all-text story, your mind is filling in so much, and that’s part of the pleasure.

JB: Exactly. Part of the pleasure is that you’re imagining your version of that story, all the details and all the richness. And multimedia takes some of that away.

LE: Plus it’s kind of a distraction. There’s a thread that gets broken when you’re tempted to go somewhere.

JB: I totally agree. And I would also say that a lot of what makes long-form books such a good format is there’s a lot of inner dialog that can happen in a book that you can’t really capture in multimedia. It can’t just be a glance at somebody’s face. It has to actually be that whole thread of what’s happening inside their head.

LE: The two core features back in the early days of the design that you emphasized were keyboards for searching books easily and also the automatic 3G, so people wouldn’t have to mess with WiFi. And the two Kindles now don’t have either of those. So what changed there?

JB: The key thing about the keyboard is that the electronic ink display technology finally got fast enough and responsive enough that we could do a reasonable onscreen keyboard. That also ends up making the device lighter. But the big difference, the big change over time is that the electronic ink display technology has gotten faster and more responsive.

We do still offer our 3G version of the Kindle. And that is a very popular choice, in fact people who buy that Kindle are the people who read the most.

LE: Why do you think that is?

JB: I suspect it’s probably some that they are the more serious readers, so they want the very best Kindle. But we also see that their reading increases even more than people who buy the other Kindles. And the reason, I think, for that is that it makes getting books even more frictionless, makes it even easier. You don’t have to look for a WiFi hotspot. You can just get them wherever you happen to be. And it roams globally at no charge, so people can figure that out, too, and get it wherever they are, even if they’re traveling around the world.

LE: It’s amazing how that small of an additional convenience would translate into more sales and reading.

JB: Exactly right, and we see this in everything. Many years ago we did this thing called One-Click Shopping, and tiny, little improvements can drive people to do more of something, just because you’re making it easier. And we’re all busy here in the early 21st Century.

LE: You’ve innovated with steady improvements to the Kindle platform since the introduction in November of 2007. And, as you’ve said, not every experiment succeeds—otherwise it wouldn’t be an experiment. Which blind alley that you’ve gone down in the last seven years taught you the most about how your customers want to read?

JB: That’s a great question. I would say one example of that would be location numbers. So one of the things that we did early on is we looked very hard at page numbers and how should we deal with electronic books? How should we do page numbers? You have to keep in mind that when you change the font size, everything changes. So you can’t really just count pages or screenfuls. So we came up with location numbers, and location numbers are the same no matter what font size you set your Kindle to. And by the way, being able to change the font size is something customers love about Kindle. That, and looking up words—there are a bunch of little things that people really love. They seem like small things, but they’re actually big features that people use all the time.

So after working with location numbers for many years, we got lots of feedback from customers that there are a lot of use cases where they wished that they had page numbers that matched the page numbers in physical books. So, for example, if you’re having a book club, and some people have the physical book and you have the Kindle book, you still want to be able to refer people to the real page number. You can’t say to your friend, “Turn to Location, you know, 2015.” (Laughs)

And so we used our cloud-computing expertise and our machine-learning expertise, and we actually built a set of algorithms that can look at the scanned pages of physical books and match up the words and find with pretty high confidence when you’re on your Kindle, what is the real page number that you happen to be on? We’ve implemented that for many, many of the books now in the Kindle catalog.

LE: That was good, because even though I can’t feel the pages, to know I’m on page 200—there’s a reference to the way I used to read that’s helpful.

JB: Exactly. Because we’ve all grown up reading physical books, we have kind of an internal clock or something that keeps track in page numbers, and that’s much harder to translate into something like location numbers. Maybe it would be akin to trying to figure out how much something costs in Yen when you’re in Japan. You can eventually figure it out, but it’s not something that you can do with intuition.

LE: Do you think we’ll ever reach a time when 60 seconds just seems like too long to download a book?

JB: I can tell you that most of the downloads now take way less than that. So we advertise books in 60 seconds, but actually it’s much faster.

I can also tell you that one of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting. You know, this is a team of missionaries, and we like to rise to those kinds of challenges.

