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Windwalker Recovers

Greetings from Kindle Nation!

Just a quick note to let you know that I am at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, recovering from emergency surgery yesterday and about to be released. All is well and my hope is that within a few hours there will be little or no sign that I was ever away.

Cheers,

Steve Windwalker

Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey Results: Kindle’s “Extra” Features Continue to Have Wide Usage

(One of several Kindle Nation posts exploring the results of the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Click here to see a breakdown of results.) 
 
 
By Tom Dulaney, Contributing Reporter

Jeff Bezos says the Kindle is and always will be, first and foremost, a dedicated ebook reader. And he’s right, of course.

 
But here at Kindle Nation we have been aware of the appeal of other features ever since our publisher Steve Windwalker hit the Kindle Store bestseller list back in January 2008 with the first “ebook” on how to use the Kindle for email. (The short piece later became part of the #1 bestselling book in the Kindle Store for the entire calendar year 2008.)


So, the Kindle may not be the ultimate convergence device, but readers do a lot more than buy and read ebooks on their Kindles. However, no other feature of the dedicated ebook reading tool compares to the book reading function in either usage or performance ratings.


The Kindle’s many other features find use and favor with scattered blocks of the 2,275 people who responded to the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Taken, together they are certainly part of the package of features that makes the Kindle the most popular ebook reader ever, and the most popular product ever sold by Amazon.

Presented here, arranged in order of usage and appeal with most popular first, are other Kindle features and our survey respondents’ ratings of them.

The three most popular non-ebook pastimes — newspaper reading, blog reading, and Kindles games — each come in with 35% to 36% of respondents.


Just over a third of respondents—a fraction under 36%–rated the Kindle for newspaper reading, and 8% say its performance is “superior” while 28% call it “useful, even if flawed.”

About the same percentage — 35% of respondents — subscribe to blogs that they read on their Kindles. About half of these Kindle Nation citizens read blogs nearly every day.

How well does the Kindle do in delivering blogs? Some 12% rate it as “superior” as a blog reader, while 20% find it “useful even if flawed” for a total of 32%. 57% of respondents saying blog reading is not important to them, 5% saying it’s a distraction, and 6% unaware of the feature.

Playing word games or using other Kindle apps and utilities occupies about 35% of readers, with 11% saying the use of such features on the device is “superior” while 24% say it is “useful even if flawed.” But 65% don’t play games for these reasons: 6% said “I was not aware of this feature,” 14% find gaming an annoyance or distraction; and 45% say it is just not important to them.

And one of our favorite features—sending personal documents and manuscripts to the Kindle—is used by 26% of all respondents, with 2% doing so daily, 6% weekly and 18% “sometimes.”  About 21% said they were unaware of the feature, and 53% said they “rarely use” it.

Their ratings of the document reading feature: 25% find it useful even if flawed, and 9% rate the feature “superior.” About 53% said it was not important to them, 8% were unaware of the feature, and 5% found it a distraction.

The text-to-speech feature of the Kindle is used by a sizeable group of 25% of respondents, with 2% listening daily, 4% weekly and 19% “sometimes.” Two thirds—66%–say they use text-to-speech rarely. 8% call text-to-speech “superior” and 29% term it “useful if flawed.”

The Kindle gets significant use from owners checking email and browsing the web. In a question about usage, the survey combined email checking and web browsing. About 25% overall use the features, with 17% doing so “sometimes,” another 5% weekly, and 3% daily. And 56% said they rarely check email with their Kindles, while 19% were unaware that they could.

But that’s usage for email and web browsing. What about performance?

A second question broke out the Kindle’s two features: email and web browsing. For email, only 1% rate the Kindle “superior,” while 23% say it is “useful if flawed.”

As a web browser, only 2% rate the Kindle as “superior” as a web browser, and 28% call it “useful, if flawed.”

