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Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Why Christmas Kindle Day Will Soon Be the Biggest Online Shopping Day Each Year, and Why It Changes Everything

December 5, 2011 by KND

By Steve Windwalker

A couple of decades ago this week, during my stretch as an indie brick-and-mortar bookseller, and a member in good standing of the American Booksellers Association, I found myself once again on the home stretch of the business year. Each day in December would be a little bit better than the day before as holiday shoppers helped put a smile back on my face after the months of difficult sledding that came before. Come Christmas Eve I’d close the store around 7 or 8 pm, take my family out for dinner and try to get myself into the proper holiday spirit as I contemplated the dramatic post-Christmas drop-off in sales.

Of course this is how it has been for everyone in the brick-and-mortar bookselling business — and many other retail sectors — for generations, but we are in the midst of cataclysmic change in the book business, and the chances are very good that this holiday season the world’s largest bookseller will experience something it has never experienced before.

Amazon issued one of its customary “tidbits o’ jolly sales metrics” press releases last week in which, among other things, the company let slip that its biggest single sales day of 2010 was Cyber Monday, November 29, 2010, when it sold 13.7 million items, or 158 items per second. Indeed I would be very surprised if Cyber Monday 2011 — November 28 — didn’t surpass the previous year’s benchmark to become the biggest single sales day in Amazon history, so far. There were certainly plenty of great deals available.

But here’s our prediction: either in 2011 or 2012, December 25 itself will become the new biggest sales day of the year for Amazon (in terms of sheer items sold), and once that change gains traction it will stay that way for a long, long time.

Why? Because the Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets that make up such a huge portion of Amazon’s items shipped prior to December 25 are the perfect content delivery system for all of the astonishingly fast-growing digital inventory of ebooks, MP3 music, movies, TV shows, apps, magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, and gift cards that are the new cornerstore of Amazon’s retail business for the rest of this decade.

We aren’t sure that this change will occur this year, but if it does occur it would be based on a sales units-per-Kindle model something like this:

4 million Kindle Fires shipped in the fourth quarter of 2011, with half of them opened on Christmas morning leading to the purchase that day of 2 million Kindle books, 1 million apps, 1 million MP3 songs, and 1 million other digital files including movies, TV shows, audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers = 5 million units.
4 million eInk Kindles shipped in the fourth quarter of 2011, with half of them opened on Christmas morning leading to the purchase that day of 3 million Kindle books = 3 million units.
20 million Kindles sold prior to the fourth quarter of 2011, with 12 million or more still in service and used for the purchase on Christmas Day of 5 million Kindle books = 5 million units.
1 million other items purchased on Christmas Day in other Amazon departments, including items purchased with Amazon gift cards opened Christmas morning and many more physical items purchased from the Amazon store by shoppers sitting on their sofas and playing with their new Kindle Fire tablets.

So maybe it will happen this year, maybe it will happen next year — and let’s be very clear that we’re talking units here and not dollars. (These units-per-Kindle models seem pretty conservative, so I am having a little trouble imagining how it would not happen this year.)

But lest you think of this as just some kind of flukey factoid-to-be, to be remarked upon and then forgotten, let’s also be clear this is a change that will herald major waves of transformation in the book and other media industries for years to come.

The increasing importance of instant shopping as opposed to pre-event shopping-and-shipping will mean a continuing decline in seasonal shopping and all of the ways that retail seasons have traditionally organized distribution channels, catalogs, the behavior or even the existence of sales reps, seasonal marketing campaigns, etc. Meanwhile Amazon will get to have it both ways, with huge dollar sales of Kindle content delivery systems between Thanksgiving and Christmas year, followed inevitably by huge unit sales of Kindle content each year during the “12 Days of Christmas” Between Christmas and Epiphany.

While it may seem a bit overheated to speak of these Kindle content delivery systems as an extension of our brains or as portals to all things cultural or consumable, it is nonetheless clear that they are remarkable engines of economic disintermediation that relentlessly — some would say cruelly — slice off inefficiencies and waste, and throw to the curb those who have depended on such inefficiencies for their livelihood.

I began self-referentially with a mention of my independent, brick-and-mortar bookselling roots. Even back in my American Bookseller Association days, I knew that it was futile and irrelevant of my colleagues and myself to rant against bogeymen like the chains and bookselling superstores. I’m always sad when I hear of someone from the traditional book business or printing industry who is out of work and not likely to be employable again without a career transformation, but I am just as sad when I hear my friends rant against change that is inevitable as if it was somehow just the fault of Jeff Bezos.

It’s not very Zen of me to say so, but where we are may be less important than where we are headed. We’ve already arrived at a place where there is:

a store that sells everything….
a store that can suggest what we want next….
a store that delivers instantly….
a web browser that anticipates where we are going….

