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Coming to the Kindle: A Flexible Color Touch Screen?

Via a tweet from Bufo Calvin, here’s a potentially exciting rumor that is being reported today by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton and Brad Stone on their Bits technology blog:

In a sign that Amazon wants to upgrade its Kindle e-reader to compete head-on with the Apple iPad, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York-based start-up specializing in touch-screen technology, a person briefed on the deal said Wednesday.

According to Engadget, “the startup claims its interpolating force-sensitive resistance tech can be made completely transparent, works with color LCDs, and can detect ‘an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points’ as well as distinguish between a finger and stylus.”

There are a lot of cool Kindle developments coming our way in the next few months, but this acquisition strongly suggests that a little further out we may see a color touchscreen on the Kindle. Apparently the tiny Touchco staff is being merged with Amazon’s Lab 126 unit of Kindle engineers in Cupertino, CA.

Here’s a link to a few minutes of video on Touchco’s technology:

Publishers Could Be Mining Millions in Their Own Backlists … Why Not?

By Stephen Windwalker

  • Originally posted February 3, 2010 at Kindle Nation Daily – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

Peruvian author Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the son of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta author Mario Vargas Llosa, has an interesting if politically twisted piece on the web today under the title “Holden Caulfield vs. Steve Jobs,” and it ends with this overreachingly clever effort to impose context where it might not naturally be found:

“How ironic that you will soon be able to read masterpieces on adolescent alienation such as ‘The Catcher in the Rye‘ on an iPad tablet, a monument to youthful liberation.”

Among the problems with that closing line? It’s reality-challenged.

As thousands of Kindle owners found to their great disappointment following J.D. Salinger’s death last week, neither The Catcher in the Rye nor any of Salinger’s three other books are available in ebook form.

Nothing against Salinger, of course. His four thin volumes of fiction are in good company, joined by much of the best work of many of the finest writers of the past several decades in being unavailable in the Kindle Store or in any other ebook platform. And it is highly unlikely that these wonderful books are about to show up in Apple’s yet-to-be-opened iBooks store, or anywhere else, unless they are also made available to Kindle readers.

Too bad, eh? But let’s take a look at how this could be. It’s not Amazon’s doing.

Not surprisingly, in the Simba Information survey about which we reported here this morning, the unavailability of backlist titles by their favorite authors showed up as one of the major annoyances shared by Kindle owners with the current state of ebook selection.

Naturally Amazon would love to see these books added to the Kindle Store, but for that to happen they must be provided in digital form for the Kindle platform.

By the publishers, if they own the copyright. And if the publishers do not own the copyright, the rightsholders are in the perfect position either to deal directly with Amazon and other ebook platforms or to work through a company finely attuned to the needs and opportunities of the 21st century book publishing world, such as the Open Road Integrated Media venture created last year by Jane Friedman and Jeffrey Sharp “to use technology to bring the literary giants of yesteryear to a new generation of readers and along the way to introduce new stars.”

If they build these ebooks, readers will come. “They” in this case could mean authors, publishers, or survivors and estates, whoever owns the rights. “Readers” in this case refers primarily for now to Kindle readers, since it is Kindle readers for the most part who are buying the lion’s share of ebooks, but there is plenty of room for newcomers to the party, regardless of device or platform.

Some of these titles are out of print, because the economics of maintaining print-edition inventory for backlist titles are rather difficult given the costs of production, warehousing, fulfillment, and returns, but almost all remain “in copyright.” But the economics of using new technologies to provide backlist are compelling indeed:

  • Priced at $7.99 in the Kindle Store, many of these books would sell briskly.
  • With the 70 percent “royalty” or “commission” that Amazon expects to pay under either the publishers’ newly beloved “agency model” or Amazon’s own recently announced Digital Text Platform structure, publishers would receive $5.59 per download, so that authors or estates would receive at least $1.45 per download. The only other costs involved are the manageable one-time costs of digitization and formatting. (Isn’t that what smart interns are for?)
  • By comparison, for traditionally printed paperback print copies sold at $12, publishers would receive $6 from distributors and retailers, and over half of that would be eaten up by the costs of production, warehousing, fulfillment, returns, and the dollar or so per copy that would flow through to authors or estates.
  • For titles that publishers wished to keep in print with respect to their print editions, relatively new print-on-demand services such as CreateSpace would allow them worldwide fulfillment to bookstores, libraries, wholesalers, and online retailers at zero front-end expense and far better margins than are available to most publishers, via technologies similar to those that major music labels are using to restore their out-of-print catalogues and produce and sell them widely and profitably.