The survey combined two audio features to ask respondents how often they used their Kindles to listen to audiobooks and/or music. Some 12% listen to music or audiobooks on their Kindles, about half as many as text-to speech. About 1% listen daily, 3% listen weekly and 8 percent listen “sometimes.”

eBook Leaders Show Random House Sitting Pretty As Amazon’s Kindle Store Discounting Plays Crucial Role in Picking Winners

Related posts: 
By Steve Windwalker
For the past few weeks, we’ve been paying more attention than usual to the USA Today bestseller lists that come out each Thursday because they have provided a fascinating window into the changes that are taking places in what we read and the publishing sources for the books that we are reasing.
Once again, the USA Today top 50 list for the week ended February 13, 2011 shows a healthy representation of titles for which the ebook format is the highest-selling format. There are 19 such titles this week and we provide a full list of those 19 titles below, with their list prices and Kindle Store prices as of today.
For each of the titles listed here, the first price shown is the publisher’s list price as reported by USA Today, and the second, linked price is the Kindle Store price. Wherever the publisher is a participant in the agency-model price-fixing scheme, the two prices will often be the same. For other books, Amazon may discount the book further for Kindle customers at its discretion.

  • 2.        Alone           Lisa Gardner,  Bantam State  (F) (E)   $0.99 $0.99
  • 3.        The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo           Stieg Larsson,  Vintage  (F) (E)   $14.95  $5.00
  • 4.        The Girl Who Played With Fire           Stieg Larsson,  Knopf Doubleday (F) (E)   $25.95 $5.00
  • 5.        Unbroken           Laura Hillenbrand,  Random House (NF) (E)   $27.00 $9.99
  • 6.        The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest           Stieg Larsson,  Knopf (F) (E)   $27.95  $9.99
  • 8.        A Discovery of Witches           Deborah E. Harkness,  Viking Adult (F) (E)   $14.99 $14.99 
  • 9.        Water for Elephants           Sara Gruen,  Algonquin (F) (E)   $14.95 $5.00 
  • 15.        Cutting for Stone: A Novel           Abraham Verghese,  Knopf A (F) (E)   $26.95 $5.00 
  • 17.        Switched           Amanda Hocking,  Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E)   $2.99 $0.99
  • 20.        I Am Number Four           Pittacus Lore,  HarperCollins Youth (F) (E)   $17.99 $9.99      
  • 21.        The Confession           John Grisham,  Doubleday (F) (E)   $28.95 $9.99 
  • 24.        The Help           Kathryn Stockett,  Putnam (E)   $12.99  $12.99        
  • 27.        Ascend           Amanda Hocking,  Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E)   $2.99 $2.99
  • 31.        Torn           Amanda Hocking,  Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E)   $2.99 $2.99
  • 34.        Room           Emma Donoghue,  Little, Brown (F) (E)   $11.99  $11.99          
  • 42.        What the Night Knows           Dean Koontz,  Bantam (F) (E)   $28.00  $9.99   
  • 44.        Dead or Alive           Tom Clancy, Grant Blackwood,  Putnam (F) (E)   $14.99 $12.99  
  • 46.        Strategic Moves           Stuart Woods,  Putnam (F) (E)   $12.99 $12.99
  • 48.        The Perfect Husband           Lisa Gardner,  Bantam (F) (E)   $7.99 $5.00 
While we are looking, a couple of other tidbits that caught our attention:
Among traditional publishers, Random House and its imprints are the place to be for authors these days. Random House is the leading traditional publisher in the U.S., and some may have been nervous for its authors when Random decided to abstain from the agency-model price-fixing scheme and, in the bargain, from the much-hyped Apple iBooks Store. But Random and its imprints and authors have benefited hugely from the price flexibility that Amazon and other retailers have been allowed, especially since the publisher and the authors get paid based on full list price even if a title is discounted below wholesale cost in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. Sixteen of the USA Today Top 50 are published by Random and its imprints, which is a dominant position given other changes in the composition of he bestseller lists. Given that Random has achieved that position without a single sale through the iBooks store, that dominance speaks eloquently of the utter failure of iBooks.   
Meanwhile, Amazon and others should take very seriously the king-making role that results from the company’s selective discounting for Kindle titles. It seems very likely that a fabulous book-group natural like Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s novel The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady should be headed straight to the highest rungs of the Kindle Store bestseller list, especially after recent rave reviews in the New York Times, Denver Post, Boston Globe, and Kindle Nation Daily. The book is published by Random imprint Doubleday, which means that Amazon controls price and discounting in the Kindle Store just as brick-and-mortar booksellers control price and discounting for the hardcover edition. But with Amazon selling the Kindle edition for $13.90, Jeff Bezos and his minions might as well be standing at the gates of bestseller heaven blocking the entrance of one of the more distinctive, independent voices to come along in American fiction in recent years. It says here that as soon as Amazon brings the retail price of Revenge down to the $5-$10 promotional price sweet spot provided for Stieg Larsson, Sara Gruen, John Grisham and others, it will have another bestseller in the making.

eBook Leaders Show Random House Sitting Pretty As Amazon’s Kindle Store Discounting Plays Crucial Role in Picking Winners

For the past few weeks, we’ve been paying more attention than usual to the USA Today bestseller lists that come out each Thursday because they have provided a fascinating window into the changes that are taking places in what we read and the publishing sources for the books that we are reasing.

