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First Look at the New Normal from Amazon: Len Edgerly’s Notes from the Santa Monica Kindle Press Conference

September 9, 2012 by KND

By Len Edgerly
Contributing Editor

Amazon is shortening the half-life of normal.

That’s my impression the morning after the latest torrent of new devices and inventions released yesterday, September 6th, here in Santa Monica, California.

It was just 345 days ago that the Seattle game changers introduced the Kindle Fire at a press conference in New York City. It’s instructive to remember back to when the idea of Amazon selling a color tablet was pretty radical stuff.

As Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos strode across the stage and raised that first Fire high, like a proud fist, I thought I saw a golden rim around it. It turned out to be just the reflection of the arty overhead lights at the venue, but Amazon went on to find plenty of gold in the original Fire. In its first nine months the seven-inch tablet snatched 22 percent of the U.S. tablet market.

Before yesterday, “normal” had settled down for a while, to a solid lineup of E Ink Kindles and one Kindle Fire. Amazon Prime customers came to think it normal that their $79 annual membership keeps bringing additional benefits, like free book borrowing at the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and an ever-expanding selection of free movies and TV shows through Prime Instant Video.

Yesterday’s press conference in Santa Monica opened with a new television ad shown on a huge screen at the back of the stage. The ad highlighted Amazon’s most successful innovations, from one-click purchasing to customer reviews and the creation of the Kindle. It ended with this statement: “Look around. What once seemed wildly impractical is now completely normal. Then normal just begs to be messed with.”

As the lights came up, Jeff Bezos entered from Stage Left grinning, ready to start messing with normal. He wore jeans, a sports jacket, and a white shirt with colorful buttons. His famous and jarring laugh is under wraps for these tightly scripted events. What remains is a nearly constant smile, just this side of a smirk.

“We. Love. To invent.” He made that statement just as I’ve written it, with pauses separating the words. He continued, “We love to pioneer. We even love to go down alleys that turn out to be blind alleys.”

Exhibit A of a blind alley, which Bezos cited when I interviewed him in Seattle this summer, was the invention of “locations” in Kindle books. It was a reasonable innovation for identifying where you are in a book when the number of pages changes with the font size, but customers hated it.

“Of course every once in a while,” he said yesterday, “one of those blind alleys opens up into a broad avenue—and that’s really fun.”

By now you have, I’m sure, checked out the new lineup of devices that Bezos introduced. For each one, he had fun touting new features and highlighting the engineering prowess that made them possible. The crowd of 400, mainly journalists not paid to holler and applaud, couldn’t help offering some oohs and ahs.

I felt the suspense build as each of the new products was described on the screen and demonstrated by Bezos at his lectern. What is this thing going to cost?

I guessed too low for the new Kindle 6-inch Paperwhite, with its gorgeous frontlit screen, but my tech assistant for the press conference, Garrett Riley, came close to nailing it when I whispered a request for his prediction. He guessed $100; it’s actually $119 with Special Offers and ships October 1.

Here is the rest of the lineup:

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G for $499, ships November 20.
Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ for $299, ships November 20.
Kindle Fire HD 7″ for $199, ships September 14.
Kindle Paperwhite 3G with Special Offers for $179, ships October 1.

In the past, I have purchased every new Kindle in order to make sure I have hands-on experience to share with my listeners and readers. But yesterday’s offerings arrived as a blur of possibilities, reminding me of a story I heard when I lived in Casper, Wyoming.

A cowhand was supposed to be counting cattle moving into a corral. When he presented his tally, it contained a single line for each animal along with a few marks that led the foreman to ask, “What are these?”

“Oh, them’s bunches,” the wrangler replied.

Likewise, the specific devices kind of flowed together in my mind as we tried them out and watched demos in the high lobby of the Barker Hanger. Did the Kindle Paperwhite have audio? Or just the Fires? (Answer: Just the Fires.)

Back here at the hotel last night, I hit the one-click button on a Kindle Paperwhite without 3G, because I can tether it to my iPhone whenever I need to. It won’t be shipped for three weeks, so that led me also to buy the new entry-level six-inch Kindle, which I’m happy to see left Amazon’s facility this morning at 6 a.m. and is headed to Cambridge for delivery in four days.

I wanted to try one of the HD Fires, but I love my iPad 3, so I bought the Kindle Fire HD 7” and will have that in just over a week.

In addition to the devices themselves, Amazon’s new generation includes inventions big and small that illustrate just how much fun they’re having and how closely they are aligning themselves with customers.

