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Around the Kindlesphere, May 3, 2010: The Decline & Fall of the Agency 5, eReader Blogs & Podcasts New and Old, Kobo Hardware and Compatibility

At Kindle Nation Daily, we do a lot of tasting so that you won’t ruin your appetite on morsels unworthy of your palate. Here are a few tasty tidbits to provide the flavor of what’s going on in the Kindlesphere today:

  • Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors, and, like me, a frequent contributor to the Teleread blog. For those of us who follow the peregrinations of Steve Jobs’ cat-herding efforts to wring collusive price-fixing and a market advantage out of the Agency 5 megapublishers, Adin’s Teleread piece today, “The Decline & Fall of the Agency 5,” is a must read.
  • Publishing exec Joe Wikert’s Kindleville blog has gone the way of so many 2007-2008 Kindle blogs, but he’s opened up a new once-a-week iPadHound blog, and he continues to provide consistently interesting if occasionally snarky perspectives in his 2020 Publishing blog, including one this morning on eReaders and Digital Bookstores. (I’m no shrink, and I love and have blogged about Joe’s ideas, but I have to admit that I wonder if his perspective might be tinged with some sort of personal embitterment toward Amazon when I read a discussion of the Kindle and iBooks Stores that makes no mention of relative catalog count, which as of this morning appears to stand at 509,985 for the Kindle Store and somewhere between “over 46,000” and “about 60,000” for theiBooks Store.)
  • Speaking of new general ereader initiatives by long-time Kindle observers, you’ll want to check out Len Edgerly’s Reading Edge podcast, Andrys Basten’s E-Reader World Blog, and, of course, the granddaddy of ’em all, Paul K. Biba’s TeleRead. The first two are new because they are relatively new, and Teleread is new because, despite having been around since the 90s, it’s full of new content each and every day. (By the way, it was Len to the best of my knowledge who coined the excellent word “Kindlesphere” that I throw around so liberally, and if you see him around Harvard Square this week be sure to join me in congratulating him on his daughter’s wedding Saturday.) 
  • Speaking again of Teleread, contributor and offsite blogger Joanna has the scoop this morning on the new Kobo reader becoming available in stores, in Canada.
  • Speaking of Kobo, thanks to Kindle Nation citizen Nina S., who wrote in with this Kobo Kwery: “Hello, Stephen… As a Gmail user, you may have seen the ads along the right side of the screen. Today, as I was reading the Tuesday Kindle Nation, I saw Kobo, a provider of ebooks. I clicked on the ad (curious person that I am), and read as much as I could on the website about what Kobo is and what it provides. But I am a bit puzzled, and perhaps you have the answer. I couldn’t discern if the books are in mobi format. Are you acquainted with this site? If so, what’s your “take” on it?   Glad to know you came through the surgery so well.   Nina” Thanks, Nina. I’ll admit that although I have downloaded the free Kobo app on my iPad, I have yet to spend tons of time with it, so I will shy away from sharing a “take” too hastily, with apologies, but I can tell you that Kobo books, which are in one of the many occasionally overlapping ePub formats, are not intended, as yet, to be read on your Kindle. (Which is not to say that there are not ways….).

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Monday, May 3: Six More Brand New Fiction Freebies — Death of a Trophy Wife, The Killing Room, Mistress by Mistake, Secrets of the Tudor Court, Give Me Fever, Breach of Trust — and Dozens More

The early May march of free books for easy download in the Kindle Store continued Monday with six new listings, most of them new releases, bringing the total for May to 11!
Meanwhile, check out our new listing of 30 months of month-by-month Kindle Store bestsellers here:

Kindle Store Bestsellers, Month-by-Month for the First 30 Months

 

Death of a Trophy Wife, the eighth novel in Laura Levine’s Jane Austen series, was released by Kensington Saturday as a $22 hardcover, discounted to $14.96 by Amazon, but it’s free today in the Kindle Store.

 
The Killing Room by John Manning will be released as a $6.99 paperback tomorrow by Pinnacle Books, but it’s free today in the Kindle Store.
Mistress By Mistake by Maggie Robinson was released by Kensington Saturday as a $14 paperback, discounted to $10.20 by Amazon, but it’s free today in the Kindle Store.
D.L. Bogdan’s Secrets of the Tudor Court was released by Kensington Saturday as a $15 paperback, discounted to $10.20 by Amazon, but it’s free today in the Kindle Store.
 