Sure, there are other retailers who can look at the above list and say “we do that too,” but we all know that Amazon is driving this kind of change. Yet even with the potentially frightening world dominance that some may consider implicit in the fact that each of those lines characterizes Amazon, we are also within a daydream of a rebel and democratic marketplace of the mind where:

every reader is a writer, or at least a literary agent….
every viewer is an actor, or at least a casting director….
every listener is a player, or at least a DJ….
every downloader is an uploader, or at least a blogger….
and every promotion is personal.

In such a world the feedback will increasingly be the filter, and our ability to make choices in a world of limitless choice will depend more than ever on knowing who we can trust to help us distinguish between the ridiculous and the sublime. Our friends will be our networks, and our networks, more and more, will be in our minds.

Ray Kurzweil may say that we’ll have to wait until 2029 for the Singularity, but here at Kindle Nation we won’t be surprised if the Kindle Fire is offered as an implantable chip before the decade is out.

8 Myths About Reading Books On Mobile Phones

September 27, 2011September 6, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Piotr Kowalczyk addresses common myths about using smartphones as ereaders.

According to Wikipedia there are 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world. It’s a huge number. But people don’t try to read books on them. In this post I’d like to address some of the most popular reasons, which prevent us from doing it.

The screen is too small
This is true – if you still own a 5-year old phone with black&white screen large enough to show in full length only a phone number (if you’re lucky). But things change, and one of the quickest developing ones are mobile phones. More and more people buy smartphones. They have screens large enough to make their producers cry: “Hey you can even watch movies on this phone!”

I’ve heard many times that reading on a mobile phone is a disaster. Now try to watch a movie. It stops every 5 seconds, as it takes a lot of time to download it. THIS is a disaster.

Let’s compare sizes. For a book, you have an A5 format (average paper book) vs a phone screen. For a video, you as a reference we can use a 21″ TV screen. If we can shrink our video world that much, why we can’t do the same with books?

Another comparison. On average the screen of a smartphone has the width of a text column in a newspaper. If the size of a text field in a paper edition of The New York Times is not enough for you, then you can also complain about a mobile phone.

This is bad for eyes
This is truly mysterious point of view. If you read on your 21″ desktop computer monitor – this is bad for your eyes. But the smaller the device is, the less it affects your eyes.

The font is too small
This argument comes usually with a first one, but I guess it’s also connected in some way with a general perception of what the e-book is. There are still a lot of people who think, that an e-book is a fixed pdf document, and that you need to scroll and zoom a lot to see anything.

It’s not true any more. More and more e-books are made with mobile devices in mind. They have a proper format (like ePub), which enables a user to change a font size, among many other features. That means you can enlarge a font to the size you want. Kid book size needed? There you go.

There are few books available
People with the knowledge of modern e-book formats, still think that the number of publications is very limited and they are hard to find.

The truth is that any major e-bookstore now offers books in mobile friendly formats. Do you have an account at Amazon? All books in Kindle e-bookstore are well readable on smartphones. That means you log in to your Amazon account from your cellphone and start reading an e-book in minutes. Same with Barnes&Noble or Borders. What’s more important, there are sites devoted to mobile reading, like Feedbooks or Wattpad. Go there and you’ll see how many good books you can download to your mobile phone – for free.

Extra effort is needed to get a book
If you have a smartphone, you can easily turn it into an e-reader – I wrote a short post about it. What you need is to choose your favourite method. The most popular and the easiest way is to download an application. For iPhone OS you have Stanza. Free books for Android are available via Aldiko application. Kindle and Kobo have apps for both mobile OS-es.

Another way is managing and reading books via a mobile browser. This is what Google Editions is going to bring to an e-book world in the coming days. Reading books will be even easier. No special app needed, you’ll use your smartphone’s browser.

One thing is clear. You absolutely don’t need to learn anything about format-to-format conversions to start reading books on your mobile phone.

It costs money
Most e-book reading apps are free of charge. What you need to pay for is books themselves. So if you think, that turning your mobile phone into an e-reader will cost you an extra money – you’re just wrong.

What you may want to know is that there are two kinds of apps in the applications markets. One is a program to read and manage books downloaded to it. The other one is a book-app – a book sold as a separate application.

If you want to give the e-books a try at no cost the best way is to download Stanza for iPhone or Aldiko for Android. They both give you the access to free resources from Feedbooks – public domain books as well as new titles from self-published authors.

It’s inconvenient to manage a book library
Some of us think, that building a book library based on a mobile phone is a useless work. Managing all the books from a small device is hard to imagine.

You don’t need to assume that any more. With cloud-based services you can access your library from a lot of devices, like a computer, a tablet, an e-reader – and a mobile phone.

