That quaint little Kindle bookshop that launched with about 80,000 titles exactly 44 months ago today reached an important selection benchmark today when it passed the threshold of 1 million titles. That includes about 4,000 titles that are currently available for pre-order.
Amazon has just announced move that could constitute a true Killer feature for stimulating massive adoption by college students of ebooks — and Kindle ebooks in particular.
“Today, Amazon.com announced the launch of Kindle Textbook Rental–now students can save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store,” the company said in a press release. “Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Students can find details about the program at www.amazon.com/kindletextbooks.”
“Students tell us that they enjoy the low prices we offer on new and used print textbooks. Now we’re excited to offer students an option to rent Kindle textbooks and only pay for the time they need–with savings up to 80% off the print list price on a 30-day rental,” said Dave Limp, vice president, Amazon Kindle.
How effective will this program be in luring students to the Kindle platform? That will depend primarily on two things:
Finally, it seems worthwhile to observe here that, like nearly everything else that Amazon has done in recent months, this move appears to be another important part of the set-up for the launch of a Kindle-compatible tablet from Amazon. Many of the textbooks available under the Kindle Textbook Rental program won’t look like much on a 6-inch e-Ink Kindle display, but I suspect they’ll look great both on a Kindle-compatible iPad and on the K-Tab which we expect Amazon to announce in the next few weeks.
Here’s the guts of Amazon’s news release this morning:
| Students Can Now Save Up To 80% with Kindle Textbook Rental |
| Low rental prices and flexible rental periods of any length between 30 and 360 days Margin notes and highlighted passages are stored in the Amazon Cloud for viewing anytime, anywhere – even after a rental expires SEATTLE, Jul 18, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — (NASDAQ: AMZN)– Today, Amazon.com announced the launch of Kindle Textbook Rental–now students can save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Students can find details about the program at www.amazon.com/kindletextbooks. “Students tell us that they enjoy the low prices we offer on new and used print textbooks. Now we’re excited to offer students an option to rent Kindle textbooks and only pay for the time they need–with savings up to 80% off the print list price on a 30-day rental,” said Dave Limp, vice president, Amazon Kindle. Kindle Textbook Rental offers the ability to customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days, so students only pay for the specific amount of time they need a book. Students can also easily extend any rental period in increments as small as one day or choose to purchase the book they are renting at any time. “We’ve done a little something extra we think students will enjoy,” continued Limp. “Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere – even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.” Kindle Textbooks are “Rent Once, Read Everywhere” as they can be read across the most popular devices with free Kindle Reading Apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices. For more information about Kindle Textbook Rental, visit www.amazon.com/kindletextbooks. |
By Steve Windwalker
The Wall Street Journal’s website is reporting this evening that Amazon will release three new Kindle compatible devices between now and the end of September, including:
The K-Tab, which is the name we at Kindle Nation have given to the tablet device for which we have projected a late July announcement and a late August ship date, “will allow Amazon customers to easily watch videos, read electronic books and listen to digital music they purchase or rent” from Amazon, the Journal piece said.
WSJ reporters Stu Woo and Yukari Iwakani Kane take an authoritative tone in a report whose anonymous sources are “people familiar with the matter,” suggesting that Amazon planned the leak.
“The new tablet will intensify a growing clash between Amazon and Apple,” the Journal opined. “The two tech-industry titans are already fighting for customers for their respective digital book, music and video businesses. Now Amazon will have a device that will compete closely against Apple’s popular iPad, as well as other tablets such as Samsung Electronic Co.’s Galaxy Tab.”
Amazon announced earlier today that its KINDEAL 3G – the 3G+wi-fi Kindle with special offers, is now available for $139 due to sponsorship or subsidy by AT&T. As Amazon attempts to clear out existing inventory prior to the launch the aforementioned new devices, we expect to see a base-model wi-fi Kindle offering at $99 for the first time in time for the back-to-school market in late August or September.
As Jeff Bezos said a few weeks back when asked about a new Kindle tablet launch this year, “Stay tuned.”
Don’t miss out on Kindle Nation’s latest Kindle 3G giveaway sweepstakes, co-sponsored by bestselling novelist M.J. Rose! Just click here to check out her novel THE HALO EFFECT, the first book in the Butterfield Institute series, while it is priced at just 99 cents, then click here and scroll down to the entry form to enter our Kindle 3G sweepstakes! This will be the fourth Kindle we’ve given away this year at Kindle Nation, and as always, no purchase is necessary to enter any Kindle Nation sweepstakes.
Please note: You must click here to go to our Facebook page and scroll down to the entry form to enter our Kindle 3G sweepstakes — entering a comment does not enter you in the sweepstakes!
New price for Kindle 3G with Special Offers is $139 – still no monthly fee or annual contract
Never pay for or hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot
Amazon announced today that AT&T has agreed to sponsor Kindle 3G with Special Offers — the 3G version of the device we like to call the KINDEAL — and that it is now available at a new price of $139. Kindle 3G with Special Offers is the same as the $189 Kindle 3G, plus money-saving special offers and sponsored screensavers.