If you are like me, one of the things you still miss from the days of paper books is being able to flip ahead a few pages to see how far it is to the end of the chapter you’re on. The new Kindles will show that information in the lower corner when you tap to bring up the controls. The software even tracks how fast you’re reading, so the estimate of how soon you will reach the end of the chapter, or the book, is tailored to your own pace.

An invention that has the potential to revolutionize content as much as Kindle Singles is Kindle Serials. It’s an idea that dates back to Charles Dickens, and it will get a big boost from Amazon. There are eight series available already for $1.99 each and two free ones, based on Dickens classics. When you buy a series, you will receive the first installment and all future ones, as described in the listing details.

When a future episode arrives on your Kindle, it will replace the previous file with one containing all the episodes released so far. But unlike file replacements which we now receive sometimes for corrected books, these updated Serials downloads will preserve all of your notes and highlights.

Russ Grandinetti, VP for Kindle content, told me Serials is only available through Amazon Publishing, so you can’t create one yourself through Kindle Direct Publishing yet. But I am sure that is something they’d like to do in the future, once they get the new content up and running.

Another breakthrough is one we’ve known was only a matter of time. Since Amazon owns Audible.com, why not sell an audio book paired with a Kindle book, so you can switch from reading to listening and never lose your place? Welcome to Whispersync for Voice.

Here is my advice: Don’t delay making your choices from among these new device options, and settle in as fast as you can to the new normal for Kindle reading. Because the way things are going, we won’t have long before Amazon messes with normal–again.

* * *

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his special podcast all about the Santa Monica press conference in Episode 214.

* * *

Extras

First, here’s an important tip for everyone interested in getting one of the new Kindle Fire HD units into their hands as quickly as possible: While most of the new Kindle Fire HD models will be released in November, the brand new $199 16GB Kindle Fire HD 7″ model with Dolby audio, 2 antennas, and dual-band wi-fi will be released NEXT FRIDAY, Sept 14 – here’s a link to get your order in right away http://bit.ly/FIRE-HD-SEPT14 (And by the way, this is the Kindle Fire that will be going to winners of our weekly Kindle Fire giveaway sweepstakes. We’ll be announcing not one but two winners in the next few days.)

In addition to our usual coverage of free and bargain books and this week’s great column from contributing editor Len Edgerly just below, here are links to some of our other coverage of this week’s Kindle news:

Amazon Changes the Tablet World Forever with a Brand New Family of Kindle Fires from $159 Up http://bit.ly/FIRE-CHANGER
KF-KND Editor April Hamilton’s Live Report from Today’s Kindle Press Conference http://bit.ly/UvtRww
Services and Content are the Killer Apps for the New Kindles: Come For The Devices, Stay For The Services http://bit.ly/Kindle-Services
What About TTS & Collections on the New Kindles? http://bit.ly/Oia1pm

New Kindle Ordering Links

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G for $499, ships November 20.
Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ for $299, ships November 20.
Kindle Fire HD 7″ for $199, ships September 14 (32GB model ships Oct. 25).
Kindle Paperwhite 3G with Special Offers for $179, ships in October. (This link will also take you to the Kindle Keyboard and the $69 Kindle.)

Important Links for New Kindle Accessories, Warranties, and More

Kindle Fire Accessories

Kindle E-reader Accessories

Kindle Fire Warranties

Kindle eReader Warranties
The Overflow

14,000+ Titles That Are Now Eligible for Amazon’s Cool New WhisperSync for Voice Program

Judge Approves eBook Pricing Settlement Between Government and Publishers (This one almost upstaged the Amazon press conference, since it became public just moments before Jeff Bezos stepped on stage Thursday. We’ll have more to say about it soon, and it is great news for ebook consumers, but for now you can get the basics from the New York Times.)

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: A British Startup with an Entirely New Way of Bringing Authors and Readers Closer Together – Len Edgerly Interviews John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound

September 4, 2012 by KND

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

What if you could subscribe to an author’s next book before he or she writes it– providing encouragement, receiving updates on how it’s going, and meeting other supporters?

And what if, in return for your pledged support, your name appeared in the published book as a sponsor or you received two tickets to the launch party? Or how about if a sizable pledge—about $800, in one case—meant that a character named after you actually appeared in the book?

These are some of the possibilities that John Mitchinson (photo at right) and his team are experimenting with at a U.K. startup named Unbound. They now have 25,000 registered users, and 70 percent of them have made pledges to support specific pitches from authors, at an average pledge of about $50.

“We’re at an interesting moment,” Mitchinson told me in a Skype interview on August 24th. “We set up Unbound as a way of trying to bring the relationship between readers and writers closer together. It seemed to us that those were the important kind of people in the chain.”