Bestselling author Niobia Bryant’s steamy novel Give Me Fever will be released as a $6.99 paperback tomorrow by Dafina Books, but it’s free today in the Kindle Store.
 

Breach of Trust by DiAnn Mills, a popular 2009 release from Tyndale, is newly free in the Kindle Store.

 Meanwhile….

Here are our other updated free promotional listings in the Kindle Store as of May 3:

 
The Fence My Father Built by Linda S. Clare

Snow Melts in Spring by Deborah Vogts

 Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

by Martha I. Finney and Duncan Mathison

Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure, a Sampler from Simon & Schuster

Nothing’s been ordinary in the world of ebooks lately, but ordinarily, lately, when you see the line “This price was set by the publisher” on a Kindle ebook’s product page it is Amazon’s way of letting us know  that there’s bad news adjacent to it in the form of one of those special “agency price-fixing model” prices. $12? $15? One never knows.

But here’s a breath of fresh air! Big Six publisher Simon & Schuster has done some creative thinking about how to leverage the power of “free” in the Kindle Store and used the agency price-fixing model to try something new, with a substantial volume of freebies under the lusty title Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure.

Just what do I mean by substantial? 

  • First, these are 10 tales by 10 authors each with her own substantial oeuvre of fantasy titles already, so of course the authors and the publisher are hoping that this process will work for them and lead readers to their other work in the same way that we have seen work so effectively with our own Free Kindle Nation Shorts program. The authors represented are Jane Johnson, Linda BuckleyArcher, Scott Westerfeld, Kai Meyer, Alan Snow, Anne Ursu, Obert Skye, Margaret Peterson Haddix, D.J. MacHale and Holly Black.
  • Second, for those of you who, like me, take a look at file size and “number of locations” in an ebooks metadata and free sample before committing to a book, you’ll recognize that the offering’s file size of 1320 KB and its 3,936 “locations” spell a book of significant size and virtual weight.
  • Third, my quick perusal of the full text indicates that, unlike many “sampler” offerings, these 10 tales appear to be just that — tales, self-contained short stories or novellas — rather than frustrating tastes of an excerpted chapter or two.

So, bravo, Simon & Schuster! This is just the kind of thing that the big publishers should be doing to experiment with and begin to figure out the retail marketing power of distinctive pricing and free-to-paid linkages, so we’ve got your back if some of the other agency price-fixing model publishers whine that you are engaging in competitive and adversarial behavior.

And, of course, we still have dozens of other freebies in the Kindle Store, in case you’ve missed any of them.

Kindle Store Bestsellers, Month-by-Month for the First 30 Months

There have been nights in my life when, in an effort to fall asleep without turning the light back on to read, I have relied not on counting sheep but on reciting silently to myself the regular starting lineups of each team in the American League for the 1961 season. It always worked, and I would usually doze off around the time I made my way around the nifty Indians infield of Vic Power, Johnny Temple, Woody Held and Bubba Phillips. I’ve always been a baseball guy, and like a lot of other fans I found that my memory works best for the first season that I paid attention to baseball, and that was ’61, a pretty cool year to become a fan. 

But I’m also a book guy, and things like bestseller lists can be as compelling for book people as batting averages and other stats are for baseball fans. So, just for fun and in case you want to any backfilling of your reading or drill down on the bestseller lists from the first 30 months of the Kindle Revolution, here they are. Click on any of these links to see the 100 bestselling titles in the Kindle Store for that month. I’m pretty sure that the Kindle Store has not gone out of stock on any of these, although the prices for some may have changed and the prices shown on these lists are, of course, the current prices for each book:

Amazon Brings Nice Improvements in Kindle for PC Updates

A Kindle World blogger Andrys Basten has the scoop on some nice enhancements to the Kindle for PC app. Here’s a link to her post: http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2010/05/kindle-for-pc-app-updated-with.html

A necessary consequence of my recovery from total hip replacement surgery 2 1/2 weeks ago is that, temporarily at least, I cannot as easily as usual get to the Windows laptop that we keep on the second floor, so I will just pass on from Andrys’ report that the update allows users of the free Kindle for PC app to create as well as read marks, annotations and highlighting, adjust brightness, set background and text color, and view Kindle content in full-screen view.