Once again, the USA Today top 50 list for the week ended February 13, 2011 shows a healthy representation of titles for which the ebook format is the highest-selling format. There are 19 such titles this week and we provide a full list of those 19 titles below, with their list prices and Kindle Store prices as of today.

For each of the titles listed here, the first price shown is the publisher’s list price as reported by USA Today, and the second, linked price is the Kindle Store price. Wherever the publisher is a participant in the agency-model price-fixing scheme, the two prices will often be the same. For other books, Amazon may discount the book further for Kindle customers at its discretion.

While we are looking, a couple of other tidbits that caught our attention:

Among traditional publishers, Random House and its imprints are the place to be for authors these days. Random House is the leading traditional publisher in the U.S., and some may have been nervous for its authors when Random decided to abstain from the agency-model price-fixing scheme and, in the bargain, from the much-hyped Apple iBooks Store. But Random and its imprints and authors have benefited hugely from the price flexibility that Amazon and other retailers have been allowed, especially since the publisher and the authors get paid based on full list price even if a title is discounted below wholesale cost in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. Sixteen of the USA Today Top 50 are published by Random and its imprints, which is a dominant position given other changes in the composition of he bestseller lists. Given that Random has achieved that position without a single sale through the iBooks store, that dominance speaks eloquently of the utter failure of iBooks.

Meanwhile, Amazon and others should take very seriously the king-making role that results from the company’s selective discounting for Kindle titles. It seems very likely that a fabulous book-group natural like Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s novel The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady should be headed straight to the highest rungs of the Kindle Store bestseller list, especially after recent rave reviews in the New York Times, Denver Post, Boston Globe, and Kindle Nation Daily. The book is published by Random imprint Doubleday, which means that Amazon controls price and discounting in the Kindle Store just as brick-and-mortar booksellers control price and discounting for the hardcover edition. But with Amazon selling the Kindle edition for $13.90, Jeff Bezos and his minions might as well be standing at the gates of bestseller heaven blocking the entrance of one of the more distinctive, independent voices to come along in American fiction in recent years. It says here that as soon as Amazon brings the retail price of Revenge down to the $5-$10 promotional price sweet spot provided for Stieg Larsson, Sara Gruen, John Grisham and others, it will have another bestseller in the making.

Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey Results: Despite All the New Kids on the Block, 90% of Respondents Still Find a “Superior” Reading Experience with the Kindle

(One of several Kindle Nation posts exploring the results of the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Click here to see a breakdown of results.)   

 

By Tom Dulaney, Contributing Reporter

The 2011 Winter Kindle Nation Citizen Survey asked users about their Kindle experiences from two different perspectives:

  • What features of the Kindle do you use? “Tell us about your use of various Kindle features.”
  • How does the Kindle perform, feature by feature? The survey asked: “Amazon has been clear that its mission with the Kindle is to provide a superior reading experience. ….Rate the Kindle’s performance in each of the following areas:”

This post will stick to the book-related features of the Kindle. A later post will explore the Kindle’s various other abilities.

As a dedicated ebook reading device, the Kindle’s first mission is finding, downloading and presenting books for reading.

54% of our survey respondents make a daily habit of reading on Kindle. Another 30% do so weekly, and 13% read books on their Kindles “sometimes.” 43 people rarely use their Kindles for reading.

How do they rate the Kindle’s performance for its intended purpose as a reader?

90% of the respondents said the Kindle provides “a superior experience” as a reading device. Another 10% called the Kindle’s reading experience “useful, if flawed,” for a very high 99%+ aggregate.

Readers continue to love the convenience and wireless connectivity that allows them to browse and order Kindle books directly from their Kindle, without wires, cables, or USB connections. 54% purchase and download ebooks daily with the device. About 30% do so weekly, and another 13% “sometimes.”

