Michael's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘ebook’

One day after the launch of the IPad, Macmillan – one of the major book publishers in the US – announced to Amazon that they would not agree with the Amazon pricing of their content anymore. The following weekend a showdown happened that eventually concluded with Amazon giving in and changing their pricing model. This was the first public locking of horns about ebook pricing and may be symptomatic of future discussions between publishers and digital distributors.

Amazon wanted to sell books for their Kindle ebook reader at 9.95, Macmillan said they want to determine the pricing of books themselves, not undercut their hardcover editions by that much and sell at least some of them at a higher price (14.95), just like they have always done with distributors/booksellers of paper titles. Macmillan stated that they would not allow Amazon to sell their books. This was communicated by their CEO John Sargent via a paid ad in an online newsletter on Saturday.

Amazon promptly withdrew all Macmillan titles – e- and paper books – from their online store (which had the effect that Macmillan titles shot to the top of the other online retailers, like Barns & Noble).

Eventually, Amazon gave in, allowed Macmillan to set their own pricing and re-instated all titles.

In the meantime, other publishers, like the french Hachette Group, have joined Macmillan. Harper Collins have also expressed their dissatisfaction with Amazon’s pricing.

Amazon’s Kindle Team posts a letter to their customers citing a mission for inexpensive ebooks.

So this was to a big part prompted by the introduction of the IPad by Apple, who will open an ibook store in competition to Amazon, so far the dominant ebook distributor.

The Apple IBook store will work according to the “agency model”, in which publishers determine pricing of their titles, proceeds are split 70/30 between publisher and Apple. Amazon, on the other hand, operates on a low cost model, buying books at a big wholesaler’s discount (70%) from the publishers and selling them at bargain pricing.

So the result is that ebook prices are going up. In the short term. In the long term there will be competition, and many more of these battles will be fought. No publisher will price themselves out of a competitive market, and if titles are available on a variety of platforms, from a variety of distributors, this can only be a good thing in the long run.

2010 will be an exciting year in book publishing and distribution. Old business and pricing models will have to be questioned and revised, and even traditional media producers must re-think, ideally before technological advances, market changes and consumer behaviour force them to.

The second wave of ebook readers like the Iliad or the Kindle shows that there is life in the idea of reading from a screen (TechCrunch has some numbers).

However, while these devices are much improved, friendlier on the eye, net-connected (Kindle) for immediate downloads they are still far from perfect (not only in that I don’t have one). Some can not play sounds, some cannot display videos, some need to be connected to computers to update their contents and some are just hard to use. Is it really the best approach to mimmick the interface of printed books? I think that might mean imposing a limitation that does not really have that many benefits.
A logical choice for an ebook reader would have to be the iPhone. Always connected, millions sold, great screen, multi-media capable, etc.

EReader is an ebook reader application, available for free at the app store. EReader lets you adjust font sizes, animation when flipping pages and screen brightness. The reader software is available for Iphone and IPod Touch, WindowsMobile devices, Palms, Symbian driven phones as well as PCs or Macs. EReader publishes content at their website, tagged as the world’s largest ebook site. EReader is powered by Fictionwise, choice is not enormous, but there are non fiction best sellers like “Tipping Point”.

Another option to read on the IPhone is Instapaper. This application lets you tag web pages while browsing on the computer, these tagged pages are then downloaded to the phone and can be read later.  This is a bit like bookmarking, but better, because you do not have to connect to the internet to read later. It allows you to display formatted as a web page or as text only, which is often much easier to read.

Stanza is another free application that makes it easy to read on the IPhone. It’s IPhone application is very flexible when it comes to adjusting text size, brightness, etc. The PC or Mac based application allows the conversion of almost any file into an IPhone readable format. It also converts into other formats like pdf, or for the Amazon Kindle, for other phones (mobi) or ebook readers.

Stanza is probably the most popular e-reader application on the IPhone, which prompted Amazon to buy it in spring 2009.

Another reading application is Classics. Classics starts with your bookshelf, where your books are stored. You can add books, subtract books or even re-arrange them on the shelf.
This adminttedly beautiful interface is continued to the pages, which are off-white and the page annimation, the closest to a paper book page I have seen. Even the mark, which it places automatically at the page you stop reading, looks like a real old fashioned bookmark.

However, while this is app is sticking very close to the presentation of a paper book, this also means that it does not (yet) take advantage of welcome e-reader features, such as adjustable font size. The view of the text is not customisable, the text does not even rotate as the phone is turned.

Classics definitely has a great interface, but for the actual reading of books it will only please those, who want to be as close as possible to the paper book experience. Classic costs 3.99 Australian dollars and comes with 12 public domain titles.

Stanza on the other hand is a versatile application that makes it easy to convert any text into an e-book. It takes advantages of the e-reader capabilities and allows for customisation of the reading experience.

Stanza is an interface to books, magazines and news and if Lexcycle are able to convince publishers to let them distribute current titles, it may be the application that helps the IPhone compete with devices like the Kindle as a reading device.

Applications like these make it easier to read on the IPhone, but the real breakthrough for reading on the IPhone could come when applications and content take advantage of its multi media capabilities, ie. when I can read, listen and watch the story on the phone (The Kindle already provides links to Wikipedia, however without the option of colour pictures or videos).