Can easy access to Kindle blogs and periodicals with the Kindle for PC and other device apps be far behind?

Is It Just an Early Morning Mirage? New Associates Page Suggests Amazon May Be About to Unleash Powerful Force in Marketing Kindle Content

By Stephen Windwalker

We won’t jump the gun on what we find on the Amazon website (at least in this case) until an announcement is made, but it is too pretty a picture not to share a screen shot from a page that is, after all, now available to any of Amazon’s 114 million customers.

Back on March 15, in a post entitled What’s in Store for the Kindle in 2010 and Beyond?, I shared a numbers of ideas for new Kindle initiatives, including this one:

  • Re-integration of Kindle content with Amazon Associates: Originally, beginning with the Kindle launch in November 2007, Amazon paid a 10 percent commission on links to all Kindle hardware, branded accessories, and content. This was much higher than the usual Amazon Associates commission of 4 to 8.5 percent, but early in 2009 Amazon zeroed out Kindle content commissions, presumably due to thin or negative Kindle book margins. Now, with intensifying competition with other ebook content providers and Kindle content margins rising to at least 30 per cent given changes in Amazon’s relationships with publishers, it would make good business sense for Amazon to re-establish Amazon Associates commissions for all content in the Kindle Store to drive more traffic there.

A few weeks earlier, I had emailed the same concept to an Amazon contact:

Now, as Amazon is positioned for better gross margins on Kindle content and also faces increasing content competition, it seems that the Amazon Associates program could again be very helpful in positioning Kindle content to maintain as much as possible of its current market share strength. Obviously this would be very much in my own self interest, but I wouldn’t waste my breath proposing it unless I thought there were good solid business reasons for Amazon to consider it.

Who knows whether this is just an early-morning mirage or something real that will merit a formal announcement in the next day or two? And if they knew, could they tell you?

If it is real, there are two very interesting things going on here:

  • Millions of Amazon Associates websites all over the world will soon be promoting their favorite books in the Kindle Store, unleashing an unparalleled marketing force for the Kindle Revolution, with which Amazon’s competitors have no comparable arrow, as yet, in their quivers. While many assume that Amazon Associates websites are limited to a few scruffy blogs here and there, they actually include many of your favorite authors, NPR and your local public radio state, your favorite online news sources, and many of the largest institutional and commercial online forces in the world.
  • There’s something else here that may be a slight atmospheric confirmation of our recent post to the effect that sales of the Kindle unit itself are doing just fine, despite all the predictions and reports of doom and gloom now that Steve Jobs has thrown his glove onto the field. While the screen shot and web page suggests that Amazon may be about to begin paying commissions of 4% to 8.5% for Kindle content, it also appears the commission being paid for Kindle hardware and certain Kindle accessories is actually being decreased from the very generous 10% that has been offered for the past 2 1/2 years to the standard 4% to 8.5%. It seems unlikely that Amazon would back off on its investment in Kindle hardware marketing if the hardware sales were flagging.

All this being said, I can be the kind of guy who, if you pour me half a glass of Sam Adams, I want a pitcher. While I would think it wonderful for Amazon to make all this a reality, it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the ways in which Amazon could involve its most passionate evangelists — that’s you and me, brothers and sisters, as Kindle owners and Kindle content readers — in spreading the word. We do it already, but in the new Kindle 2.5 upgrade’s addition of Facebook and Twitter features, Amazon is taking a step toward making it more systemic. Where to go next? How about implementing the following ideas which we laid out two years ago in the first, #1 Kindle Store bestseller for 2008, The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle:

The Golden Age of Kindle 2.0 and Beyond — Part 2

Kindle Owners as Kindle Sellers

This elegant idea is the brainchild of Joe Wikert, blogger extraordinaire who has a day job as an publishing executive at John Wiley. Have I added my own two or three cents to it? Of course I have.

And this smart column by Mary Schmich today’s Chicago Tribune is just one more indication that this is an idea whose time is here.