As everyone who has read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail understands, the future of just about any content business lies in broadening the catalogue and achieving economies of scale and access that allow profitability even when annual sales of particular items amount to a few thousand or a few hundred units. Backlist book classics are the perfect fit for this model with technologies that exist today. Perhaps the Big Six publishers have their own reasons for failing to seize these opportunities, such as a desire to avoid doing anything to make but it is a betrayal not only of their backlist authors and the reading public but also of the publishers’ own self-proclaimed role as gatekeepers and arbiters of quality.

The upside, of course, is the creation of a strong and steady new revenue stream for an industry that is working hard these days to convince us that it is dying at the hands of the same companies and media that would be its willing and generous partners in the creation of that new revenue.

What are we missing? Just to give you a taste, here in no particular order are a few titles from one man’s list of possibilities, books for which the lack of ebook access is, in my eyes, a crime:

Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, and Franny and Zooey  by J.D. Salinger
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
A Summons to Memphis and The Flying Change by Henry Taylor
The Color Purple by Alice Walker 
The Good Mother by Sue Miller
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Selected Stories by Alice Munro
The Laughing Policeman by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

Like I say, just a few off the top of my own idiosyncratic noggin. Get a few hundred Kindle owners together and the list of quality entries would quickly climb into the thousands. And with Kindle owners having already distinguished themselves as the most voracious group of book buyers and readers on the planet, that would mean millions for the publishing industry, and for the authors or their survivors.

What are some of the titles that you would like to see brough back to life for the Kindle?

Exclusive: Here’s What the Publishers Are Hearing from Their Own Media Intelligence Sources

By Stephen Windwalker

  • Originally posted February 3, 2010 at Kindle Nation Daily – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

One might assume, given the apparent commitment that the BS Cabal (Apple and the Big Six publishers) is making to anti-consumer collusive price-gouging for ebooks, that their strategy is at least supported by a bit of market research. Apparently one would be wrong. Those publishers are real cowboys, and they’ve drawn their guns, so they might as well shoot someone, or something, somewhere, sometime. Even if it’s their own feet!

Simba Information, which bills itself as “The Market Intelligence Leader for the Media and Publishing Industries,” recently completed a survey of Kindle owners’ book-buying behavior and has been good enough to share a preliminary report exclusively with Kindle Nation Daily. Although Simba did not survey a huge sample, these results are especially interesting in the context of the current battles and controversies swirling around ebook pricing. Special thanks to Michael Norris, Senior Analyst with Simba’s Trade Books Group, for sharing this information.