Unbound has 21 books available to fund, and you can browse video and text pitches by each of the authors to see if any of them entice you to make a pledge at whatever level you choose.

To take just one tasty example, Tamasin Day-Lewis, whose The Art of the Tart became a bestseller in England in 2000, has written a dozen popular cookbooks since then. But tarts are the subject she is still asked about most, and she has been creating scores of new tart recipes in the past 12 years.

That’s why Day-Lewis would like to write a new book, titled Smart Tart. In her pitch, she concludes with the following:

“Because although baking books are ubiquitous, there is NO OTHER sweet and savoury tart book out there. Plus, I have tinkered with and perfected and up-dated even the old-fashioned classics and now I have a hundred new tarts up my sleeve to re-ignite the palates of all those who delighted in The Art of the Tart. That’s surely enough to re-crown me The Queen of Tarts.”

In her video, Day-Lewis is shown cooking up a mouth-watering sample of tarts in her lovely country kitchen, and Mitchinson stars as an appreciative guest, tasting the treats. The videography is top quality, with pleasant music and great camera work.

If your saliva glands are dancing, as mine are as I write this, you will find yourself checking out the various levels of pledge you can make, and there is still time—only five percent of the needed pledges have been made, with 76 days to go.

The lowest level is 10 pounds or $15.88 for a digital copy of the book that will have your name in the back. Higher levels, if the pitch succeeds, will bring you a hardback copy, a signed collector’s edition, a tart-making class conducted by the author, and a “Smart Tart Lunch” comprising tarts galore prepared by Day-Lewis at a central London restaurant.

And for just under $800 you can get all of the above, plus have a tart named after you in the book, and you can even suggest the key ingredients!

I think this example gives you an idea of the creativity at play in this playful publishing venture.

The variety of subjects described in the “Books to Fund” section is truly wonderful. In addition to tarts, you’ll find a pitch by JF Derry for The Dissent of Man, “exploring the influence of Darwin on everyone: atheists, Christians, biologists and entrepreneurs.”

There is also Keith Kahn-Harris’s The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg, which he says “will recount my encounters with those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of excellence while almost no one else is looking.”

Although Mitchinson plans to extend the model to unpublished authors, his initial projects have featured well-known writers willing to try an entirely new way of financing a book.

I didn’t find it particularly easy at this point to find which books are available to download as eBooks in Kindle and other formats, but Mitchinson will be working on that in the coming weeks and months.

I did manage to submit a 10-pound pledge via PayPal for How to Have an Almost Perfect Marriage by Edna Fry, wife of Stephen Fry, who hosts a BBC comedy quiz show named Quite Interesting. QI lists John Mitchinson as its Director of Research.

Once my pledge went through, I was able to download a .mobi file of the book for my Kindles, because Mrs. Fry’s project is already fully funded. In fact, it reached 165 percent of its goal. Even though I won’t see my name in the eBook, it looks like an entertaining read, and I’m glad to support one of the first Unbound books.

I’d say this experiment is off to a promising start. Unbound has successfully funded 18 books in its first year. Mitchinson plans to add another 50 successful projects this year, and to grow exponentially after that.

He is at an interesting moment indeed.

Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his with John Mitchinson in its entirety at 25:23 of this week’s Episode 213.

What to Expect on September 6: It Might Be Amazon’s Biggest Press Conference Ever, with Major Pyrotechnics for the Kindle Fire and Amazon Prime

September 1, 2012August 31, 2012 by Steve Windwalker

Amazon’s press office staffers have been earning their keep this month — the company has put out 16 press releases already in August, including 10 in the last 11 days, after averaging 11 per month during the first half of 2012 — but the real heavy lifting lies in the work that’s being done to prepare for what may become Amazon’s biggest press conference ever next Thursday, September 6.

Based on what we’ve seen from Amazon in the last few weeks, combined with developments like the release of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet in July, we’re fully prepared for a blockbuster event that, among other things, should feature

the release of a brand new Kindle tablet (to succeed the suddenly sold out Kindle Fire 1),
updated eInk models including one or more with a front-lit display to remove any slight hardware advantage held by Nook’s Glowlight feature, and
major enhancements to Amazon Prime that could have the effect of transforming customer experience across the entire Amazon Store.

As a Kindle Nation Daily reader you will be well represented at next week’s press conference in Santa Monica, with KF-KND editor April Hamilton and contributing editor Len Edgerly (of The Kindle Chronicles) on the scene (April for same-day coverage and Len for an onsite interview that will be featured in the following Saturday’s Kindle Nation Weekender), and associate editor Candace Cheatham and myself stirring the pot from KND world headquarters.