As with other early adopters, many Kindle owners tend to be somewhat evangelical buzz agents in spreading the word about the device and all it can do. I have to admit that when someone sees me out and about with my Kindle and asks about it, they better have 10 or 15 minutes to spare. Amazon has taken a couple of major steps in recognition of this propensity:
· A prominently displayed “See a Kindle in Your City” page on the Amazon website, promoting the concept of meet-ups in cities and towns all over the country so that Kindle owners can show off their Kindles to prospective Kindle buyers. Although one might expect some reticence to participate in this day and age, early indications are that it is becoming a popular feature.
· Right from the start, Amazon has offered a very attractive 10% Amazon Associates affiliate fee for all purchases from the Kindle store, including the Kindle itself. In other words, if you buy a Kindle through a link like this one embedded in my website, an email, or in any other content, Amazon will pay me 10% of your $359 purchase price. This can get lucrative in a hurry.
What happens when you combine these two initiatives? You get Joe Wikert’s idea, and it is a keeper. Kindle owners are already carrying a lot of water for Amazon via word-of-mouth enthusiasm about how much they love their Kindles, and all Amazon would need to do to return a little love (and, in the end, greatly multiply the love they get back), would be, in Joe’s words, to provide “something as bare-bones as one screen with a couple of text-entry boxes where we can put the prospective buyer’s name and e-mail address …. thanks to the magic of Whispernet the info would go right to Amazon and they could then send the prospect a message with more info on the Kindle. They could also track you or I as the lead originator, so if an order results, we’d get credit for it.”
Joe goes on to suggest some great operational ideas such as credit in the form of “a free Kindle book or two” and “a leader board showing the top 10 originators. There would be a lot of friendly competition to hit the #1 slot!” What’s more viral than a proposal that could turn every Kindle into an order-taking device and every Kindle owner into a Kindle salesperson?
I love Joe’s idea, and I believe it is well within the realm of Amazon’s engineer capacities as well as its marketing vision. Although “a free Kindle book or two” would be nice, I tend to think the setting up each Kindle with an Amazon Associates tag would be more flexible for Kindle owners (who might want to use their credit to order groceries from Amazon) and also more powerful over the long haul for Amazon. Each Kindle owner could automatically receive an Amazon Associate tag and account (if he doesn’t already have one), and the Kindle could be “wired” so that an email could go out automatically with a “click this link to order your Kindle now.” Amazon could even set it up so that the $35.90 affiliate fee could be split with the buyer, so that in addition to your handselling you would also be offering a prospective buyer a nice 5% discount for jumping on it right away through the link.
The profit motive would of course inspire a lot of evangelism – $17.95 a conversation is nothing to sneeze at. I feel a new chapter of my book percolating as I think about the possibilities here — I hope you won’t mind if I credit you for the idea when I wrote about it.
Customer Experience: Every time you someone asks you about your Kindle, you come a little closer to paying for it. 20 conversations and you are reading from a free Kindle! Duh?
Likelihood of Adoption (on a scale of 1 to 10): 9. What was it I said in the last paragraph. Yes, it was “Duh?” Not that there isn’t a downside to all this viral thinking. Amazon would not want to be responsible for the marauding hordes of Kindle owners preying on potential buyers in every upscale community from La Jolla to Kennebunkport, or the guys sitting in those cushy easy chairs in every Starbucks with an “Ask me about my Kindle” sign taped to their foreheads.
.

Kindle Content Affiliate Program

If you liked the “Kindle Owners as Kindle Sellers” concept, you’ll love the Kindle Content Affiliate Program. (I know, it needs a catchier name, which no doubt Amazon will develop. I’m just going for informative here, not sexy).
One of the features that I love in the Kindle Store is the ability to get a sample chapter of just about any Kindle edition sent wirelessly to my Kindle within a few seconds via the Whispernet. What I’m suggesting here is just a new Kindle-to-Kindle wrinkle that would allow Kindle owners to buzz to their Kindle-owning friends about the latest book their reading, with a brief note and a sample chapter. Once again, the engineering required would be a snap, and from any e-book you were reading you could click on the menu bar and pull up a screen that would allow you to type in a friend’s kindle.com email address (or select it from a list of your Kindle contacts) and send off your note and sample with an easy-to-click invitation for your friend to buy the title that you recommend.
Since Amazon already established an affiliate account for you and your Kindle (see above), it would be easy for Amazon to pay you an affiliate fee whenever your recommendation results in a purchase by the friend you’ve contacted. Or, better yet, let Amazon split the affiliate fee so that 5% each goes to you and your friend.
Customer Experience: An idea like this one is bound to optimize the Kindle’s astonishing potential for putting readers into contact with each other and with authors or publishers whom they wish to follow. The same things that customers enjoy about the recommendation features of the main Amazon site would be made even more seamless for Kindle owners. Meanwhile, it’s yet another means for voracious readers to help defray their Kindle and Kindle Store expenses.