LE: You like to be a little bit ahead.

JB: Maybe it should be books in one second. (Laughs.)

LE: Whoah. I’d buy even more.

JB: Exactly. Very good.

LE: Now, Stephen King has been very future-leaning on eBooks. In fact he helped you launch the Kindle 2. I was disappointed, because his upcoming book, Joyland, is coming out in print only, and he was quoted in the press release saying, “folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book.” Any idea what happened there?

JB: No, I don’t know what that’s about. I can tell you one thing, though. If you’re Stephen King, you can do what you want. (Laughs.) As you pointed out, he’s been a great friend of Kindle. He wrote some exclusive content for us and came to one of our press conferences, and he’s a very good guy.

LE: Compared with the Kindle Fire and the Kindle apps, the E Ink Kindles still maintain their role as kind of the Cadillac of purpose-built reading devices. There are things you can do on the E Ink Kindles that you can’t do on the Fire. Do you think the appeal of purpose-driven eReaders is likely to diminish as the all-purpose devices get better and better at reading?

JB: No. I think that for serious readers, there will always be a place for a purpose-built reading device, because I think you’ll be able to build a device which is lighter, which matters a lot to people, has better readability if what you’re doing is reading text. You know, as soon as you have to make a device do a bunch of things, it becomes suboptimal for doing the one thing. And so while I think the tablet, LCD devices like Kindle Fire will continue to get better and better and better, I think that purpose-built reading devices, like our electronic ink Kindle will also continue to get better and better and better.

Can you go hiking in tennis shoes? Yes, but if you’re a real hiker you might want hiking boots. And so both things, I think, will continue to coexist.

LE: You’ve said your passions choose you and not the other way around. Can you trace back the passion that led to the creation of the Kindle in your life?

JB: Well, I have been a lifelong reader. My wife is an author. We started Amazon with books. We are missionaries. All of our products here at Amazon, products and services, are built by missionaries. And I call it missionaries versus mercenaries. Missionaries build better products, because they’re not doing it just for the business results. They’re doing it because the love the product or they love the service.
And it turns out Kindle is a really easy product to attract missionaries, because a lot of people care about reading. A lot of people care about inventing the future of reading. And so it’s super-easy for me personally and for our whole team to be passionate missionaries about Kindle.

LE: Because of that love of reading.

JB: Yeah, absolutely! I think it’s the love of reading personally and it’s also that we on the Kindle team take it as an article of faith that reading is important for civilization. So we feel this powerful mission, and it’s exciting.

LE: Your mission is every book ever published in every language, available in 60 seconds anywhere in the world. How would the world be a better place if you achieve that?

JB: First and foremost, I would take it as an article of faith. I think if people read more, that is a better world. So I would posit that as an article of faith.

But, you know, we humans, we co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. And if you look at the digital era, almost every kind of media as it’s gotten digitized, more people have been able to access it. And most of what has happened with the digitization of text has been on short-form, so it’s things like blog posts. It’s short articles, short newspaper articles and so on.

And really, until Kindle, nothing in the digital era really made it easier to read long-form. People didn’t want to read long-form on their laptop. We tried that actually. We offered eBooks to people to buy as PDFs and other ways. You needed an electron microscope to find sales. Nobody wanted that.

In that sense that we’re co-evolving with our tools, one of the things that Kindle does is make it easier for people to read long-form. I personally believe that that also means that people will have longer attention spans. You know, one of the reasons that people sense that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, a lot of it is because a lot of the digital media are shrinking the scale of the media. So YouTube videos are eight minutes long, and blog posts are two paragraphs long. So it’s not surprising. If that’s what you consume all day, that’s what your brain gets accustomed to consuming. And Kindle helps to push in the other direction.

LE: Which has got to be a good thing just for understanding and knowledge.

JB: That’s exactly what I think.

LE: Last question. When you spoke to the graduates at Princeton, you asked what convictions would enable them not to wilt under criticism. That interested me, and it made me think of your willingness to be misunderstood within the publishing industry. What conviction, personally for you, do you hold onto to avoid wilting under the criticism that comes your way, specifically in the publishing arena?