Part of the challenge for Amazon in such an event is to find a way to distill dozens or even hundreds of product enhancements, feature roll-outs, and new or significantly expanded services into a single compelling story that Jeff Bezos can present to the world from a single stage within, one hopes, a single hour. Our expectation that this could be “Amazon’s biggest press conference ever” is based in large part on the impressive breadth of groundbreaking new announcements that the company seems poised to make, but figuring out how Amazon could break all that ground without stories A and B stepping on stories C, D, and E is way above my pay grade, and perhaps even Bezos’.

And we could be totally wrong, but we can’t think of any way that Amazon could layer an announcement like a new Kindle phone or, say, the acquisition of Spotify AB on top of the aforementioned items without totally losing focus on its various Fire, eInk, and Prime announcements. The image that comes to mind for me is of Henry Ford holding a press event to announce the Model A but also, at the same event, announcing the Model T, the Thunderbird, the Lincoln, the Falcon, the F-150 and more. Wouldn’t the glut of messages have made them all the Edsel? But it may be that we on the outside just lack sufficient imagination.

So let’s start with Amazon Prime.

“Amazon Prime is the best bargain in the history of shopping,” said Jeff Bezos again this week in one of Amazon’s press releases, and this time he teased us — and perhaps next week’s press conference as well — by adding the line “and it’s going to keep getting better.”

Better how?

Over the past five years many of us have come to understand Amazon’s Kindle and now the Kindle Fire as a seamless, friction-free, almost instantaneous content delivery system for a growing catalog of entertainment and/or educational content that began with ebooks and now includes newspapers and magazines, blogs, audiobooks, music, movies, television programming, games and productivity apps, and other web content. Of course all of that content, in order to be deliverable almost instantaneously to handheld devices with no transmission or data cost, is digital in one way or another.

But Amazon is far from just a digital store: it has grown the rest of its retail store relentlessly across a growing number of departments, platforms and nations, with the result that it now offers tens of millions of physical products in nearly every imaginable category. And until Jeff Bezos and his team of innovators manage to turn Amazon into Nanozon by coming up with some way of digitalizing and then reifying physical products via some new wireless manufacturing-via-quantum physics functionality, Amazon Prime may offer the company and us its customers the best chance to revolutionize delivery, even if it doesn’t quite hit the “nearly instantaneous” sweet spot.

One possibility would be a major expansion of expedited Prime shipping options such as Amazon’s remarkable $3.99 overnight delivery service and the same-day delivery program that is now available for some products in the cities of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Part of the trick for Amazon is to build as much value as possible into its Amazon Prime buffet while avoiding any increase in the same $79 per year membership price with which it kicked off Prime back in 2005 when its only real offering was free two-day shipping on about a million selected items. It’s a major feather in Amazon’s cap that the program is still just $79 seven years later with 15 million eligible items and the much newer additions of 22,000 free movie and television offerings under Prime Instant Video and 180,000 Kindle titles that can be borrowed free (up to one per month with no due dates) via the Prime-eligible Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Another possible addition to Prime features might involve the offering of 3G or 4G Kindle Fire connectivity for Prime members. Such an offering would be costly, but we always pay attention to what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has to say, and we thought it was very significant when he told our contributing editor Len Edgerly in an exclusive interview earlier this summer that, of all of the company’s customers, the people who read the most (or buy the most books) are people who buy “our 3G version of the Kindle.”

“And the reason, I think, for that,” Bezos said, “is that it makes getting books even more frictionless, makes it even easier. You don’t have to look for a WiFi hotspot. You can just get them wherever you happen to be. And it roams globally at no charge, so people can figure that out, too, and get it wherever they are, even if they’re traveling around the world.”

Part of the DNA that has made Bezos and Amazon so successful, of course, lies in the capacity to take a conclusion like that one and extrapolate that adding 3G or 4G wireless connectivity for a new deluxe Prime-compatible Kindle Fire would almost definitely have a similarly salubrious effect on the shopping behavior of its owners for other content and products, both digital and physical, in the Amazon store. It remains to be seen whether Amazon could make free 3G or 4G wireless connectivity work for its tablets the way it has worked for the Kindle 3G and Kindle DX, but even limited connectivity to the Amazon cloud and the Amazon store would be a significant start. If Amazon could offer unlimited connectivity across the entire web, market share for the Fire tablet family would quickly grow well beyond the benchmark the company announced this week: “Kindle Fire has captured 22% of tablet sales in the U.S.”

Then there’s the very significant fact that the press conference is being held in Santa Monica, rather than in New York like past Kindle press conferences and announcement events. We don’t think the LaLa-land location is any accident, so we’re expecting that the event will include some real Hollywood star power, perhaps in support of original video content that might be free to Amazon Prime customers for viewing on the Kindle Fire and other devices — say, an original docudrama series based loosely on the agency model pricing conspiracy, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, and John Lithgow?