How good is the inbuilt Kindle Store experience? Some 52% rate browsing and ordering a “superior” experience, while 34% rate it “useful if flawed” for a total of 85%.

42% or those surveyed say they get reading matter from sources other than the Kindle Store — including free sources like Project Gutenberg and other free book collections to which Kindle Nation provides links — but in terms of frequency they are far less likely to go beyond the Kindle Store. About 5 % do so daily, 11% weekly and 26% “sometimes.”

A large majority — 77% of respondents — read samples before they buy an ebook. Again, frequency of use varies as expected: 9% read samples nearly every day, 28% do so weekly, and 39% “sometimes.”

Amazon’s “Buy Once, Read Anywhere” program is a hit with readers. About 50% or respondents say they buy, download and read ebooks using one of the Kindle apps with a device other than a Kindle.

Publishing Perestroika: Indie Authors Blow Away Traditional Gatekeepers and Storm the Castle of Newspaper Bestseller Lists

By Steve Windwalker

Call it the “Paper Curtain,” if you like.

But like the Berlin Wall, it’s coming down.

As a result of the Publishing Perestroika that has been unleashed by readers and writers connecting primarily around Kindle content in the short span of just 39 months, the walls that have kept self-published and ebook authors from being included in prestigious newspaper bestseller lists will come crashing down this week.

Tomorrow, USA TODAY will roll out its weekly list of the top 150 bestselling books in the U.S., just as it does every Thursday.

Amanda Hocking
But for the very first time, USA Today announced today, its list for the week ending February 6 will include bestselling self-published direct-to-Kindle authors like Amanda Hocking. Hocking’s books currently rank #3, #11, #12, #27, #37, #41, and #46 on the Kindle Store top 50 bestsellers, and “the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list,” wrote USA Today’s Carol Memmott in an article entitled “Authors catch fire with self-published ebooks.”

Whether it happens this week or within a few more weeks, it’s also a good bet that Hocking will soon be accompanied by bestselling Kindle indie authors like John Locke, Victorine Lieske, and others.

And other, equally dramatic developments will follow:
  • One way or another, the fact that USA Today has opened its “bestseller list” gates to the great unwashed population of ebook and self-published authors will force the New York Times to do the same, lest its bestseller list be rendered irrelevant.
  • Once the Times and other rags allow self-published books on their bestseller lists, they will have to start publishing reviews of self-published books.
  • The prediction made here just a few weeks ago, that an indie author would be inducted by early 2012 into the “Kindle Million Club” alongside James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, and Nora Roberts, will prove to have been ridiculously conservative. Regardless of when Amazon makes the announcement, Hocking will pass the million-copy mark in Kindle books sold by the first day of Spring this year, and she will be joined by another dozen indie authors before the arrival of Spring in 2012.
All of these changes probably became inevitable, even though we didn’t know it then, when Amazon launched the Kindle on November 19, 2007.
 
But the barons of the book industry and the big New York publishers should make no mistake about the fact that these events have been hastened dramatically by their own tragically misguided launch of the agency model price-fixing plan early in 2010. Their tone-deaf move to try to protect their print publishing business model by insisting upon increases of 30 to 50 percent in ebook prices opened the doors wide to indie authors to lure readers with lower prices for what, in many cases, are better books.

During the last week before the agency model launch, in March 2010, there was not a single fiction title by an indie author along the top 50 bestselling titles in the Kindle Store.

This week, indie fiction authors have 18 of the top 50 spots. Those are 18 of the top 50 bestselling ebook spots in the land, worth well over a million copies sold during the month of February, and the agency model publishers might just as well have said “Here, come and take these, we don’t need them.”

Kindle Version 3.1: Now Here’s a Kindle Update That Kindle Customers Have Been Waiting For! Real Page Numbers, and More!