You don’t need to manage your library from a mobile phone – just pick up the most convenient device for that.

Phones will be replaced by better-suited devices anyway
Not true. Tablets, e-readers and phones will be used simultaneously. I’m sure that with the availability of bookshelves in the cloud, anyone will want to have a comfort to access books from whatever device he’s got at hand. The big decision to make will be “tablet or e-reader”, but smartphones? We have them anyway, they can be easily turned into e-reading devices.

And they can be used to read books on the go, anywhere where there was no reason to take a bigger device – but there is time to read books.

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Publetariat Dispatch: Self-Publishing, A Source Of Innovative Thinking And How To Benefit From It

September 27, 2011August 30, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Piotr Kowalczyk discusses what all of us can learn about innovation from self-publishers.

This post, from Piotr Kowalczyk, originally appeared on his Password Incorrect site on 3/3/11 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

The presentation you’ll see below was prepared for Ebook Lab Italia conference. I wanted to highlight a prevailing characteristic of self-publishers, not yet discovered and fully utilized by publishers and readers. It’s the innovative thinking.

In digital times, times of over-content, the front line is the attention of a reader. Technology leads to equal chances. Both big publishers and self-publishers use the same on-line tools and services to find the reader and convince him to buy the book. But obviously there is a difference: it’s the money at disposal.

Self-publishers usually don’t have money, so they use all their energy to be creative and innovative. In a presentation there are several examples of innovation in both a self-promotion run by single authors and joint actions taken by self-publishing community:
– 3D1D project (3 days, 1 dispatch) – a draft of a novel written live in under 72 hours,

– Bathrobe Guru – a short story written using Google Wave,

– Indie Call to Action – authors cross-reviewed and promoted their books using social media,

– Friday Flash – a large group of writers share their new flash-fiction stories on Twitter with a tag #FridayFlash.

Truth is that not every self-publisher is as successful as Joanna Penn. She made her debut novel, Pentecost, a bestseller within 24 hours from launch.

What can self-publishers do if royalties are just not enough? Again, they are innovative enough to find other ideas for earning money. You’ll also find the examples in a presentation.

This year self-publishing is on the rise. In January there were as much as 18 self-published books among top 50 bestsellers in Kindle Store. There are big chances that self-publishers will be noticed and get the attention they deserve.

Self-publishing – a source of innovative thinking and how to benefit from it on Prezi

If you liked this article, please click on a Facebook Like it button. Buy my geek fiction ebooks ($.99 each at Kindle Store) or get a free sample: Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed. You can subscribe to one of RSS feeds here. Let’s also connect on Twitter.

Publetariat Dispatch: People Don’t Buy Books Based On The Publisher

September 27, 2011August 23, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, indie author and publishing consultant Joanna Penn asserts that publisher names don’t matter all that much to readers.

Most writers and authors also buy a lot of books. I certainly do, and you probably do too. So what makes you buy a book?

I buy books primarily based on the following:

Recommendations from others mostly found on blogs I read and twitter

Browsing Amazon Kindle store in the categories I read, as well as how Amazon uses suggestions on other books I have read. I download lots of samples and then buy the books that take my fancy.

Browsing physical book stores, although now I note down titles and then go buy them on my Kindle as they are 1/4 of the price of the physical book

I definitely do not buy books based on the publisher. In fact, most of the time I wouldn’t know who the publisher was anyway and in a brief survey of other book buyers they have a similar experience. This raises a couple of very important questions for authors and writers, and perhaps publishers as well.

If book buyers don’t care who the publisher is, why is there a stigma to being self-published? (it’s changing but it is still there). If you have a professionally edited and interesting book, with an eye-catching cover, buyers will not know the difference anyway. I have the same Amazon shelf-space as any other books. What do you think?

If book buyers don’t care who the publisher is, why do authors care so much? Do we all want a 10 book deal with Harper Collins because it means more physical distribution to bookstores, potentially world rights and more publicity budget? and is that scenario very likely for most authors. I don’t think so. The reason must be ego and I will freely admit to being one of those authors! I would love a 10 book deal with Harper Collins! But I know that I will still need to do my own publicity and marketing, and I may well make less money than digital publishing. It is important to identify the why behind what you want for your book and your career as an author. Why do you care who publishes you?

If book buyers don’t care who the publisher is, whose brand is associated with the book? In a brilliant audio to the indie publishing industry a few weeks ago, Seth Godin challenged the audience on brand. He basically said that publishers should be aligning with audiences and brands and become the “go to” publisher for that audience e.g. be the publisher for civil war books, or for coeliac disease sufferers. I can think of a couple of publishers who have this right at the moment. O’Reilly Books is for tech books, and Harlequin is for romance, but do the readers go there to spend money? I find branding to be a fascinating topic for authors and the publishing industry and right now, you need to consider your branding in a very crowded marketplace.