Nor would we be surprised to see some stars onstage as voice actors in association with even greater Kindle integration and expansion of Amazon’s Audible.com subsidiary, following on the recent Audible roll-out of its “A-List” program of performances featuring Colin Firth, Anne Hathaway, Kate Winslet, Samuel L. Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, and Jennifer Connelly.

No doubt it will all be great fun, and it may lead Amazon’s share price to rise even further beyond its current all-time high levels, but don’t get us wrong: after the confetti has landed and helium balloons have attached themselves to the ceiling, the event should be largely about the Kindle and especially a new Kindle Fire. Although Amazon announced this week that it is “sold out” of the Kindle Fire, this “sold out” status is not quite the same as the “sold out” status that occurred in November 2008 (and lasted for months) after Oprah went Gaga over the original Kindle. This time it is clearly the case of Amazon pulling the Kindle Fire’s Buy button ahead of the announcements contemplated by Bezos when he said in a release this week: “Kindle Fire is sold out, but we have an exciting roadmap ahead—we will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”

So what about that exciting roadmap? We’ll certainly be paying close attention to see how much adoption Amazon announces of the ideas noted in our July 23 piece entitled 17 Features Amazon Must Add to the Next Kindle Fire, After Google Raises the Bar with the Nexus 7 Tablet. But even that list now seems so July 23 that we’ll expand on it a bit here and suggest the following killer feature set for a brand new Fire:

Slim it down
Lighten it up
Improve screen resolution
Speed up the processor
Improve web functionality with less reliance on truncated “mobile” representations
Allow an SD Card
Offer 3G/4G wireless connectivity, possibly free with Amazon Prime
Keep the $199 price point for the new 7” Fire and offer a larger Fire for under $250
Allow greater user control of font sizes on the web and in apps
Allow full input/output functionality for apps such as Google Docs/Google Drive documents
Enhance curb appeal so that teh Fire looks and feels as good as the Nexus 7
Add external volume controls
Provide camera functionality similar to that on the iPhone
Provide Siri/Iris Capability that hits the sweet spot both for information and for commerce
Add a microphone
Add Text-to-Speech
Place the power switch (and an external volume control) on the upper right edge
Allow greater user personalization and customization
Add full-featured GPS for a 3G or 4G model
Add maximum Android platform compatibility
Add access to Google’s Android Market
Seize every available opportunity to make the Fire a replacement for netbooks and notebook computers

See what we mean? Even half of that is a lot to announce in one day. And there are plenty of other possibilities, including even the possibility of a dual screen tablet/eInk combo, but we’d rather see Amazon focus on making each of these very different devices, as well as the Kindle phone that will surely follow, as good as it can be.

Stay tuned.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: The Making of the President (-ial Campaign Book) 2012: Game Changing in the Age of Kindle

August 28, 2012 by KND

Len Edgerly Interviews Glenn Thrush, Politico’s senior White House Correspondent and author of Obama’s Last Stand

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

A new eBook about the presidential campaign this week shows just how quickly the journalism game is changing.

Obama’s Last Stand, written by Glenn Thrush, Politico.com’s senior White House correspondent, was released in the early morning of Monday, August 20th, in eBook format only.

Its juicy bits about dissension within the Obama reelection campaign and how the President really feels about Mitt Romney prompted extensive media coverage, and the book quickly leaped to Number One on the Kindle Singles best-seller list.

Obama’s Last Stand reminds me of Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a dishy account of the 2008 Presidential campaign that was turned into an HBO movie. But a key difference is that the anonymous sources for Game Change knew that their comments would not go public until after the election.
Glenn Thrush
“It was a very challenging project from a reporting perspective,” Thrush said of his book in an interview this week, “because the people I was interviewing knew that their perspectives on things would appear prior to the election.”

In fact, the author did not have tremendously high hopes that the experiment would succeed. When he began the reporting for the book, he wasn’t sure he would find people willing to talk about the Obama campaign, even on background.

He needn’t have worried.

“Campaigns are, fortunately for me, fairly chatty enterprises,” Thrush said.

I wonder if there might have been another reason he succeeded in getting lots of newsworthy anecdotes for the book. His sources might have thought this was going to be “only” an eBook, so how much harm could it do?

If that was a factor, future campaign-chronicling eBook authors may find their sources will be more cautious, given the coverage Thrush’s book received this week everywhere from The New Yorker and USA Today.

You can tell this is a new form of journalism by how the pioneering author himself was not entirely certain of its possibilities.