JB: What I hold onto and what I tell our folks here at Amazon is, if you’re going to invent, if you’re going to do anything at all in a new way there are going to be people who sincerely misunderstand, and there are going to be also self-interested critics who have a reason to misunderstand. You’ll get both types.

But if you can’t weather that misunderstanding for long periods of time, then you just have to hang up your hat as an inventor. It’s part and parcel with invention. Invention is by its very nature disruptive. And if you want to be understood, if it’s so important for you to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Jeff Bezos in its entirety at 11:45 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles episode 208.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: From Homer to Homer: Unnatural Acts, Words Like Loaded Pistols, and Rewiring Our Brains for the Pleasures of Reading – Len Edgerly Interviews Marshall Poe of New Books Network

July 10, 2012 by KND

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

If you are like me and most other people, you seldom read a book published by a university press. Which is a shame, actually.

When you consider the intelligence of the authors and the variety and depth of topics represented by this slice of the publishing world, it makes me wish there were a convenient way to explore them.

Or, with my Kindle Fire or other .mp3 player, maybe there could be a way to learn from scholarly authors without even having to buy and read their books.
It turns out there is a way to browse such work by scholars. It is the creation of Marshall Poe, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, and it’s called t mpoe he New Books Network (NBN).

Poe (photo at right) started his podcast-based project by doing smart, unhurried audio interviews with fellow historians about their books. He has since expanded the effort to other disciplines, so you will find about 50 active podcast channels at New Books Network, covering (alphabetically) everything from African Studies to World Affairs. In between, you can browse Anthropology, Buddhist Studies, Critical Theory, Islamic Studies, Music, and Secularism, among others.

This is a helpful way to organize a daunting catalog of interviews, because you can browse through categories and drill down to specific books and authors you might like to hear about.

For example, if you are interested in Sports, you will find a channel devoted to that topic, and in it you will find an interview with Rob Fitts, author of Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan. Like many of the books featured at NBN, this one is no bargain. It’s available from the University of Nebraska Press at the Kindle Store for $19.22.

Bruce Berglund interviews Fitts with a light touch, giving the author plenty of time to tell how, starting out as an archeologist, he came to write a book about a tour of Japan by Babe Ruth seven years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ruth and the players traveling with him were thrilled with their reception in Japan, where hundreds of thousands of fans lined the streets to greet them. Ruth’s connection to Japan led to a deep sense of personal betrayal on December 7, 1941.

Although I am not a baseball fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the Fitts interview. It lasts just under an hour, and it offers a highly original look into Japanese-American relations leading up to World War II. In this case, the interview was enough, and I did not decide to purchase the book.

You might or might not find a Kindle book you want to buy while hanging out at New Books Network. In fact, about 40 percent of the titles discussed are available, sadly, only on paper. What I can guarantee is that you are not likely to find these books featured elsewhere. And this goes to Marshall Poe’s mission.

“There’s a lot of good stuff in these books, and these people are very eloquent and very intelligent,” he told me during this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview. “It can be quite a joy to listen to them talk about their books.”

What frustrates Poe is how poor a job university presses do in distributing their books. They have few marketing channels, and they price the books at a premium.
“University presses should just stop printing books—full stop,” he said. By comparison, eBooks may bring new audiences for scholarly works, but even they face this fundamental challenge: the difficulty of getting people to read anything.

“Although we often forget it, reading is a profoundly unnatural act,” Poe wrote in “Every Monograph a Movie,” a provocative article he published in March of this year in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We were not evolved to read,” he argued. “Eyes are for seeing, ears are for hearing, but we have nothing specifically designed for reading.” This means we have to rewire our brains to learn to read. In addition, Poe wrote, even if we have learned to read well, the activity is “often not physically pleasurable.”

I found it shocking to read those words in a scholarly article by an academic. But even as I consider myself to be an evangelist for the joys of reading eBooks with ever-improving digital devices, I will admit to a gnawing doubt. What if the future bends inevitably toward “enhanced” books that do provide pleasure for eyes and ears more in tune with millions of years of human evolution?