Amazon announced today that it is rolling out a new update for the latest generation Kindle 3G and wi-fi models, and the update includes a new and long-awaited feature that millions of Kindle owners will notice right away: real page numbers! (There are some other cool features as well; more about them below).
As you can see from the screenshot at left from my Kindle copy of The Hunger Games (the book that my 12-year-old son Danny and I are currently reading together), you can check the real page number for any of tens of thousands of Kindle books just by pressing the Menu button while you are reading.
But I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself already. This software update has not yet been rolled out wirelessly to all latest-generation Kindles. That will happen at some unspecified point in the future. But if you would like to update your own Kindle manually with the new software directly from the Amazon Kindle website, it’s a snap and it’s entirely okay with Amazon.
Here are the steps — and the other features — directly from Amazon’s support page for the new Kindle software update:

Kindle Version 3.1 Overview

We’re excited to announce that a new, free software update is available for Kindle (Latest Generation). It’s free and easy to download. Some of the features included in this update are:
  • Public Notes — This feature lets Kindle users choose to make their book notes and highlights available for others to see. Any Kindle user — including authors, their fans, book reviewers, professors and passionate readers everywhere — can opt-in to share their thoughts on book passages and ideas with friends, family members, colleagues, and the greater Kindle community of people who love to read. This is a new way for readers to share their excitement and knowledge about books and get more from the books they read. To review and turn on Public Notes in your own books, view the Public Notes of people you follow, track your reading activities, see Popular Highlights and your annotations, and view your full library of books, go to https://kindle.amazon.com. Learn more.
  • Real Page Numbers — Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. We’ve already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle Store that have matching print editions and thousands more of the most popular books. Page numbers will also be available on our free “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” Kindle apps in the coming months. If a Kindle book includes page numbers, press the Menu key in an open Kindle book to display page numbers. Learn more.
  • Before You Go … — When you reach the end of the book, you can immediately rate the book, share a message about the book with your social network, get personalized recommendations for what to read next, and see more books by the same author. Learn more.
  • New Newspaper and Magazine Layout — We’re introducing a new and improved layout for newspapers and magazines. This new layout gives you a quick snapshot of the news and helps you decide what you want to read first. Learn more.

Download the Early Preview Release — Version 3.1

Customers can download the Early Preview Release of this update below. All latest generation Kindle and Kindle 3G customers will receive this software update automatically via Wi-Fi once it becomes available. We will update this page when we complete the Early Preview and begin to automatically deliver the update.
Here’s how to download the Early Preview Release of Kindle software update version 3.1 and transfer it to your Kindle via USB:
  1. Determine your software version: From Home, select Menu, then Settings. On the Settings screen you will see the Kindle version at the bottom of the screen. If you see “Version Kindle 3.0.3” or earlier (3.0.3, 3.0.2, 3.0.1, or 3.0), please proceed with the steps below to update your Kindle to the latest software.

    version

  2. Download your software: Click on the appropriate link below to download the software update file directly to your computer:

  3. Kindle Wi-Fi: Download 3.1 (Early Preview Release) Your serial number will start with “B008”  

    Kindle 3G (Free 3G + Wi-Fi) – U.S. and Canadian Customers*: Download 3.1 (Early Preview Release) Your serial number will start with “B006”   
    Kindle 3G (Free 3G + Wi-Fi) – European Customers*: Download 3.1 (Early Preview Release) Your serial number will start with “B00A” 


    Your Kindle serial number is visible at the bottom of the Settings Screen. From Home, select Menu, then Settings. *We automatically ship your Kindle with the best built-in wireless card based on the shipping country you select during checkout. If your country is not listed above, please check your serial number to determine which download to use.

     

  1. Transfer software to your Kindle: Turn your Kindle on and connect it to your computer using the USB cable. Drag and drop the new update file from your computer to the root Kindle drive. (The drive contains a number of folders – such as “audible,” “documents,” and “music” – and is typically displayed as a “device” icon).
  2. Monitor file transfer and disconnect: Check your file transfer progress to ensure file transfer to your Kindle is complete before disconnecting. After the file has transferred successfully, eject the Kindle to safely disconnect Kindle from your computer. Disconnect the USB cable from your Kindle and your computer.
  3. Start the software update: Go to the Home screen, press the Menu key, and select “Settings.” Press the Menu key again, and then select “Update Your Kindle.” (This option will be grayed out if the most recent update has already been installed or if the file transfer was not successful.) Select “Ok” when prompted if you want to perform an update. Your Kindle will restart twice during the update. After the first restart, you will see “Your Kindle is Updating”.
  4. Once the update is complete: Your Kindle will automatically restart a second time. When you go to the Settings page, you should notice Version: Kindle 3.1 at the bottom of the screen. Once you see this, you know your update is complete.
We welcome your feedback about this Early Preview Release of software version 3.1. Please send us an e-mail.