When I asked Thrush if he had found parts of the book that he would like to amend, he said yes, based on comments from a couple of players who had not returned phone calls or emails during his due-diligence work but did contact him once the book was published, to give him their perspectives.

He said he would not be averse to going back into the book and adding some nuance based on such feedback, but he didn’t seem to realize how easy it would be to make minor changes to the digital file and resubmit it.

When I pointed out that this would be a trivial task, Thrush replied: “That is something I’d be eager to explore, absolutely.”

The eBook-only publication posed a challenge for some of Thrush’s over-50 peers. In fact, he found himself helping a friend download the Kindle app in order to read it on a computer.

“I never thought that would be part of the whole e-author process,” he said. “I don’t think Teddy White ever had to do that.”

Which is a good way to emphasize how far we’ve come. When Theodore H. White wrote his Making of the President series of campaign books, beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, reporters were hauling portable typewriters along the campaign trail and stuffing their pockets with dimes to call in stories from pay phones.

With each change in journalism’s technology and professional standards, there is an impact on our democracy. I was glad to hear Glenn Thrush express sensitivity on that point. He noted that a deep-background book about an incumbent president running for reelection, released in real time during the campaign, cannot easily be replicated by reporters following the opponent.

“Reporters covering the Romney campaign don’t have the benefit of having lived basically in the same building with their subject, as I have,” he said. “The challenger has an advantage in terms of the opacity. They are the merry pirate band.”

That makes the challenger’s campaign more difficult to penetrate for reporters, which raises a concern about balance in Thrush’s mind.

“I’m not covering sports,” he said. “I’m covering politics because I care about it. I think it would be really cool if somebody could do something similar on the Romney side.”

For his part, Thrush spent at least a quarter of his two months of work on the book going back to the principals in the story, checking drafts for accuracy. This makes sense when you realize he works in a small circle of players. If someone feels that you unfairly described their role, you might get a buzz-worthy blog post or eBook out of it, but not much in the future.

For political junkies, the arrival of longform coverage in the middle of a campaign is like industrial-strength catnip. Obama’s Last Stand is about 25,000 words, and it took me two or three hours to finish, partly by text-to-speech on my Kindle Fire as I was driving from Harpswell, Maine, back to Ocean Park.

By comparison, Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article, “Schmooze or Lose,” about the Obama campaign’s conflicted courting of large donors, totaled only 7,000 words. Game Change, the traditionally sized book published more than a year after the 2008 election, clocked in at approximately 165,000 words.

So this mid-length, fast-to-publication account of a political campaign is something brand new, and I’m sure we will see more of it.

The fourth and last book in Politico’s Playbook 2012 series will cover the rest of the campaign, and will probably be available on your Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo or other eReader soon after the first Tuesday in November.

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Glenn Thrush in its entirety at 22:34 of this week’s Episode 212.

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview – Two Kindles Before the Mast: It’s Our Gain as Len Edgerly Interviews Eric Loss About Sailing Solo — and Reading eBooks — Around the World in 258 Days

August 15, 2012 by KND

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

How many Kindles would you take on an eight-month solo sail around the world?

Eric Loss thought two would be enough, and he brought a couple of plastic covers to protect them when he departed Los Angeles on November 7th of last year aboard his 35-year-old, 37-foot yacht, Odyssey.

He returned, safe and sound, on July 22nd, and I spoke with him this week by Skype about his adventures in sailing—and reading.

The scariest moments came in the middle of the Indian Ocean a thousand miles before Australia, when a wave hit Odyssey sideways with enough force to knock the boat on its side, with the mast about two feet under water.

Eric was below deck, putting on his foul-weather gear as the autopilot did its job in the storm. When he saw the huge wave coming, he dove to the low end of the cabin to avoid being thrown there when the boat turned sideways. He heard the snap of something breaking.

“I was sure the boat was going to come back up and was not going to have a mast and I didn’t know what I was going to have to do,” he recalled. “When I looked out and saw the mast was still there, it was the best day of my life.”

It turned out that he had heard a wooden railing snapping, not the mast, and Odyssey was able to continue the journey unscathed.

As dramatic as that episode was, it wasn’t the one that took down either of the Kindles. And luckily for Eric, who at 26 years old is a voracious and eclectic reader, the demise of his Kindle Keyboards did not take place until he was much closer to the end of his trip.

“The first one, I’m not really sure what happened to it,” he said. “I was reading right before I went to bed. I turned if off and put it next to my bed. I must have somehow hit the screen when I was falling asleep.”