I will try to stay nimble and explore such enhancements, of course. It is a good strategy for aging with energy and wit. Meanwhile, I am always looking for great books to read, using my rewired brain that long ago learned to love the way words on a page or screen mysteriously dissolve into story and meaning.

I love bestsellers and popular books. But now and again I like to challenge myself at the outer edge of my comfort zone. That’s why I am going to enjoy listening to more of NBN’s author interviews. I will close by mentioning a book that I found in the Language section that actually did lead me to a one-click purchase for my Kindle.
The title is Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama by Sam Leith, available for $14.84 from Basic Books. Chris Cummins’s chat with the author hooked me into wanting to learn more about centuries-old tools of persuasion that are on full display, for those who recognize them, in modern political campaigns.

It begins—and I’m reading from my Kindle Fire here—with this promising scene from The Simpsons:

MARGE [sings]: How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?

HOMER: Seven.

LISA: No, dad, it’s a rhetorical question.

HOMER: Okay, eight.

LISA: Dad, do you even know what “rhetorical” means?

HOMER: Do I know what “rhetorical” means?

Good question, Homer! And thanks, Marshall Poe, for getting it onto my Kindle.

Kindle Nation Weekender columnist Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Marshall Poe in its entirety at 10:57 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles Episode 205.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: What’s Your eReader IQ?

July 3, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews Christian Hupfeld, creator of eReaderIQ.com

By LEN EDGERLY, KND Contributing Editor

Christian Hupfeld family — Christian Hupfield and family

Amidst coverage and focus on the huge corporate players in the eBook Revolution, I love spending time with someone like Christian Hupfeld.

Amazon has 65,600 employees, and Google has 33,077. Christian Hupfeld’s eReaderIQ.com today welcomes Employee Number 2, his wife. She leaves a full-time paying job to help him take advantage of what he, without exaggeration, terms “the unbelievable growth” of eBook adoption and business.

It’s a great story, beginning in 2006 when Christian was on paternity leave with the couple’s first child, taking a break from his job in customer service tech support for an insurance company.

“He was a good kid, so I had free time,” Christian recalled in a telephone interview this week from his home in northern California. “I decided to teach myself how to build websites. I built a little website called jungle-search.com. I had no intentions of having it be a Kindle website, but some genius came along and figured out that you could find free Kindle books through that website, and that’s where this all started.”

Jungle-search was a general Amazon.com search engine that included an option to search for Kindle books. When his Kindle user base started to grow, he created a specific Kindle search page at Jungle-search featuring free-book lists and price-drop alerts. Everything was going fine until a year and a half ago, when his wife lost her job.

“I kind of went into panic mode, and figured I better do something to make up the extra income.” Christian said. He was generating commissions as an Amazon Affiliate at the time. “I’d come home from work and spend another eight hours behind the computer for about a month straight.” That led to his creation of the site now known as eReaderIQ, and in September of last year its growth enabled him to quit his day job at the insurance company.

Growth in the Kindlesphere generally comes in Santa’s sleigh, and you can see evidence of this at eReaderIQ.

The user base doubled during the holiday shopping season in 2010, and from that base it tripled last year. eReaderIQ now receives approximately 20,000 unique visitors daily and sends out between 50,000 and 70,000 e-mail alerts to users who rely on the site for updated information on availability and price drops for Kindle titles.

With his wife on board, Christian is expanding his business to the blogging world with Book Basset, “always on the hunt for the best Kindle deals.”

eReaderIQ has plenty of competition from other Internet tools for tracking prices for Kindle titles, including Kindle Nation Daily’s own eBook Tracker, which enables you to see a graph of a Kindle title’s sales rank and price over the past year. eBook Tracker will add a price-drop alert feature within the next few weeks.

Other sites that track eBook prices include Luzme , eBook Price Drops, and zooLert.
The price-tracker sites are good listening posts for following the habits and preferences of eBook readers. For example, Christian Hupfeld has noticed that users of his U.K. site choose the same top genres as users from his U.S. site. However, here in the States he sees less of a tolerance for “profanity, erotica and things like that.”