Likelihood of Adoption (on a scale of 1 to 10): 9. This one synchronizes chapter and verse with Amazon’s signature marketing and customer experience strategies. It would also easy for Amazon to protect Kindle owners from spamming abuses of the feature by requiring that such messages originate from a Kindle and allowing Kindle owners to block particular senders.

I’m just saying.

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Sunday, May 2: Two Brand New Freebies — The Fence My Father Built & Snow Melts in Spring — and Dozens More

Two new Kindle Store freebies this morning, which brings us to five so far in May:
 
The Fence My Father Built by Linda S. Clare

Snow Melts in Spring by Deborah Vogts

 Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

by Martha I. Finney and Duncan Mathison

 Meanwhile….

Here are our other updated free promotional listings in the Kindle Store as of May 1:

Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure, a Sampler from Simon & Schuster

Nothing’s been ordinary in the world of ebooks lately, but ordinarily, lately, when you see the line “This price was set by the publisher” on a Kindle ebook’s product page it is Amazon’s way of letting us know  that there’s bad news adjacent to it in the form of one of those special “agency price-fixing model” prices. $12? $15? One never knows.

But here’s a breath of fresh air! Big Six publisher Simon & Schuster has done some creative thinking about how to leverage the power of “free” in the Kindle Store and used the agency price-fixing model to try something new, with a substantial volume of freebies under the lusty title Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure.

Just what do I mean by substantial? 

  • First, these are 10 tales by 10 authors each with her own substantial oeuvre of fantasy titles already, so of course the authors and the publisher are hoping that this process will work for them and lead readers to their other work in the same way that we have seen work so effectively with our own Free Kindle Nation Shorts program. The authors represented are Jane Johnson, Linda BuckleyArcher, Scott Westerfeld, Kai Meyer, Alan Snow, Anne Ursu, Obert Skye, Margaret Peterson Haddix, D.J. MacHale and Holly Black.
  • Second, for those of you who, like me, take a look at file size and “number of locations” in an ebooks metadata and free sample before committing to a book, you’ll recognize that the offering’s file size of 1320 KB and its 3,936 “locations” spell a book of significant size and virtual weight.
  • Third, my quick perusal of the full text indicates that, unlike many “sampler” offerings, these 10 tales appear to be just that — tales, self-contained short stories or novellas — rather than frustrating tastes of an excerpted chapter or two.

So, bravo, Simon & Schuster! This is just the kind of thing that the big publishers should be doing to experiment with and begin to figure out the retail marketing power of distinctive pricing and free-to-paid linkages, so we’ve got your back if some of the other agency price-fixing model publishers whine that you are engaging in competitive and adversarial behavior.

Indeed, I am so pleased to see this little development that I am not going to make any snide cracks in which I wonder archly how you can afford to offer this sampler free of charge what with the storage and fulfillment costs of ebooks!

Loving A Lost Lord by Mary Jo Putney

Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help by Douglas Anthony Cooper ($.01)
The Minister’s Wooing, a Penguin Classic by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wounded Healer by Donna Fleisher 

4.6 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
Scent by Clint L. Kelly (Author)

3.5 out of 5 stars 4 customer reviews
by Sandra Felton
4.5 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
by Leslie Parrott

60,000 eBooks in the iBooks Store? 46,000? Imprecise O’Reilly Radar Post Could Brew a Tempest … Does Steve Jobs Have Some Splainin’ to Do?

A few stories you may have missed if you haven’t tried the Kindle Store’s free 14-day trial subscription to iPad Nation Daily: