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What would life have been like if she’d made a different choice? Is it too late to change her mind… The Devil You Know (Dr. Jane McGill Book 2) by Freida McFadden
What would life have been like if she’d made a different choice? Is it too late to change her mind… The Devil You Know (Dr. Jane McGill Book 2) by Freida McFadden
Fate seems to have a peculiar sense of humor. The Budding Detective: The Origin Story for a Grace Thompson Mystery Series by Ginger Ellington
Fate seems to have a peculiar sense of humor. The Budding Detective: The Origin Story for a Grace Thompson Mystery Series by Ginger Ellington
Sometimes love has a price. And now the only question is—can Lyle and Sugar afford to pay it? Wicked Dirty (Wicked Nights Book 2) by J. Kenner
Sometimes love has a price. And now the only question is—can Lyle and Sugar afford to pay it? Wicked Dirty (Wicked Nights Book 2) by J. Kenner
When Carson Flint traded his Commonwealth military badge for the quiet life, he thought he’d left his battles behind. Owning a Spacebar by John Walker
When Carson Flint traded his Commonwealth military badge for the quiet life, he thought he’d left his battles behind. Owning a Spacebar by John Walker
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Flashback (Kendra Michaels) by Roy Johansen, Iris Johnsen
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Flashback (Kendra Michaels) by Roy Johansen, Iris Johnsen
One picture really can reveal more than 1,000 words… Tune Up (Detective Qigiq Book 2) by Joe Klingler
One picture really can reveal more than 1,000 words… Tune Up (Detective Qigiq Book 2) by Joe Klingler
Tabitha was used to being a social pariah. Could her standing in society get any worse? A Proud Woman: A Historical Romance Mystery (Tabitha & Wolf Historical Mystery Series Book 1) by Sarah F. Noel
Tabitha was used to being a social pariah. Could her standing in society get any worse? A Proud Woman: A Historical Romance Mystery (Tabitha & Wolf Historical Mystery Series Book 1) by Sarah F. Noel
The only hope that the unique history and stories will survive lies with one unlikely Storykeeper. Storykeeper: Epic Historical Saga of Destruction and Survival in 16th Century America (Nine-Rivers Valley Book 1) by Daniel A. Smith
The only hope that the unique history and stories will survive lies with one unlikely Storykeeper. Storykeeper: Epic Historical Saga of Destruction and Survival in 16th Century America (Nine-Rivers Valley Book 1) by Daniel A. Smith
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Phantoms by Dean Koontz
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Phantoms by Dean Koontz
The allegation is homicide. But defending it could be professional suicide… Dark Moon, A Legal Thriller by Deborah Hawkins
The allegation is homicide. But defending it could be professional suicide… Dark Moon, A Legal Thriller by Deborah Hawkins
Forget sugar and spice and everything nice … this year we want to show off our naughty side. Knotty or Nice (Kringle & Co Book 1) by Ines Johnson
Forget sugar and spice and everything nice … this year we want to show off our naughty side. Knotty or Nice (Kringle & Co Book 1) by Ines Johnson
A radical challenge to be a passionate follower of Christ… Ageless Faith: Wisdom for Overcoming Today’s Challenges by Rick McKinney and Jane McKinney
A radical challenge to be a passionate follower of Christ… Ageless Faith: Wisdom for Overcoming Today’s Challenges by Rick McKinney and Jane McKinney
Four new freebies to begin the month of June in the Kindle Store and give you something to read so that you don’t have to pay those ridiculously high prices that Penguin is trying to force on the citizens of Kindle Nation….
Kensington Publishing Company has a new Kindle Store freebie this morning: a lengthy excerpt from Brad Herzog’s new road memoir Turn Left At The Trojan Horse. At 936 “locations,” this is over 5 times the length of a Kindle sample, and the full-length book is available for pre-order here until its release on Tuesday. The book is being billed as On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Love, if you can get your head around that combination. Kirkus Reviews says “Herzog’s third travel memoir follows the highways cross-country examining the idea of the hero along the way. He captures stunning details of the American landscape. The hero’s return, is irresistible…a near-perfect ending.”
At a party Saturday evening, I met an author who has published several of her novels with Kensington, Robin Reardon, and I told her she was very well positioned for the ebook revolution because Kensington, a successful New York-based independent publishing company, is light years ahead of dinosaurs like Penguin Pearson in understanding how to connect with ebook readers. Much more on this later, but let me just mention that Penguin, coincidentially, is the publisher of the two books mentioned above in that On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Lovecomparison, and both of the Penguin titles are terribly overpriced in their Kindle editions since Penguin established its new predatory pricing plan under the agency model.
Thanks to the many Kindle Nation citizens who have written in with their perspectives on Penguin Publishing’s recent, colossally misguided pricing war against readers in general and Kindle owners in particular. Here are a few responses that I wanted to share with you:
I bought The Fountainhead for my Kindle a few months ago at 8.99. On what planet is anyone going to pay THREE times that amount for a book that’s been out for how long? 50 years?
Penguin’s pricing can only result in lowered sales for their books (particularly since you can buy used copies of ANY book for much less on Amazon Marketplace). At what point will their authors AND shareholders wake up and wonder why sales are down?
Wait until the contracts expire next April for all those publishers who happily crawled into bed with Apple. Wait until they realize they’ve been had by a man who has no interest in saving them from the evil discounter Amazon; he’s interested only in the profitability of Apple. In the meantime, Random House has reported that ebook sales are one of its few bright spots in a dismal economy where people aren’t doing a great deal of discretionary spending. By this time next year, I predict that heads will roll at the Agency 5.
Kim said:
Maybe (hopefully) it’s a case of the Penguin not knowing what they are doing. “Storm Prey” by John Sandford is $14.99 in both Kindle and ibook form.
I tend to boycott ANY Kindle edition priced higher than its paperback version.
Kindle Nation contributor Tom Dulaney shared these thoughts:
What it God’s name was I thinking?
After 2 years in a Kindle-induced fog, buying armloads of ebooks 25% over my usual price point, your reports today snapped me out of my profligacy.
Even when I made big bucks, I never bought hardbacks at full retail. In fact, I rarely bought hardbacks, even at the B&N; 30% member price. I always waited, drooling I must admit, for the works of my very favorite authors to appear in paperback. My price point was $8.00. Maybe, when loaded, I was a cheap SOB, but that was me. On rare occasions, I might have sprung for $14 at Sam’s club, but that was an impulse buy.
That says nothing about my regard of the authors, which is high, or my estimate of the “intrinsic worth” of the book.
For over two years, I’ve been flagrantly spending 9.99–a full 25% over my price point–for three times as many books as I normally would buy, because of the Kindle.
Whoa.
I think the whole paperback industry was built on the backs of cheapskates like me. We were a market worth the effort.
Now, living in reduced means, I from this day vow to be sensible once more. I can wait for Sandiford, Patterson, DeMille, Preston, Kellerman, et al, like I did before. Great authors, I love them, and hope they all make wads of money. I will ante up about $8 a pop to contribute to their wealth, but my wild and crazy days of spending 9.99 is overindulgence. I have come to my senses.
You are losing my business, and that is not a good thing for either of us. I have had my Kindle since the Kindle2 came out. That would be something like 15 months. I have spent over $1000 on Kindle books. The previous year I spent less than $100 on books of any kind. The Kindle has turned me into an impulse buyer.
Last spring I had a bad few days with my asthma. Going to the bathroom was a struggle. So I indulged myself. I looked for some light reading on the Kindle and I found your Gaslight Mystery series. At the time they were $6.99 each. I bought all nine of them in the course of three days. Next I bought the entire Sookie Stackhouse series, which led to me purchasing the Harper Connelly series. I bought a couple of multi-author anthologies solely because there was a Sookie Stackhouse story in them. Then I downloaded the first chapter of Mistress of the Art of Death. I enjoyed it so much that I bought the whole book, even though it had been out an entire year and was still $9.99. I bought the sequel to that one too. Somewhere in there I found Women of the Otherworld, and bought most of those on Kindle (the others I got as audio books for a trip). I did the math, and on those books alone I spent over $350. At least one-third of my book budget is going your books!