Christian has found that users of his site don’t want him making filtering decisions for them, even if that might be more convenient. “People really want to make that determination on their own, on what’s suitable,” he told me.

The design of eReaderIQ at first looked cluttered to me, but as I spent more time at the site, I was reminded of the information-presentation principles promulgated by Edward Tufte. ET, as he is known, recommends high data density, so the user can make his or her own choices of relevant information.

That’s why it makes sense that eReaderIQ presents you with 18 choices at the home page for making your own filtering decisions as you browse thousands of free Kindle Books.

Readers also want to decide for themselves how many stars they’re looking for in Kindle rankings, and how many reviews are enough protection against gaming the system by an author or publisher’s friends and fellow booksellers. Beware a book whose reviews all seem to be saying the same thing, Christian cautioned.

“I’d always thought of a book that had a four- or five-star review with five or six ratings was probably fairly good,” he added. “But now that you’re seeing so much competition in that marketplace, it’s hard to take the ratings seriously until you get up into the 30s and 40s of actual reviews.”

What Christian Hupfeld does take seriously is the dizzying growth in eBook adoption and the opportunities it offers for a family business that today doubled its workforce.
Amazon, Google, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and the big publishers get most of the headlines in coverage of the eBook Revolution, and that’s understandable. But I love knowing how much innovation and hard work takes place below the media radar.
I bet there is someone out there who will spend most of tonight after his or her day job, working on the next great idea for changing the way we read.

* * *

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Christian Hupfeld in its entirety at 22:34 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast Episode 204.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview, by Len Edgerly: Longtime Kindle Nation Fave Novelist Theresa Ragan is Proof Positive That 19 Years of Hard Work Can Lead to Overnight Success

June 18, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews Theresa Ragan, Author of the Lizzy Gardner Thrillers Abducted and Dead Weight

(Editor’s Note: Readers may remember novelist Theresa Ragan from her past appearances in the KND Spotlight with Abducted and Finding Kate Huntley in the Fall of 2011. She’s gone on to great things since then, and she shares a very inspiring success story with Len Edgerly in this week’s interview. –S.W.)

Theresa photo

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

Be honest. Do you still think there is a stigma to self-published writing?

When I was working hard to become a noteworthy poet a decade ago, I had no intention of publishing my own poems. I wanted The New Yorker to accept one of my poetry submissions, leading straight to a bidding war between Copper Canyon Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux over a contract to publish my first collection.

I never dreamed of publishing my own book of poems and finding an audience for it. I wanted to be a real poet!

Theresa Ragan, whom I interviewed last week at BookExpo America, put it this way: “I wanted to do it the hard way, the right way. I didn’t know about self-publishing. I wish I had checked it out.”

Theresa’s genre at the time was the romance novel, but the stigma against self-publishing was the same.

She spent 19 years writing romance novels. She wrote every day. She joined Romance Writers of America (RWA) and worked hard to learn her craft. She attended workshops and conferences all across the U.S. She was a finalist six times in the RWA’s Golden Heart Awards for unpublished writers. She had literary agents, two of them, one after the other. In all this time, she never sold a book.

While I became discouraged and switched from poetry to podcasting, Theresa kept going, and it’s a good thing she did. By the time 2011 rolled around, her youngest child was headed off to college, and people were talking about self-publishing on Amazon.

“I just knew that it was time,” she recalled. “I had nothing to lose. I published my first two books I’d ever written.” These were her medieval time travel novels, Return of the Rose and A Knight in Central Park. She didn’t expect them to sell more than 10 copies. Before long she was selling hundreds, and then thousands.

“Even after the first two books, I was shocked,” Theresa told me. It was 90 days before she saw her first paycheck from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. That’s when she let her agent go and decided to continue the work of self-publishing herself.

“I was enjoying the process,” she said. “I liked promoting and marketing myself. It was fun!”

It has also paid off financially. In a little over a year, she has sold nearly 300,000 of her books, most of them in eBook format but some via Amazon’s print-on-demand service, CreateSpace.