(However, if you are in the market for a brand new Kindle 3G, don’t miss out on Kindle Nation’s latest Kindle 3G giveaway sweepstakes, co-sponsored by bestselling novelist M.J. Rose. Just click here to check out her novel THE HALO EFFECT, the first book in the Butterfield Institute series, while it is priced at just 99 cents, then click here to enter our Kindle 3G sweepstakes! This will be the fourth Kindle we’ve given away this year at Kindle Nation.)*
“Kindle 3G is more convenient – customers never have to hunt for or pay for a Wi-Fi hotspot – they simply download and read books anytime, anywhere. Kindle 3G customers read 20 percent more books, and take advantage of twice as many special offers,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com. “A big thank you to AT&T for helping to make the new $139 price possible.”
“Kindle 3G is by far the fastest-growing connected device on the AT&T network. We consistently hear from customers how much they enjoy the freedom of not being tied to a Wi-Fi hotspot and instead being able to download and read new books anytime, anywhere on AT&T’s fast, reliable network,” said Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “We are excited to sponsor Amazon’s best Kindle – Kindle 3G with Special Offers – at the new lower price of only $139.”
Kindle 3G includes all the same features that helped make the third-generation Kindle the #1 bestselling e-reader in the world:
Here’s a link to Amazon’s complete press release this morning.
*No purchase is necessary to enter any Kindle Nation sweepstakes.
By Steve Windwalker
We do it twice a year: once when it’s hot and once when it’s cold. We’re getting ready to do it again, and we would love to have your help!
It’s the Summer 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey, and we think it is a great way for Kindle Nation citizens to bring everyone else in the book business — including authors, publishers, and Amazon, for starters — up to speed about what’s important to the world’s greatest readers: you and me.
At the same time, with thousands of very thoughtful respondents in our last few Kindle Nation surveys, it’s also not a bad way for us Kindle-toting readers to get to know each other, and with that in mind I would like to invite you to suggest some of the questions that you’d like to see answered by your fellow Kindle Nation citizens … either for your own edification or because you think the answers would make a difference to industry types.
Just send your ideas for survey questions to this address:
KindleNation+SurveyInput@gmail.com
We probably won’t be able to use every suggested question, but we’ll definitely use some of them, and we’ll take 10 of the emails we like best and send each of their senders a $10 gift certificate to the Kindle Store!
Meanwhile, if you’d like to check out the results to the last survey, here’s a link.
And we’ll let you know later in July when the polling place at the Summer 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey is open for all voters!
In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Alan Baxter takes a closer look at JK Rowling’s new Pottermore undertaking, and what it could mean for the future of publishing and sales of ebooks.
The internet has been abuzz lately since mega-billionaire-super-author, J K Rowling (of Harry Potter fame, in case you’ve been a monk in a cave for more than ten years) announced Pottermore. In a nutshell, it goes like this:
After seven books and eight films and more merchandising than you can fit in George Lucas’s ego, Rowling has now announced a website which will be a complete interactive experience for all ages based on her stories. Along with that she’s announced that for the first time ebook editions of the Harry Potter series will be made available. Well, legal ebook editions that is. Rowling truly is the master at monetising her ideas and characters, having turned some books about wizards at school into an international behemoth across all media.
With Pottermore, as the press release says:
For this groundbreaking collaborative project, J.K. Rowling has written extensive new material about the characters, places and objects in the much-loved stories, which will inform, inspire and entertain readers as they journey through the storylines of the books. Pottermore will later incorporate an online shop where people can purchase exclusively the long-awaited Harry Potter eBooks, in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide, and is ultimately intended to become an online reading experience, extending the relevance of Harry Potter to new generations of readers, while still appealing to existing fans.
It’s a pretty inspired concept. Of course, Rowling with her riches and business partners is the kind of author with the kind of clout you’d need to make something like this happen.
The real game changer among all this, however, despite the partnership comment above, is that the ebooks will be essentially self-published. Her publishers, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, etc., don’t own the eletronic rights – and I bet they’re really happy about that. So Rowling is planning to make the ebooks available directly through Pottmore. Of course, when Rowling self-publishes, she’s has a team of people behind her and her own company on the case, so it’s not like she sits there on her own and uploads files to Amazon. But the key here is the lack of a third-party publisher.
The Kindle will accept epub format ebooks soon and the announcement that the Harry Potter ebooks will be available from October seems to fit in with that, so it’s likely the books will be in epub. That certainly does seem to be the prominent format and, aside from Amazon’s mobi format, has been the industry leader all along. Once the Kindle accepts epub too, we have the first stage of industry standardisation and that’s a good thing for all of us. Perhaps we have Rowling to thank in part for forcing that change – who knows who talked to who while this was getting off the ground.
Authors leveraging their existing print success to manage their own ebook releases is nothing new – just see J A Konrath’s example for one. But nothing on this scale has happened before and we can see things shifting a little more on the axis. I’ve said it before – we’re living in exciting times in writing and publishing and the ride ain’t over yet. I wonder how many kids will get an ereader with a set of Harry Potter books on board for Xmas this year? This will be a big step in mainstreaming ereaders, which are becoming more and more mainstream anyway. On a recent flight to Melbourne I noticed several people reading from Kindles and Sony Readers while waiting for my plane.
The kind of cross-media storytelling and promotion which Pottermore represents is certainly not new, but we’ve seen nothing on this scale before. Just the official announcement video is better than any book trailer a lowly author like myself could hope for. I wonder where we go from here?
Here’s the official release video from Rowling herself.
And here’s the Pottermore site.
Interesting times indeed. What do you think? Is this a good thing or not? Where do things go from here?
This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.