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Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Wednesday, February 10, 2010: James Patterson, Tom Reynolds, Darren Craske, and More

Fang: A Maximum Ride Novel  (Free Book 1 Preview) by James Patterson

Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #3: Paragon by JOHN JACKSON MILLER  


Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn by JOHN JACKSON MILLER 


Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #1: Precipice by JOHN JACKSON MILLER

Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus 
by Michael B Slaughter

Edge of Apocalypse Free Preview Only (Equivalent of about 35-40 pages despite metadata that indicates longer) by Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

Devotions for Lent

  
The Apothecary’s Daughter by Julie Klassen (Jan 1, 2009)

Talk of the Town Lisa Wingate (Mar 1, 2008)

Daisy Chain (Defiance Texas Trilogy, Book 1) Mary E. DeMuth (Mar 1, 2009)

Peculiar Treasures (The Katie Weldon Series #1) Robin Jones Gunn (Apr 1, 2008)

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith Rob Bell (Jul 1, 2006)

Icy Heat: A Heat series story by Leigh Wyndfield

John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken (Jun 7, 2007)

His Lady Mistress
Slow Hands (Harlequin Blaze)

 

Senior Executive Indicates Random House Could Steer Clear of Price-Fixing Cabal

Thanks to Bufo Calvin at I Love My Kindle for turning my attention to some fascinating remarks last week by Madeline McIntosh, who returned to Random House in early November in the newly created position of President, Sales, Operations, and Digital. Speaking in San Jose at the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association, McIntosh separated herself and Random House dramatically from what had previously seemed like lockstep among Big Six publishers around issues of pricing control over ebooks.

According to a report at Publishers Lunch:

McIntosh took on pricing control directly as one of the reasons Random House has “not acted quite as quickly as others.” She expressed a series of concerns that publishers “have no real experience at setting retail prices….”

She cited a recent visit to Powell’s, where with used books and new books sitting on the same shelves “they set the prices on every single unit in a unique, demand-based way.” But more importantly from her perspective, up until now “our authors have not been at risk if you make a different decision about how to price a given book, so it didn’t actually affect our author if a given retailer decided to aggressively discount a certain segment of books. The benefit…is that we have been able to sustain a great variety of different authors at different levels.”

On the windowing of releases, McIntosh expressed a personal opinion and noted “there are a lot of divergent opinions at Random House,” but she is “not convinced that delaying an ebook will be to the benefit of either the author or the consumer.” She prefers not to lose a potential sale because an ebook version is not available and also does not want to “create an adversarial relationship” with ebook readers or “train those readers that instead the best way to get that digital copy is to download it for free.”

Instead of through changed pricing models, McIntosh said “the best value we can offer in the digital world will be about embracing what we already know how to do well…. Our best asset is our editors.” She spoke about “allowing digital to force us to reinvent ourselves as editors” as Random looks at ways “to contract and deliver content that is a whole range of different lengths, and bring ideas to market in a much faster way than we can when its print.” For the future, she is less excited about “just about creating a digital version of a book or adding bells and whistles” but wonders instead “do we need to push ourselves into an area we really don’t know anything about, which is thinking about developing applications.” She sees the process as taking a brand and conceiving of “what would be compelling to a consumer…that would make us still relevant as a content producer” in a new way, admitting that they don’t have the answers yet–just the question.

It’s good to see some engaged, intelligent, independent thinking by someone in a position to influence how the ebook pricing saga may actually play out.

Three-Year Cost Comparison Before You Buy a Single Book: Kindle $359, Kindle DX $639, Apple iPad $1959

Has the entire Internet been hijacked by close relatives of Steve Jobs?

Don’t get me wrong. I am pretty jazzed about the Apple iPad, and I plan to get one if I can keep myself convinced that I will be able to use its features, apps, and hardware functionality in ways that actually allow me to save money on other gadgets and services. 

But I have to say that it’s a little surprising, as I read various posts about Apple’s new iPad, some at otherwise responsible websites, how confused many people seem to be about the real cost comparisons between the Kindle and the iPad. Anyone who tells you that the two products are relatively close in price is not telling you the whole story.

I will grant that it was a pretty good initial PR coup for Apple to announce that the iPad starts at $499, but let’s get real here. Given the fact that the iPad will be all about mobility and will provide a very cool environment for downloading and viewing, reading, or listening to various kinds of high-bandwidth media content (including ebooks), it simply does not make sense to analyze the iPad’s price without unlimited 3G wireless or without at least 32 GB of storage. To equip the iPad with less than the 3G and 32 GB options seems rather like buying a Maserati with a speed governor and using it to delivery the mail in your town, or in this case, the email. And we are talking about a Maserati here.

