Michael's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘kindle’

It’s a lazy Sunday morning, Kerry is reading a book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She likes it, tells me briefly about it and gets back to it. She is a focussed reader and I realize that she’ll be offline for a while, considering this is the first in a series of three.

I decide to read it as well, and check IBooks and the IPad Kindle app. IBooks does not have a lot of content in Australia. Amazon’s store wants me to register my Kindle before allowing me to download any ebooks. I don’t have a Kindle, I can’t find out quickly how to register my iPhone or iPad, so I move on to Kobo. Credit card registration and 30 seconds later the book is on my IPad, ready to read. I love instant gratification.

Cost is less than half of the paper edition, $10 vs $25. This is the same for most bestsellers and will certainly have an effect on the printed volumes.

The Kobo reader app is simple: adjust font size, screen brightness and there you are, ready to flip through pages. If you like, you can change the page transitions, page curl for the traditionalist, fade for the presentation fan. Pages turn instantly, no delay as on some of the e-ink readers.

The Kindle app has a couple of additional features: There are annotations and explanations in footnotes. You can also see which passages of a book others found remarkable, as they are highlighted and when you tap them, the app tells you how many other readers highlighted the word, sentence or paragraph. There is no further explanation or discussion, but it is a basis for forums and other interactivity.

The IPad is a little heavier than a paperback and that makes it difficult to read while trying to hold it with one hand, for example standing in a train. But lying on a lounge, the IPad rests on my chest and holding it is no problem. I have chosen fairly big type and I prefer to keep it in portrait, so that I don’t have to flip pages all the time. Being able to read without glasses is one of the main advantages of e-readers for vain people like myself.
Backlit pages mean you don’t need any additional light, it makes you location independent and is obviously very handy at night. The iPad does emit a lot of light, but it is surely less disturbing than an extra light in the bedroom.
Bookmarks let you find the spot you left off immediately and I never have a problem finding where I left off. The Kobo reader does not have a progress bar and does not show you where you are in the book. I notice during those short reading breaks when you look at he book instead of reading the type and contemplate what you have taken in and what could happen next. Kobo reader gives you a page count within the chapter, so you know you are on page 11 of 26 in chapter 15, but that may not be relevant to overall progress. The Kindle reader gives you a percentage at the bottom of the page, 12% read of the book.
Surveys claim that readers are faster when reading off paper, but I can’t confirm that. Once you have gotten used to the differences, the medium doesn’t really matter that much.
In fact, I finished first, compared to my control group, and now I can put the book away - though I haven’t quite worked out how to do that. One thing I definitely can’t do, is give the paper book to someone else, “you have to read this…”.

The IPad is a cool reading tool, it requires changing a few habits, but the advantages compared to printed books show very quickly. The biggest of them will be the price of the book, printed matter cannot compete with books at half their price. Other benefits are instant availability or books and the adjustability of the display. However, it is not for every situation: in bright sunlight it is useless; reading does use battery power which needs to be managed and a $1000 gadget is not to be left on the beach when going for a swim.

Anyway, time to download the next book in the series.

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.

Recent news about print and publishing included the (not so) news that print volumes are declining, Newspapers are vanishing, magazines are getting thinner or disappear, advertising revenues are suffering in a recession and are shifting online (and could you blame them? Measurable returns, pay for results, easier, cheaper and quicker production).

The future of paper books is not looking any more promising as E-Readers gain momentum and are fast becoming mainstream gadgets and then tools, even Opra’s Life has been changed by an ebook reader?

Books are not read anymore anyway, says Steve Jobs in a NYT interview,

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Espresso book machines are installed in bookshops to print books on demand and printers argue that they won’t replace whole digital print departments. Yet.

E-paper and e-ink are driving a whole range of applications, the Esquire cover was only a first stab, showing that the technology is mainstream ready.

Digital Natives are the ones to watch, because they grow up (not) using print without a long education through which print was so dominant, will they treat print as a niche product, a luxury item, books and magazines as not useful but pretty?

It’s obvious: Print is suffering, if not dead already. Other – formerly known as new – media have proven themselves and print is just not a preferred medium of communication any more. The US elections showed the niche use of print, the elections were won online, but everybody wanted a copy of the newspaper front page with the historic election result, several papers reprinted that edition.

Further volumes of offset print will change to print on demand, for manuals, books and even magazines. Returns and obsolescense are expensive, environmentally unsound and not sustainable in the longer run.

Print is not for fast, efficient information distribution, it cannot compete with online on efficiencies and soon the people at the receiving end will be satisfied with online  as opposed to print, if not happier, because it makes it so much easier for them to re-purpose.

Print is good for archival of special information. Coffee tables need books. However, if you think how many photos will often be viewed but never printed.

If you’re in print, now should be the time to re-think. Print will obviously not vanish that quickly - think CD manufacturers - but it willl change. It is important to question your perception of print’s relevance, always remembering that younger people may not inherit that attachment to printed newspapers and books that you may have.

So learning from the famous Canadian philosopher Wayne Gretzky, we’re thinking not where it is, but rather where the book will be.