When he woke up, half the screen was messed up, so he had to flip the orientation of the Kindle twice in order to read a single page, which got tiring. It was enough to prompt him to break out the backup Kindle, loaded with the same books as the first. Eric Loss

Four days later, the second Kindle took a direct hit from Eric’s satellite phone, which he had tossed into the cabin from the deck instead of walking it down and putting it away.

By this late in the trip, he had read most of the books on the Kindles, so the loss of them was not so tough. Plus, he had become acclimatized to being alone on the endless expanse of ocean, which led to less time reading.

“I spent a lot more time, when the weather was nice, out on deck enjoying being outside, which was actually kind of a nice change, especially once the weather started warming up,” he said.

By this time, though, Eric had read a lot of books. He emailed me a list of books he’d read on Kindle and paper—since he did bring some paperbacks in case the Kindles broke—and I count at least 150 titles. Some of them he read twice.

The book that will probably stay with him the longest as a memory of his journey is one he read before he decided to undertake a solo, nonstop sail around the world. It is The Long Way, published in 1974 by Bernard Moitessier about his own solo sail around the world.

“I felt like every time I went back and reread pieces of it on the trip—reading about him rounding New Zealand while I was doing it, and having sailed through nasty weather, rereading about storms he was going through—every time I read it, it got more intense.”

Other books that Eric read included A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain, The Essential PG. Wodehouse, Candide by Voltaire, and Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James. He read sailing books, biographies, science fiction, and a category he described as “everything else.”

When the weather made few demands on his time, he could read most of the day, curled up below in the cabin.

I used to spend hours in a 14-foot sailing dinghy on a one-mile-long pond where my family vacationed in New Hampshire when I was a boy. I would bring a book with me and sail while glancing at the sky until the tops of trees appeared in my view, which meant it was time to tack away from shore.

It was easy for me to idealize the life that Eric Loss led for eight months aboard Odyssey.

That’s one reason why I checked his location in Google Maps regularly during his voyage, using the coordinates he posted at noon each day in his blog. It was an eerie way to experience the vastness of the oceans he was sailing, because when I first pulled up the location there would be nothing but empty blue space on the screen. I would have to zoom out and out to reveal the nearest land, a thousand miles away in most cases.

Eric’s mother, Katie Loss, emailed me a photo of Odyssey arriving in Los Angeles on July 22nd. It looked so small and fragile, but brilliantly white in the sunlight. What an adventure.

And what a memorable example of how this new digital reading technology makes it possible to read more than we ever could before, in more unusual places, without burdening our boat with weight better spent on cans of food.

len Kindle Nation Weekender columnist and contributing editor Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with with Eric Loss in its entirety at 18:31 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles Episode 210.

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

August 6, 2012 by KND

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview:

Librarian as Action Figure!

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

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disruption Ahead for iTunes, Google Play? Updated Amazon Cloud Player Includes New Scan and Match Technology, Free Audio Quality Upgrades, and More

July 31, 2012 by KND

Over the past five years much of the battle to sell digital content (ebooks, music, video and apps) has been about devices (Kindle, iPod, iPad, etc.), and what has not been about devices has been about platforms.

But the next phase will be every bit as much about whose cloud we’re on, so it is no surprise that Amazon is taking giant steps to make it as inviting as possible for us to use its cloud (rather than Apple’s, Google’s, or somebody else’s) to enjoy the content we have purchased in the past, anywhere and on any device, no matter what device we may have been using when we acquired the content.

Among the exciting new features:

Amazon scans customers’ iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon’s 20 million song catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs – are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player also will be upgraded.

Here’s the guts of the press release from Amazon today – please read carefully, because this is very likely to make for big — and positive — changes in the way you use your Kindle Fire and/or other devices to enjoy music, video, apps, and ebooks:

Amazon announces licenses from Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers

Coming soon, Roku and Sonos — following the recent addition of iPhone and iPod Touch, Roku and Sonos will join the list of Cloud Player compatible devices

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jul. 31, 2012– (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. today announced Cloud Player licensing agreements that bring significant updates to Amazon Cloud Player. The agreements are with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers. Amazon’s scan and match technology gives customers a fast and easy way to get all of their music from their computers to the cloud. Cloud Player customers can then enjoy their music on their favorite devices, including Kindle Fire, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android devices and any web browser, and soon, Roku streaming players and Sonos home entertainment systems.

New Cloud Player features include:

Amazon MP3 purchases — including music that customers purchased in the past — are automatically saved to Cloud Player, which means that customers have a secure backup copy of the music they buy from Amazon, free of charge.
Amazon scans customers’ iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon’s 20 million song catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs – are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player also will be upgraded.
Any customer with a Kindle Fire, Android device, iPhone, iPod touch, or any web browser — and soon, a Roku streaming player or Sonos home entertainment system — can play their music anywhere.