So, let’s do a three-year price comparison of the current 6-inch Kindle, the Kindle DX, and the 32 GB iPad 3G, before a customer buys a single book:

  • The latest-generation 6-inch Kindle costs $259 up front, another $75 to $100 for accessories and an extended warranty, and never another dime = $334-$359
  • The latest-generation Kindle DX costs $489 up front, another $100 to $150 for accessories and an extended warranty, and never another dime = $589-639
  • The iPad with unlimited 3G (i.e., enough bandwidth to do anything more than email and a few ebooks) and 32 GB storage capacity costs $729 up front, another $100 to $150 for accessories and an extended warranty, and $30 a month x 36 months = $1909-$1959

But like I said, the iPad is a Maserati. For people who are looking for a highly mobile, highly portable convergence device, and for whom money is no object, this may (soon) be the closest thing yet on the market. Although the iPad has been roundly criticized for some specific limitations like the fact that it will not play well with Adobe Flash, the fact remains that it will be able to do so much that it is unfair, in one sense, to compare it to the Kindle. But in another sense, unless you truly value all that the iPad can do, it’s reasonable to compare it with your other options — like the Kindle that you probably already own if you are reading this post — for doing very specific things. And for many of us, there will be several ways in which the iPad comes up short in comparison with the Kindle when it come to very specific reading-related issues such as its weight and its backlit screen.

Perhaps it just comes down to the fact that we do not, as consumers, live in a one-size-fits-all world. The iPad is an exciting product to me and to many other people who already perceive the need for higher levels of tricked out mobility. It will definitely achieve at least moderate success, but there are some  issues that would concern me if I were an Apple investor:

  • For the iPad to become a mass audience product Apple will have to create the perception of a need for millions of affluent customers who do not yet perceive the need. (Apple’s done it before, so I wouldn’t bet against them doing it again.)
  • When people buy the iPad they will be buying it for very different reasons than those for which they buy the Kindle, so the iPad is not well-positioned to ride the wave of the Kindle revolution, and trying to stand on Amazon’s shoulders, to use Steve Jobs’ phrase, may be a precarious perch indeed.
  • The weight of the iPad is wonderful if you are comparing it to a tablet or a netbook, but it’s going to be a dealbreaker for many potential customers when it comes to serious reading. In our current Kindle Nation Citizen Survey 52% of respondents so far say that the fact that a device weighed 24 ounces would have a negative influence on whether they would buy it or continue to use it.
  • Of all the products that might lose sales to the iPad, the first would seem to be the iPod Touch, and there may also be some low-level cannibalism between the iPad and the iPhone, particularly among those who figure out that you can run Skype on the iPad.

Meanwhile, there are three ways in which the iPad could actually be helpful to the Kindle:

  • If it gains a foothold as the primary ereading alternative to the Kindle, it could discourage investment in other ereader devices and platforms.
  • Its impressive bells and whistles are bound to inspire Amazon to add new features and sex appeal to the Kindle sooner than might otherwise occur.
  • By all accounts to date, the iPad like the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and soon the Mac will allow access to Kindle content through various Kindle for X apps.

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Tuesday, February 9, 2010: Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #3: Paragon and more!

Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #3: Paragon by JOHN JACKSON MILLER  


Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn by JOHN JACKSON MILLER 


Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #1: Precipice by JOHN JACKSON MILLER

Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus 
by Michael B Slaughter

Edge of Apocalypse Free Preview Only (Equivalent of about 35-40 pages despite metadata that indicates longer) by Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

Devotions for Lent

  
The Apothecary’s Daughter by Julie Klassen (Jan 1, 2009)

Talk of the Town Lisa Wingate (Mar 1, 2008)

Daisy Chain (Defiance Texas Trilogy, Book 1) Mary E. DeMuth (Mar 1, 2009)

Peculiar Treasures (The Katie Weldon Series #1) Robin Jones Gunn (Apr 1, 2008)

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith Rob Bell (Jul 1, 2006)

Icy Heat: A Heat series story by Leigh Wyndfield

John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken (Jun 7, 2007)

His Lady Mistress
Slow Hands (Harlequin Blaze)

 

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Monday, February 8, 2010: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, and Nine Glitchy "Titles" to Avoid for Now

Here’s one we haven’t mention for a while – a classic of Eastern mysticism:

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda 

Meanwhile, you may notice that there are nine new “free” titles that you will want to avoid, for now, in the Kindle Store:

As we mentioned in a post yesterday, Amazon is beginning to venture into the world of book publishing with unique content that comes to it through programs such as the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest, and it appears we’ll soon be able to read excerpts from works by the contest quarterfinalists, free, right on our Kindles. Perhaps we’ll even be invited to cast out votes, ratings or recommendations!