Things really took off when, out of frustration, Theresa wrote Abducted, a thriller in which a lot of characters got killed off. Her heroine, Lizzy Gardner, is a courageous private investigator who teaches self-defense to teenage girls, the better to help them avoid what Lizzy experienced when she was 17, at the hands of a depraved serial killer she came to know as Spiderman.

Once Abducted hit the top 20 on Amazon the second time, the traditional publishers came knocking. Random House and Simon & Schuster expressed interest in signing Theresa for her third Lizzy Gardner novel—the second, which she also published herself, is Dead Weight. She also heard from the new kid in the business, Amazon Publishing.

“I wanted to go with Amazon,” she said, “because they think outside the box. They’re, in my mind, the digital kings right now.” Also, Amazon offered higher royalties.

And that’s how, three months ago, Theresa Ragan ended up signing a contract with Thomas & Mercer, Amazon Publishing’s mysteries-and-thrillers imprint. At BEA, she was still shaking her head over these developments. “I was just so glad,” she told me. “Here for 19 years, I couldn’t sell 10 books, and suddenly someone wanted to pay me to write a book that I hadn’t even written a word of. That’s crazy!”

Not really. What’s crazy is a book distribution system that makes it so difficult for writers as hard working and talented as Theresa Ragan to sell a single book. Now, with the benefit of eBook technology, that system is being upended, and with it have come entirely new meanings for words we thought we understood, like “self publishing.”

In 2012, self-publishing is not about vanity. It’s about finding an audience for your writing, if you’re willing to work for it. Theresa spent several months developing her social media network, and she now spends an hour or two a day tending that network through Twitter, Facebook, and her blog. That’s after she meets her first priority every morning, which is to write 1,000 words on her next book.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy, and in fact I hope the amount of determination and discipline that Theresa has devoted to her writing is what you remember about her story.

A long-observed stigma is dissolving before our eyes. There will come a time when self-publishing will be seen for what it is: simply one of several ways for real authors to connect with real readers looking for the next great book to read.

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Theresa Ragan in its entirety at 15:37 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast Episode 202.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Weekly Interview: Understanding Kindle Strategy from Outside … and Inside … the Mother Ship: Len Edgerly Interviews Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP of Kindle Content

June 13, 2012 by KND

Grandinetti

By LEN EDGERLY

Contributing Editor

I find it refreshing that Russ Grandinetti (photo at right), one of the top Kindle executives at Amazon, knows as little about what’s ahead for social reading on the Kindle as I do.

When you try to understand Kindle strategy from outside the mother ship, it’s easy to assume that Bezos and team have the future scribbled down on whiteboards in Seattle, or captured in top-secret Evernote notebooks on their Kindle Fires. I mean, they invented the thing, right?

Nearly five years ago the Kindle didn’t even exist, and the gorgeous but tethered-to-your-computer-with-a-wire Sony Reader was going nowhere. And remember when the first Kindle came out, how it was dissed by Robert Scoble on down? “Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over,” Scoble scolded in an open letter to Bezos. Unperturbed, Amazon pressed on as if they knew how successful the Kindle would be.

Maybe not. Maybe they were just trying things to see what customers wanted more and less of. And maybe that’s what they’ve been doing ever since the original Kindle sold out in five and a half hours on November 19, 2007.

That’s the insight I gleaned from an interview with Grandinetti this week in a tucked-away meeting room beneath the huge exhibit floor at BookExpo America in New York City. The topic was social reading, something I feel I should do more of, like eating my broccoli. But because reading has been a solitary joy in my life for so long, I resist sharing my highlights and notes or following those of other readers, even though such sharing is easy with tools being rolled out for the Kindle.

I figured Grandinetti, the czar of Kindle content, would have a clearer view of how social reading will evolve, because he and his team are inventing it.

He admitted that he shares a love of the old ways himself when it comes to reading. He described kindle.amazon.com, where you can make your annotations public and follow others, as “a place that might be a little more off the beaten path” compared with the main Amazon.com site. As such, kindle.amazon.com is a good place to put trial features in place.