Now, I know I have bought other Penguin books on the Kinde, but these series are particularly important. This spring there was a new book in the Gaslight, Sookie Stackhouse, and Mistress of the Art of Death series. I had all three of them on pre-order for my Kindle. Then you had your renegotiation with Amazon and I have cancelled them all. They are on my “hold” list at the local library. I debated the new Gaslight book, Murder on Lexington Avenue. It is $11.99 and I kept taking it on and off my list. I did not debate at all about A Murderous Procession (Mistress). It is a mind-boggling $17.99, making it $0.76 more than the hardback. I checked the earlier books in that series. In those cases the Kindle version is more expensive than the paperback). Now Waking the Witch(Otherworld) is about to come out and I am going back and forth about spend $12.99 on it. Women of the Otherwordseries contains some of my favorite books, but there a few that are less compelling. Maybe I will just wait and see what the reviewers say and then decide.
So, have I established my position here? I’m the kind of customer you want and you’ve lost me. Do you want me back? I want to come back. I really, really want to. I love knowing that when I wake up one morning a book I have waited for will be on my Kindle. I enjoy teasing my friends who read the same book about how I always get them first.
Getting me back is simple. Of course, returning to the policy of introducing books at $9.99 would work, even if you “windowed” them, charging more after a month or so. Of course, you could get me back by selling pre-orders at $9.99. At the very least you mustnever, ever price the Kindle version higher than the paper one. When you do that, not only do I not buy the book when it is new, I don’t buy it ever, on principle.
Please reconsider your pricing. I want to buy your books.
Yondalla
Long-time Kindle Nation citizen and Mary McManus sent in this comment:
Maybe this is off topic since these are not bestsellers, but Penguin’s Ayn Rand books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged carry the same ridiculous price of $27.99 in both the iBook store and the Kindle Store. Am happy not to like Ayn Rand at this point, but what is THAT all about?
And from Western Nation:
I get the distinct impression that the head honchos at Penguin are Luddites and would prefer that ebooks just disappear. Hmmmm…they need a wake-up call, obviously. I love my Kindle, and so do the thousands and thousands who have their Kindle. Penguin will be losing ebook sales from this individual. How many more trees will be sacrificed because Penguin wishes to price ebooks out of the realm of reason?
And they are called (wait for this) “Centennial Edition HC”. First of all, the books were NOT written in 1910. Second, this is a KINDLE edition not HC (Hardcover)!!
Actually, I think this pricing is a good thing. Now hear me out. This is of course, ridiculous pricing to the extreme. BUT, it really shows what Penguin is really after- TO KILL EBOOKS. This is just stupidly overplaying its hand, and it will backfire on them big time.
To my mind it is analagous to the 1984 controversy- It is so outrageous and ridiculous and heavy handed, that it will blow up in the faces of the Agency 5 publishers!!
And our job is to keep stoking that fire to show them how stupid, shortsighted AND GREEDY they really are.
Frequent commenter Anonymous had this to say:
Don’t publishers realize if they are going to war with Amazon/Kindle readers that they will lose the war. I refuse to purchase e-book that is more expensive than the hardcopy. iBook carried one book I wanted weeks earlier than it appeared in for purchase. On a good note, this is forcing me to look at other publishers and authors which is a good thing! Vote with your $$$ and the publishers will eventually take note.
There are dozens more, but we’ll leave it at that … for now.
Potentially big news for international readers here.
Although Amazon has yet to make an announcement about it, the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac apps now render the Japanese language and alphabet. And thanks to an email that I received overnight from Mr. Toru Suzuki with my Japanese publisher Nikkei Business Publications, I’m happy to announce that one of the first Japanese language texts available to read with the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac apps is a lengthy free excerpt from the Japanese translation of my bestselling Kindle guide.
So, that’s exciting for me, but far more exciting for the growth of a worldwide Kindle Revolution is the possibility that Amazon might soon open up the Kindle publishing platform to Japanese authors and publishers as it has already done with English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. There have been widespread reports that Amazon has been in talks with Japanese publishers about the launch of a Japanese Kindle, but now it is obvious that there’s no need to wait until Amazon makes the Kindle device itself ready for the Japanese language and alphabet. Ebook retailers could begin selling Kindle-compatible ebooks now to be read with the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac apps.
Kensington Publishing Company has a new Kindle Store freebie this morning: a lengthy excerpt from Brad Herzog’s new road memoir Turn Left At The Trojan Horse. At 936 “locations,” this is over 5 times the length of a Kindle sample, and the full-length book is available for pre-order here until its release on Tuesday. The book is being billed as On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Love, if you can get your head around that combination. Kirkus Reviews says “Herzog’s third travel memoir follows the highways cross-country examining the idea of the hero along the way. He captures stunning details of the American landscape. The hero’s return, is irresistible…a near-perfect ending.”