[Update: This piece was written a week ago, but I just saw the interview with Mark Coker from Smashwords where he says the same thing:

“Readers typically don’t pay attention to the name of the publisher on the spine of the book. They pay attention to the author and the story.”

Do you buy books based on a publisher? and do you care who publishes your book?

This is a cross-posting from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Publetariat Dispatch: Good Show, Sir – Bad Book Cover Archive

September 27, 2011August 16, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, indie author and small press owner Alan Baxter shares the Good Show, Sir website, which showcases truly awful book cover designs.

My brother-in-law put me onto this great site (thanks Adrian!) It’s called Good Show Sir and it’s all about showcasing the worst book covers in sci-fi and fantasy. Their explanation is this:

Because sometimes, a book cover is so bad that all you can do is step back in wonder and say “Good show, sir, good show”.

The truth is that these days there’s been a considerable improvement in book cover design. Some covers of recent spec-fic releases are truly outstanding. But there was a time when any sci-fi or fantasy book was guaranteed an awful cover of one kind or another. That’s where this site comes in. Check it out here.

To whet your appetite, I present this:

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s alanbaxteronline site.

Publetariat Dispatch: The iPad And The Kindle Compared

September 27, 2011August 2, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, indie author and publishing consultant Joanna Penn compares the iPad to the Kindle.

I’ve had the Kindle for over a year and the iPad for a few months now. Here’s how I am using both devices.

In the video below, I explain:

Reading fiction. Pretty much only on the Kindle device or on the Kindle app on the iPad/iPhone. I am quite loyal to the Amazon.com brand and experience as I have been buying physical books from overseas for years. It is a natural extension to move to the Kindle store, buy books there and read over multiple devices. The iBookstore is not very well populated as yet, and the Kindle app on the iPad is preferable.

Reading blogs. I use the iPad to relax and browse my Google Reader feeds as well as my social networks. I love using Flipboard, a fantastic app that formats the feeds into a magazine style layout with different sizes and pictures. It is addictive to read on Flipboard so that is how I find all the interesting articles that I tweet @thecreativepenn

Reading non-fiction/online course materials generally in PDF format. I do a lot of online courses and learning. Much of that material is formatted in PDF. I use GoodReader app on the iPad for this and love to be in the hammock with the iPad, a notebook and a cup of tea.

Multi-media. I am watching more videos on YouTube on the iPad as part of my surfing. I have also read some ebooks with embedded links to video that are great on the iPad specifically.

Traveling. When I was in Bali, I used the iPad for email, skype phone calls and twitter/facebook while I was away. I didn’t take the Kindle device as it is specialized but I did sync the same books and read them on the Kindle app. Using the iPad for skype saved me lots of money on international phone calls as well as being easy for email so I could work seamlessly while traveling. It’s definitely the device I will use in the future for travel.

Email/social networking/news on a casual basis. This may freak some people out but I often read email/twitter/FB/news while having breakfast! My husband also has an iPad and consumes different media to me. I often read UK and European news and he reads information from New Zealand (our respective countries of origin). Sitting at breakfast with a newspaper is not unusual for many couples, and for us, it is sitting with iPads. I don’t feel like it is work when I can just check a few things on email, reply to a few tweets and catch up on the news.

Overall, the iPad replaces laptop usage rather than Kindle usage. I am shifting consumption of blogs/video/learning onto the iPad whereas I did that with my laptop before. It is much more relaxing to sit with the iPad on the couch than to sit with a laptop. I still use the Kindle device for reading fiction primarily as their are no distractions when using it. The iPad has multiple distractions!

Do you have an iPad? How do you use yours?

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Publetariat Dispatch: 40 Years Of Ebooks

September 27, 2011July 5, 2011 by KND

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Piotr Kowalczyk shares his infographic, charting the history of ebooks over the past forty years.

When I finished the infographic and showed it to my wife, she said: “Forty years? No way. Four, maybe.”

“Four, maybe” – it’s what most people think. Most people are still convinced that e-books are a fad. That’s why I was looking for a convenient, all-in-one way to challenge this myth. I hope it works. Every year shows not only the information about e-books, but also other facts and achievements. This builds a good, thought-provoking time reference.

Share this infographic if you think it deserves it. I wanted to put it on the web before this year’s edition of Read an E-Book Week. 40 years of history are asking for a week of attention – this should work.

I dedicate this little piece of work to a true visionary Michael S. Hart. When he was typing the text of the US Declaration of Independence, the only word I was speaking was “ma-ma”.

via ebookfriend.ly

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

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