“We’re just doing our best,” Grandinetti continued, “to pay attention to what people like, what they don’t like, what they use, what they don’t use.” It also takes time for people to become aware that these new, experimental features even exist.

He added: “We’ll keep inventing. We’ll keep listening. We’re going to proceed adaptively, and I think you’ll start to see an increasingly large number of inventions, but inventions in response to use.”

You can see this process in action if you look back to the launch of Kindle Singles in January of last year. The big idea there was to set reading free from the constraint of how many words an author can write for an article or a book. Kindle Singles created an entirely new space, between 5,000 and 30,000 words or between the length of traditional articles and traditional books. Authors and readers loved it. By March of this year, Amazon had sold more than 2 million Kindle Singles.

“People love knowing when walls come down and constraints get lifted,” Grandinetti told me. “Which is different than something being fully evolved or mature. It takes time to invent inside that.”

As Kindle Singles took off, another dimension of the program became clear: the smashing of the constraint of time. “We were really proud to have a Single from Christopher Hitchens eight days after Bin Laden was shot, which is a time frame that traditional publishing would have found very difficult to publish into,” Grandinetti said.

When you see the surprise of a guy at the epicenter of Kindle strategy, about aspects of the Kindle as significant as social reading and Kindle Singles, you understand that anything can happen. What Amazon appears to excel at is jumping on opportunities like an 800-pound cat, a feline with very good hearing that spends most of the afternoon gazing intently at anything that moves.

This same agility is evident in Grandinetti’s comments on the hot-button issue of eBook pricing.

When I asked for his reaction to the Department of Justice’s anti-trust lawsuit against Apple and the Publisher Defendants over eBook pricing, he eschewed gloating and stuck to the company line: “We think it’s great for customers for retailers to be able to compete and set prices for consumers and try to find a way to build a great business and a great consumer offering.”

He went on to describe pricing in terms that echoed his description of experimentation with other features of the Kindle.

“Over time,” he said, “I think all of us have developed a more thoughtful, more robust, more data-driven way to think about walking that line between offering our consumers real value and having it be a great business for booksellers, for publishers, and for authors.

“I think people will continue to try lots of different strategies about how to price their books, and I think that competition, that experimentation, is a good thing.”
Which means Russ Grandinetti and Amazon don’t know much more than you or I do about how eBook prices, social reading, innovations in content form, or a host of other aspects of the Kindle Revolution will evolve.

The one thing you can be pretty sure of is that when they see something move, some gesture of interest or disinterest by their customers, they will pounce on it before most of us know anything changed.

Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Russ Grandinetti in its entirety at 23:38 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast Episode 201.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: An Engineer with Imagination and a Passion for Books Develops a New Idea for Libraries, and All of Us – Len Edgerly Interviews Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, Inc.

June 4, 2012 by KND

(Editor’s Note: This makes two columns in a row for contributing editor Len Edgerly, which is a wonderful beginning for us but nothing compared with the fact that Len just posted his 200th Kindle Chronicles podcast overnight. Congratulations, Mr. Edgerly!)

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

Eric Hellman is an engineer, and engineers like to fix problems.

His latest project, unglue.it, aims to fix a very big problem—how public libraries can make eBooks available despite restrictive, outmoded U.S. copyright law. Any Kindle owner who cares about eBooks and libraries should care about whether he succeeds.

Let’s begin with some background about Eric Hellman.

He holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from Stanford and a Bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Princeton. He was a research scientist for 10 years at Bell Labs, working on nontrivial topics such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy, high-temperature superconductors, gallium nitride and—here’s where we come in—electronic publishing.

Eric founded a company named Openly Informatics Inc., which became a leader in supplying technology, data, and services for library automation, and he sold it to OCLC, the world’s largest cooperative of libraries. His Go to Hellman blog offers lucid, in-depth posts on the intersection of technology, libraries, and eBooks.

If you go to unglue.it you will find the fix he’s trying to work up for libraries. It went live at noon EDT on May 17th.

Libraries, it turns out, are facing a two-fold challenge as they attempt to continue the mission they have fulfilled for the past 200 years.