At a party Saturday evening, I met an author who has published several of her novels with Kensington, Robin Reardon, and I told her she was very well positioned for the ebook revolution because Kensington, a successful New York-based independent publishing company, is light years ahead of dinosaurs like Penguin Pearson in understanding how to connect with ebook readers. Much more on this later, but let me just mention that Penguin, coincidentially, is the publisher of the two books mentioned above in that On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Lovecomparison, and both of the Penguin titles are terribly overpriced in their Kindle editions since Penguin established its new predatory pricing plan under the agency model.
$0.00 & includes wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
“Eric von Hippel has a penchant for identifying important aspects of technological innovation that run contrary to conventional wisdom and to the thrust of conventional scholarship. His work on the important role that users, rather than suppliers, play in the advance of technology casts the process in a new light. This book is an intellectual feast.” —Richard R. Nelson, George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business, and Law, Columbia University
“Eric von Hippel has written a genuinely important book on innovation. Combining a wealth of case studies and data with a clear and systematically developed theoretical framework, Democratizing Innovation turns much of how we think about innovation economics on its head. Von Hippel has provided us with a fascinating book that will challenge innovation theorists and businesses alike.” —Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Yale Law School
The best way to find out about these free listings right away, when they occur, is to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Kindle Nation Daily, which pushes Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alerts directly to your Kindle Home screen 24/7. And in the case of many free listings that disappear within a matter of hours or days, “right away” is often just in time.
No Kindle Required: Whether you are a long-time Kindle owner or you’ve just acquired an iPad and are filling it with ebooks for the first time or you are reading Kindle books on a PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPad Touch, you can get any and all of these titles absolutely free on your Kindle-compatible device of choice! Click here to download a free Kindle App for your device.
$0.00 & includes wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
“Eric von Hippel has a penchant for identifying important aspects of technological innovation that run contrary to conventional wisdom and to the thrust of conventional scholarship. His work on the important role that users, rather than suppliers, play in the advance of technology casts the process in a new light. This book is an intellectual feast.” —Richard R. Nelson, George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business, and Law, Columbia University
“Eric von Hippel has written a genuinely important book on innovation. Combining a wealth of case studies and data with a clear and systematically developed theoretical framework, Democratizing Innovation turns much of how we think about innovation economics on its head. Von Hippel has provided us with a fascinating book that will challenge innovation theorists and businesses alike.” —Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Yale Law School
The best way to find out about these free listings right away, when they occur, is to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Kindle Nation Daily, which pushes Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alerts directly to your Kindle Home screen 24/7. And in the case of many free listings that disappear within a matter of hours or days, “right away” is often just in time.
No Kindle Required: Whether you are a long-time Kindle owner or you’ve just acquired an iPad and are filling it with ebooks for the first time or you are reading Kindle books on a PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPad Touch, you can get any and all of these titles absolutely free on your Kindle-compatible device of choice! Click here to download a free Kindle App for your device.
Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help, which for months did very well in the Kindle Store at price points below $9.99, is now priced (by Penguin imprint Putnam) at $12.99 in the Kindle Store, but it is still listed at $9.99 at iBooks.
Another temporary glitch, or is Penguin playing favorites?
We’ve never been told exactly what the controversy was that kept Penguin and Amazon at loggerheads for the past couple of months? Was it that Penguin wanted to give “most favored nation” status to the iBooks Store and deny it to the Kindle Store?
Similar pricing discrepancies exist for Eat Pray Love, although the best price for that book is $8.25 for the paperback in Amazon’s main store.
(Kindle Edition)
(Kindle Edition)
(Kindle Edition)
: * Offer Only Available In Certain States (Kindle Edition)
to that one too.
, which pushes Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alerts directly to your Kindle Home screen 24/7. And in the case of many free listings that disappear within a matter of hours or days, “right away” is often just in time. 
(Kindle Edition)
(Kindle Edition)
, which for months did very well in the Kindle Store at price points below $9.99, is now priced (by Penguin imprint Putnam) at $12.99 in the Kindle Store, but it is still listed at $9.99 at iBooks.
in Amazon’s main store.
, the discrepancy is even greater: it’s 
.