That’s all well and good, but currently there’s a bit of a glitch in the system, as nine of these “titles” show up in the Kindle Store with listings such as this one, and they are currently just placeholders:

Quarterfinalist 9 (Kindle Edition) by ABNA entrant9 (Author) 

If you click on the “Buy” button on any of these 9 pages, it will downloaded to your Kindle and your account will be charged $0.00 (or over two buck in most countries outside the US!), but for now all you will find if you click on the title on your Home screen will be what you see in the screenshot at the right.

No harm, no foul?

Not exactly. The problem is that eventually these “placeholders” will be replaced by free content that you may want to read, but you won’t be able to download the updated content as long as the placeholder is in your Kindle account. Merely deleting it from your Kindle yourself won’t be enough of a purge.

So, two suggestions here:

  • First, if you’ve already downloaded any of these “titles,” I recommend that you contact Kindle Support (Kindle Support Phone Number 1-866-321-8851 or 1-206-266-0927 outside the US) and ask that they be removed from your Kindle so that you will be able to download it later when the content is live. We’ll have a heads up here at Kindle Nation Daily when the titles are live.
  • Second, it’s for reasons such as this that I always recommend buying content via the computer (rather than via the Kindle) whenever it is convenient, because a quick look at the file size — 3 KB in this case — usually tells me whether I am getting a full book (generally over 100KB), an excerpt (generally over 20 KB), or something less.

Obviously, from the fact that all nine of these placeholder titles made the Kindle Movers & Shakers List yesterday, one can infer that a lot of people downloaded the placeholder page. So it seems that a third suggestion is in order, to Amazon, to fix this well-intentioned glitch, because it is eating up time for Kindle owners and will no doubt lead to a lot of wasted time for Kindle Support and unnecessary bandwidth usage, even at this tiny file size, for the downloading process.

Amazon’s Recent Moves and Kindle Owners’ Survey Suggest New Responses to Publishers’ Prix Fixe Play

By Stephen Windwalker
Originally posted February 7, 2010 at Kindle Nation Daily – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

Related posts:

When the Big Six publishers and Apple’s Steve Jobs began conspiring recently to raise ebook prices by 30 to 50 percent from the Kindle Store standard of $9.99 for bestsellers and many new releases, it may have looked at first like curtains for Amazon’s powerful hold on the fast-growing ebook market. Amazon’s first move — referenced on the blog as its “Delete You” tactic against MacMillan titles — even seemed a bit petulant to some observers, especially when the retailer turned around a few days later and said that it would have to capitulate to MacMillan’s pricing demands.

The publishers are in a powerful position, and it may indeed hurt sales of the Kindle — and of the publishers’ own bestsellers — if in a few weeks we find that few ebook bestsellers are available any longer at that $9.99 price that has become so popular in the Kindle Store.

But it turns out Amazon has some arrows left in its quiver.

First, it is clear now that, whatever its intentions, Amazon’s “Delete You” play was very effective in educating Kindle owners about the pricing controversy that was going on behind the scenes. Among the first 1,032 respondents in the current Winter 2010 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey, 71 percent agree with this statement: “By dropping MacMillan books, Amazon took stand vs. high-priced ebooks.” 11 percent disagreed with the statement, and 18 percent didn’t know or didn’t have an opinion.

The importance of this customer education, with its obvious subtext that “it is the publishers, not Amazon, who are behind the price increases in the Kindle Store” is that it helps to preserve a special relationship between Amazon and those of its customers who are Kindle owners. Most Kindle owners are extremely loyal customers, and we buy a lot of books. You don’t just have to take my word on these matters, because they are quite evident from other data provided by respondents in our current survey:

  • 88 percent have positive or very positive feelings about Amazon, but only 19 percent have positive or very positive feelings about the Big Six publishers. 
  • 70 percent agreed (and only 13 percent disagreed) with the statement that “Jeff Bezos & Amazon have my back, & I know they price things to sell.
  • 33 percent said that since acquiring a Kindle they annually buy more than 30 Kindle ebooks that are priced between 99 cents and $9.99, while another 30% said they buy 15 to 30 such books.

What will Kindle owners do if the prices of bestsellers priced previous at $9.99 increase by the 30 to 50 percent threatened by the Big Six publishers? Currently, according to our respondents, only 3 percent buy 15 or more ebooks a year in the $10-and-up price range. For some customers, that will change: 37 percent agreed with the statement that “I will probably pay $10 to $14.99 for new ebook titles if necessary,” while 54 percent disagreed.