Summary of Data from Simba’s December 2009 Kindle Owner’s Survey
Summary of Message Kindle Owners Have For Publishers: Most Kindle owners are unhappy about the e-book delay of new hardcover releases, to be sure. Other complaints had to do with pricing (books are too costly or shouldn’t cost more than print titles) but quite a few are very annoyed at the lack of selection; particularly in the backlist titles of a popular author who doesn’t have their older titles available as an e-book.
  • 43% of Kindle owners have 100 books or more on their Kindles. Just 11% have nine titles or fewer, and most of that group have only had their Kindles a few months. Unsurprisingly the ones who have had their Kindles the longest are the most likely to have large numbers of books on their devices, and are also slightly more likely to have owned a first generation Kindle
  • Prior book consumption habits are mixed: one in five Kindle owners didn’t buy any hardcover titles at all in the year prior to acquiring their Kindle, but about 23% bought 10 or more hardcovers, and 60% bought 10 or more paperbacks, showing a large commitment to reading (most adult book buyers buy fewer than 5 books of any format)
  • 9.4% of Kindle owners are on their second Kindle, and half of Kindle owners never read e-books before getting their Kindle
  • One in four Kindle owners got their Kindle as a gift, and 62% bought it without ever seeing another Kindle owner using it first, showing how effective Amazon is in making the device a ‘gift for readers.’
  • The most popular activity Kindles are used for is reading books, with 87.7% of respondents indicating they read books on the Kindle ‘very often.’ The least popular activity Kindles are used is reading magazines (57.9% say they never have read a magazine on their Kindle) and reading newspapers, with 58.8% saying they’ve never read a newspaper on their Kindle. Given that the surveyed Kindle owners are mostly very happy with the reading experience (more on this in a moment) these statistics don’t bode particularly well for the upcoming ‘tablet’ devices that may enter the market for the purposes of reading magazine and newspaper content. As far as blogs are concerned, though, 28.4% of Kindle users ‘often’ or ‘very often’ use their Kindles to read blogs, but 32.8% never do.
  • The most popular place Kindles are used are in the home (78.8% indicate that’s where they use their Kindles the most frequently).
  • Kindle owners surveyed are very happy with their devices. 59.1% strongly agree with the statement ‘The Kindle is a great value for the money’ and 51.8% strongly agree with the statement that they ‘expect to replace their Kindles with another Kindle someday.’
  • 32.6% strongly agree with the statement ‘print books are overpriced’ and 42.0% somewhat agree. Fewer agree that e-books are overpriced (10.2% strongly agree and 24.8% somewhat agreeing).  54.3% of Kindle owners strongly agree with the statement ‘I always look for the free e-books when browsing’ and 64.5% strongly disagree with the statement: ‘I buy more print books now that I have a Kindle’

Free Kindle Book Promotion Worked Well for Novelist Terri Blackstock

By Tom Dulaney
Kindle Nation Daily Contributing Editor

With well over 6 million copies of her novels sold, author Terri Blackstock still worried about giving away copies of two of her novels in the Kindle Store. At a time when some traditional publishers have been trying to persuade their authors that Amazon Kindle could mean the end of Western Civilization, or at least of print book sales, her publisher was telling her to embrace the Kindle by giving her books away free to Kindle owners.
“Hmmmm…. My books free? I was worried it was not a good idea,” Blackstock told Kindle Nation Daily in an exclusive phone interview the day the free-book promotion ended. “But they [her publisher, Zondervan] had tried it successfully with Brandilyn Collins and it looked successful for her. They convinced me to try it.”
Fresh from two weeks of giving away her bestselling Cape Refuge and Southern Storm, both of which topped the Kindle Bestseller List, Blackstock talked about the Kindle, ebooks, the freemium promotion and ebook prices.
The giveaway “did what we wanted,” she said on Feb. 1. “Some of my readers who might not have read those two books had an opportunity to read them, and they bought the third and fourth books in the [Cape Refuge] series.”

“It seems there was a bump in sales of a lot of my older books,” she said. “And I suddenly had 150 people asking to be my friend on Facebook, so I knew something was going on out there.” While Facebook tells the world Blackstock has close to 2,500 “friends” at the moment, she’s still awaiting hard numbers on how the “freemium” boosted sales of of her latest novel, Intervention.