First, five of the Big Six publishers do not make eBooks available for lending by libraries, and the only one that does, Random House, charges libraries three times more for eBooks than it does for print books.

Second, libraries don’t have a way to acquire eBook versions of the trove of older books that are still protected by copyright. The Google eBooks project’s scanning of 12 million books might have led to a solution, but that initiative is mired in legal challenges that have no end in sight.

For new books published by small publishers, there are commercial networks which libraries can use to loan eBooks, such as Overdrive. For books published in the U.S. before 1923 and other books in the public domain, there is Project Gutenberg. Unglue.it is an attempt to pick up where Project Gutenberg left off, expanding the number of older books that libraries can make available as eBooks.

Here is how unglue.it works:

A participating rights holder and unglue.it decide on fair compensation for release of a free, Creative Commons-licensed edition of an already published book. A campaign for the book is launched at unglue.it—there are now five up and running—where you can make pledges toward the agreed-upon compensation. If the goal is reached, pledges will be collected. Unglue.it will pay the rights holder, who will release an “unglued” eBook edition that anyone will be able to read and share with anyone else, on any device, anywhere in the world.

How is it working so far?

When I spoke with Eric on May 29th for this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview, he was able to report a gratifying milestone. As of that day, 1,000 people had signed up for free membership at unglue.it . One of the first five books, Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth A. Finnegan, is approaching 40 percent of its $7,500 campaign goal with 20 days to go until the campaign ends at midnight, June 22nd.

Of the other four campaigns, none has generated pledges for more than 3 percent of goal—more on that later.

I pledged $50 to support Oral Literature in Africa, because I can easily imagine the benefit of making it available in eBook form for libraries and schools not only in Africa but around the world. Like NPR, unglue.it offers varying levels of benefits for pledges. If the Oral Literature campaign succeeds, my $50 payment to the rights holder will earn me a listing as a Benefactor.

Few will be familiar with the books selected for the first five unglue.it campaigns. In answer to skepticism on TeleRead about this, Eric Hellman replied: “You’re right, if we can’t offer you books that you’ve ever heard of, it won’t work in the long run. But give us a year or so. In the short run, things happen slower than you expect. In the long run, things change more than we can imagine.”

The reason things change in the long run is that people like Eric Hellman try to fix what isn’t working. “I’m kind of an impatient guy,” he told me. “I’m not holding my breath for Congress to make copyright more rational in the digital age.”

He and his team at Gluejar are learning about the unglue.it market even as they create it. They will be trying new books as rights holders come forward to join the experiment—perhaps poets or authors of books related to this year’s election, or nonprofits with great content to release in return for reasonable crowd-funded compensation.

I think it’s a terrifically inventive, smart initiative, and I hope it succeeds in helping libraries continue their mission for another two centuries. Not to mention all the great DRM-free books it could bring to our Kindles!

Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Eric Hellman in its entirety at 16:48 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast Episode 200.

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Len Edgerly interviews the woman behind the Nancy Pearl Librarian action figure in this week’s KND Kindle Chronicles Interview

Exclusive: Our own Len Edgerly interviews Amazon’s Jeff Bezos live in the KND Kindle Chronicles Interview

Article of Faith: “If people read more, that is a better world”

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: From Homer to Homer: Unnatural Acts, Words Like Loaded Pistols, and Rewiring Our Brains for the Pleasures of Reading – Len Edgerly Interviews Marshall Poe of New Books Network

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: What’s Your eReader IQ?

Len Edgerly Interviews Christian Hupfeld, creator of eReaderIQ.com

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview, by Len Edgerly: Longtime Kindle Nation Fave Novelist Theresa Ragan is Proof Positive That 19 Years of Hard Work Can Lead to Overnight Success

The KND Kindle Chronicles Weekly Interview: Understanding Kindle Strategy from Outside … and Inside … the Mother Ship: Len Edgerly Interviews Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP of Kindle Content

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: An Engineer with Imagination and a Passion for Books Develops a New Idea for Libraries, and All of Us – Len Edgerly Interviews Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, Inc.

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