“We are constantly striving to deliver the best possible customer experience for Cloud Player, and today we are offering our customers a significant set of new features, including scan and match technology and audio quality upgrade,” said Steve Boom, Vice President of Digital Music at Amazon.

“We are happy to have such broad industry support in enabling these features for customers.”

“Music fans are passionate consumers, so making it as easy as possible for them to buy music and enjoy it anywhere, anytime and on any device, is important to us,” stated Rob Wells, President of Global Digital Business at Universal Music Group. “And Amazon’s new service does just that by enabling fans to find, discover and experience more music than ever before. UMG is committed to working with innovative services like Amazon to provide consumers more choice and to expand the marketplace even further for digital music.”

“Amazon is an important destination for music fans, and we’re pleased to see them creating innovative music services that offer fans the ability to enjoy their music conveniently on all their devices,” said Mark Piibe, Executive Vice President of Global Business Development for EMI Music. “Cloud Player makes it easy for users to have their entire music collection at their fingertips wherever they are, so that they’ll get even more value from the music they buy, and will form an even deeper connection with the artists they love.”

“Cloud technology is producing a powerful new generation of entertainment experiences, making the discovery of new content easier and offering instant access to music across multiple devices. Amazon’s locker service has an impressive set of capabilities, which expand the value of owning music. It will give fans greater flexibility with their libraries and entice new customers to explore the benefits of a digital collection,” said Stephen Bryan, Executive Vice President, Digital Strategy & Business Development, Recorded Music, Warner Music Group.

“We are excited to be working with Amazon to offer consumers the ability to enjoy their music anywhere—on any device—with Cloud Player,” said Dennis Kooker, President, Global Digital Business and U.S. Sales, Sony Music Entertainment. “Amazon continues to innovate on behalf of music fans, and we believe our new licensing agreement makes it easier and more convenient than ever for Amazon customers to access, discover and ultimately buy more music.”

Cloud Player is available in a Free tier and a Premium tier. Cloud Player Free customers can store all MP3 music purchased at Amazon, plus import up to 250 songs from their PC or Mac to Cloud Player, all at no charge. Cloud Player Premium customers can import and store up to 250,000 songs in Cloud Player for an annual fee of $24.99. Amazon-purchased MP3s (including all previous purchases) do not count against the 250 or 250,000-song limits and will be added to both Free and Premium Cloud Player libraries at no charge. Amazon Cloud Player is automatically integrated into Kindle Fire and the new Cloud Player features will be automatically delivered to Kindle Fire users over the next few days.

Customers can also visit www.amazon.com/cloudplayer or download the app on iOS or Android.

Starting today, Cloud Drive will be used for file storage and Cloud Player will be used for music storage and playback — each service will offer separate subscriptions. Customers can still use Cloud Drive to store any of their files in the cloud and access them from any web browser or by using the Cloud Drive Desktop Apps. Customers can store up to 5GB free and storage plan prices have been lowered to start at $10 per year for 20 GB. To learn how to get started on Cloud Drive visit www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore.

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It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Hunting Time (A Colter Shaw Novel Book 4) by Jeffery Deaver

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First Look at the New Normal from Amazon: Len Edgerly’s Notes from the Santa Monica Kindle Press Conference

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G for $499, ships November 20.

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ for $299, ships November 20.

Kindle Fire HD 7″ for $199, ships September 14.

Kindle Paperwhite 3G with Special Offers for $179, ships October 1.

Extras

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G for $499, ships November 20.

Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ for $299, ships November 20.

Kindle Fire HD 7″ for $199, ships September 14 (32GB model ships Oct. 25).

Kindle Paperwhite 3G with Special Offers for $179, ships in October. (This link will also take you to the Kindle Keyboard and the $69 Kindle.)

Kindle Fire Accessories

Kindle E-reader Accessories

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: A British Startup with an Entirely New Way of Bringing Authors and Readers Closer Together – Len Edgerly Interviews John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound

What to Expect on September 6: It Might Be Amazon’s Biggest Press Conference Ever, with Major Pyrotechnics for the Kindle Fire and Amazon Prime

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview: The Making of the President (-ial Campaign Book) 2012: Game Changing in the Age of Kindle

Len Edgerly Interviews Glenn Thrush, Politico’s senior White House Correspondent and author of Obama’s Last Stand

The KND Kindle Chronicles Interview – Two Kindles Before the Mast: It’s Our Gain as Len Edgerly Interviews Eric Loss About Sailing Solo — and Reading eBooks — Around the World in 258 Days

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

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