Unlike many authors and indie publishers who publish directly via Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), traditionally published authors like Blackstock take a different route into the Kindle Bookstore. So those authors have to wait for their publisher to report on sales figures, and it was too soon for hard numbers on the giveaway when she spoke with KND. (DTP authors get sales information online and up-to-the-hour, but have unfortunately have been barred from offering free promotional downloads in the Kindle Store, while Amazon has, rather strangely, seemed to show a preference for religious publishers such as Zondervan among traditional publishers.)
Blackstock admits to being among the first early adopters to buy a Kindle 1. She later moved up to a Kindle 2 and sold her Kindle 1 on eBay. She immediately found the Kindle and the technology intriguing, promising and a bone of contention among peers in writing groups to which she belongs.
“At the beginning, a lot of writers were upset about the Kindle–and I was a user!” she recalls. “But I felt it was a whole new market for our books.”
She, like the rest of the book-reading and book-producing world, isn’t sure where the current faceoff between publishers and retailers will end up. “I think it will shake out and we will figure out the right price point for books and make the readers happy,” she says.
Part of that faith in the market is based on the quality and power of Kindle Nation. “People who own Kindles are avid readers and appreciate quality—and they have a lot of influence in the market–a new thing,” she says. With best estimates putting the number of Kindles in the world at somewhere between 2 and 3 million ereaders, Kindle Nation is strong in numbers as well as impact.
And that fresh concept, assumed in the ebook price wars but unspoken these days, underscores the role of current Kindle owners as key buying influences in the changing world of publishing.
As book publishers, device makers like Amazon and Apple, and retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble negotiate privately and exchange public announcements, all eyes are watchfully on the true power in the marketplace—the readers who pay for books.
Blackstock, a creative thinker as an author, is just as innovative in thinking up possible solutions for book sellers, publishers, authors and readers. For example, she points to an intriguing idea called Symtio from Zondervan. “It’s important for book stores to figure a way [like Symtio] to allow people to download in the store [in a way where] that store gets profit for it,” she suggests as a possibility.
Symtio, introduced in 2008 by Zondervan—a division of HarperCollins, is an attempt to keep bricks-and-mortar booksellers in the sales and profit loop of the ebook revolution. (Oddly, the Symtio Home Page assumes you know what it is and are ready to download the needed application.)
“Everybody is finding a new role, and that’s a good thing,” Blackstock says of the current fast-boiling change in the world of books. “It’s fun to stay on top of it all.”
“I think readers will get a lot of value with their Kindles [and] continue to get free books,” she predicts. “I hope they understand publishers need to make money, [otherwise] people could lose jobs [and] good authors won’t be able to make a living writing. Publishers are trying to figure out how to navigate the waters now.”
Amidst the current tough-talking exchanges between book publishers and retailers, Blackstock sounds like a sensible voice or reason, convinced all parties will resolve their differences and be better for weathering the storm.
Indeed, such a hopeful outlook is the very core of Blackstock’s long line of bestsellers. “The theme of my books is that the crises in our lives can turn into blessings,” she says. “Through suffering we can sometimes grow and have new opportunities.”
Her latest book, Intervention, carries forth that concept and looks to be the start of yet another Blackstock series of books. Intervention debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List. It is another work in the genre she calls “redemptive suspense.” The story of a family’s struggle with a teen daughter forced into drug rehab goes right to the edge of suspense when the girl disappears and her interventionist is murdered.
Publishers Weekly, in a review of the book, said its “mother-daughter relationship strikes true emotional notes; the redemptive arc of evangelical Christian fiction is natural and resonant in a story of addiction. Blackstock’s many fans will be pleased, and this story will also speak to families dealing with addicted children.”
No wonder the book rings true: Blackstock’s own daughter battled through a similar substance abuse history—but without the dead body that adds the suspense to the novel.
Reviewers typically refer to Blackstock as the “prolific suspense novelist,” and with 50 titles available in the Amazon store she can justly claim the title. At the moment, 18 of the 50 are available as ebooks for the Kindle.
Blackstock, born in Belleville, IL in 1957, achieved early writing success as a romance novelist. She prefers not to give out the pen name under which she wrote romance books, wanting to leave that part of her past behind.
Will there be more free Terri Blackstock titles in the future?
“Maybe,” she says. Indeed, her body of work seems custom-tailored to the so-called freemium marketing method. The two free Blackstock books offered in January served as a loss-leader to sell the rest of the four-book Cape Refuge Series. As you can see at her Amazon Author’s Page, she has four other series in print and available for the tactic: her Restoration Series, Newpointe 911 Series, Suncoast Chronicles Series and Second Chances Series.
Intervention, she expects, is the beginning of a new series as well.