But there are also some strong indications that this group of very active readers may be ready to make an interesting pivot in consumer behavior, one that may be reminiscent of changes in behavior in the audience for music and film in the past few decades. As these forms of entertainment became accessible in different formats and at different prices, and the costs of production and distribution declined, audience grew dramatically for music and movies with various forms of “indie” branding. In the current Kindle Nation survey, we found strong identification with the following statements:

  • With recent ebook price wars, I’ve become more price-conscious. 72 percent agreed, 22 per cent disagreed.
  • With higher bestseller prices, I’ll buy more backlist or indie titles. 60 percent agreed, 21 per cent disagreed.
  • I’ll look to buy ebooks by authors who provide Kindle exclusives. 48 percent agreed, 28 per cent disagreed.

It should come as no surprise, of course, that Amazon — and some other forward thinkers — are racing to keep up with, or in some cases help create a market for, changes in what we read and what is published. While Amazon is certainly not about to turn its back for long on bestsellers at whatever prices they are made available, there are some exciting channels opening up which will lead to expanded selection of unique content in the Kindle Store, including:

  • A high likelihood that we will soon see a significant number of bestselling or established authors eschewing agents and traditional publishers to publish their new work directly to the Kindle platform and other new technologies, as novelist Anne Rice recently hinted she might do in direct posts to an Amazon community threat that she initiated late last year.
  • Amazon’s recent announcement that its own do-it-yourself “Digital Text Platform” will soon pay 70 per cent royalties directly to any authors who choose to publish and market their work there in the $2.99-to-$9.99 price range. Even the English majors among established and successful authors may be sufficiently able to do the math that they question whether traditional publishers do enough for their authors to justify paying royalties of only 17.5 percent (the rate authors will get under the agency pricing model upon which publishers are insisting) compared with the 70 percent rate promised by Amazon.
  • Authors, meanwhile, are beginning to organize to protect and advance their independent publishing interests through initiatives like the fledgling Association of Independent Authors that may inspire more and more creative work for direct publication through the Kindle platform and other new technologies.
  • New publishing ventures such as Rosetta Stone and Jane Friedman’s Open Road Integrated Media are making a major investment in helping both established and emerging authors and their representatives to protect and assert their ownership of their digital publishing rights so that they can bring their own work to the Kindle and other platforms under more favorable terms than the 17.5% of retail list price being offered by the Big Six publishers for ebook royalties.
  • Recent deals by Amazon to publish a growing number of Kindle backlist exclusives or new short fiction by prominent authors such as Paulo Coelho, Stephen Covey, Ian McEwan and, through the auspices of the Atlantic Shorts program for the Kindle, Curtis Sittenfeld, Edna O’Brien, Paul Theroux, Jennifer Haigh, Patricia Engel and Christopher Buckley and others.  
  • The announcement this weekend by the British Library, courtesy Andrys Basten’s A Kindle World post, of a joint venture involving Amazon and Microsoft that will bring 65,000 works of 19th century literature to the Kindle, free of charge for Kindle users (although it is unclear if duties and wireless charges will be added for U.K. customers.)
  • Through initiatives such as Amazon Encore, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and its direct publication of public domain works for the Kindle, Amazon is beginning to venture beyond merely dipping its toes in the water of ebook publishing, so that within another year or two I will not be surprised to see hundreds or even thousands of new titles published directly by Amazon in the Kindle Store.
  • And last but not least, Amazon’s announcement on job boards this week that it is “seeking a uniquely-qualified individual to help drive selection of unique content for Kindle:

The position of Kindle Unique Content Specialist blends vendor management with creative and technical aspects of product development, and requires enthusiastic dedication to delivering to our customers unique, engaging, and multidimensional content designed especially for Kindle. To this end, the Kindle Unique Content Specialist will: Use customer feedback, industry news/trends, and Amazon data to identify categories and genres in which unique content will add key selection, amplify Kindle’s distinctive functionally, and further enhance/add value to the Kindle customer experience.

Where will it all lead?

We’ll see. We’ve just witnessed a strange and upside-down economic event where, in the hands of Steve Jobs and the Big Six publishers, “competition” has somehow led to higher rather than lower prices for the consumer.

What’s clear is that Amazon has no intention of biding its time while the publishers and Jobs do their dirty work. As often happens when the dinosaur sector of any industry goes head-to-head with cutting-edge, forward-thinking elements, the dinosaurs may convince themselves they are winning the battles only to discover later that the outcome of the war depended on other battles about which they never heard a word until it was too late.

Publishers and authors may be trying to convince each other that they are at war with Amazon, but they have been acting like they were at war with their own readers. Readers won’t stand for it, and Amazon is likely to do plenty to empower us by giving us more choices at better prices.