Carolina Kindle Owners Meet Up, and Kindle Nation Daily Reports

By Lewis Faulkner
FaulknerFiction


(Publisher’s Note: Early last month, you may recall, we ran a brief piece in Kindle Nation about the Triangle Kindle Readers Groupa Kindle meet-up group that was forming in the Raleigh-Durham area  of North Carolina. Participant Lewis Faulkner, who hipped us to the meet-up in the first place, has been good enough to write up the meet-up for us here, and it’s the least I can do to mention in turn that Mr. Faulkner is the author of four novels, one of which has been optioned for a film. Any relation to another novelist? I didn’t ask. But you can click here to see Kindle editions of Faulkner’s novels. –Stephen Windwalker)


Ever wonder what would happen if a group of Kindle owners actually met in person?
Me, too.
And on Friday, 1/23/2010, I was there when the Triangle Kindle Readers Group had their first meeting at the Sawmill Tap Room in Raleigh, NC.
It wasn’t hard to find the group when I arrived.  On the table were all sorts of Kindles, each with distinctive covers.  Prior to arriving, we were supposed to rsvp and have downloaded a copy of Charles Frazier’s novel Thirteen Moons.  For even the amateur Kindle owner, procuring the novel  was about as easy as a two clicks and a thirty second transmission.  And you never know, the author lives in North Carolina. 
Altogether, there were nine or ten people present out of the twenty that had expressed some interest in the group.  Our leader, Bob, welcomed everyone and drinks were ordered.   Bob jokingly mentioned that we were the largest Kindle group in North Carolina; that’s because, to the best of our knowledge, we’re the only Kindle meet-up group in North Carolina. 
We all introduced ourselves and tried to place names with the on-line photos from the website.  Then, Bob led the group in some discussion questions.  Insightful opinions were the norm.  When a woman made a suggestion for our next book to read together, I looked it up on-line at the table and announced that it wouldn’t be available for download until February 23—yeah, you can do that with a Kindle in a bar!  At various places during the evening, people asked questions about their Kindle.  How things worked.  How much accessories cost.  We even discussed the new revelation that Kindle will soon be offering some aps, like the aps that are presently available for iPhones.
The most important thing to mention is that everyone was respectful, nice, and friendly.  It’s hard to beat that kind of meeting in 2010.  No obnoxious egos or double-doctorate English college professors.  And, there wasn’t a techie-geek among us.  Not only that, the average age looked to be about thirty, not fifteen.
Will I go back?
Heck, yeah.
When you’ve reached that stage of Kindle ownership where you get tired of hearing people exclaim on-line how much they love their Kindles, you might thing about attending a face-to-face group like ours, or starting one of your own. 
You’ll find it exhilarating to be on the front-end of something novel, in every sense of the word.
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From the Kindle Nation Mailbag: A "thank you" to the citizens of Kindle Nation from Tom Harbin, author of Waking Up Blind

It was great to hear yesterday from Tom Harbin, the author of Waking Up Blind: Lawsuits over Eye Surgery. You may recall that we featured a generous excerpt from the book last week in Free Kindle Nation Shorts, and apparently it had quite an impact in creating interest in a fascinating book! 

Dear Steve

I was blown away by the results of your writing up my book,  Waking Up Blind: Lawsuits over Eye Surgery, in last week’s Kindle Nation Shorts.  In the weeks previous, my sales rank of the Kindle version had ranged from about 16,000 to 59,000.  Within eight hours of your posting, my sales rank had increased to 173.  It has fallen back a bit, but still remains in the mid triple digits instead of five digits.  You reach many people and get action. I can’t thank you and all the citizens of Kindle Nation enough and can recommend your Kindle Nation Shorts to any author or publisher looking for an increased presence among the thousands of Kindle owners who read Kindle Nation.

Tom Harbin MD 



You’re welcome, Tom. And — aside to readers — if you haven’t read the excerpt yet and downloaded the entire book, I’m here to say that you owe it to yourself to do both while the Kindle edition is still available at the 50%-off price that Tom’s publisher set in association with the book’s Free Kindle Nation Shorts placement.

Authors and Publishers: 
If you’d like to help promote great reading for Kindle owners by participating in Free Kindle Nation Shorts, send an email to KindleNation@gmail.com.