Ebooks

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

Inside Look at RAND's $9.95 Ebook Pricing Strategy

John Warren
June 9, 2009 | | Comments (3) | Listen Speech Icon

Recently, the RAND Corporation announced that it has revised the suggested retail pricing on all RAND ebooks to $9.95 each. RAND ebooks are available through a wide variety of wholesale and retail partners.

The press release provided some explanation for the decision, also discussed in Publishers Weekly. I have been asked by Tools of Change to provide some additional insight into our ebook pricing strategy.

There were several things that went into our thinking on, as one of my colleagues appropriately called it, this "new math." Some of these factors will generally not apply to other publishers, though I do believe some factors should, and eventually will, affect other publishers' pricing strategies as well.

  • First of all, and this is important, RAND is not a traditional publisher. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. RAND research, which spans a broad base of subjects and is funded through hundreds of resources, is dedicated to serving the public interest. RAND's focus is on conducting objective, high-quality research, and every publication endures a rigorous review processes. These exacting standards are the foundation of RAND's impeccable reputation throughout the world. No consideration is made on whether a particular topic or book might be a good title for sales -- the emphasis is on quality of the research. In addition, RAND's revenue comes primarily from its research and philanthropic support, not from the sales of books and ebooks.
  • Going along with the first point, a crucial component of RAND's mission is operating in the public interest. This was written into the our charter, in 1948: "To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." This is one of the reasons why we post all of our publicly available books and reports online for free PDF download; we had ~4.3 million PDF downloads from our site last year. Dissemination is more important than sales. (I do believe there is a compelling argument, supported by many, that free electronic dissemination helps drive sales, instead of cannibalizing sales.) We have posted all new titles since 1998 on our Web site, and sales of book sales have still increased during that period.
  • Book sales help support the marketing and publishing program, but the main consideration, as a nonprofit, is to break even, not recoup a huge profit. Book sales need to recoup the costs of printing, distribution, marketing, etc., and with ebooks, conversion costs.
  • Previously, we had been pricing ebooks at the price of the printed book, which in our case is nearly always paperback; we publish few hardcovers. This seems to be the most common model for publishers, price the ebook at the print price. RAND prints nearly everything print on demand (POD), and sells the majority of our print titles through our distributor, NBN, so the price of the print book factors in POD and distribution costs. POD cost rises when the book is longer in length and/or has color charts or graphs. Thus one book may be priced at $44 because of color charts, another may be $25 because it is shorter in length and entirely black and white. These factors have nothing to do with an ebook, however. Ebooks are agnostic as to length (except as the length may affect the costs of editing) and color charts and graphs have no bearing compared to black and white in terms of ebook costs.
  • We have no manufacturing, distribution, or warehouse costs with ebooks, nor do we have to deal with returns, so the back end is much cleaner.
  • I believe firmly that customers have an expectation, which is only likely to grow, that ebooks should cost less than printed books. I believe this is being reinforced, but not driven by, Amazon's decision to make many Kindle ebooks $9.95, even when they must pay the publisher more. I don't believe they pulled that number out of thin air, though that is possible. At $9.95, RAND hopes to make up in volume what it may lose in profits from a higher price on each ebook.
  • Library funding is tight. Increasingly, libraries want to buy ebooks on demand, when a patron asks for it, not before. Jobbers and wholesalers are now entering into relationships with ebook distributors to aggregate ebook purchases, and the library market is a key market for us to reach. Libraries may balk at $35 for a printed book, or lack the shelf space to store it, but they can afford and store a $9.95 ebook.
  • Since we post PDFs for free download, two reasons we are able to sell ebooks on other sites such as Amazon.com, Books 24x7, EBL/ebooks.com, ebrary, Ingram Digital/ MyiLibrary, netLibrary and Questia, and soon Sony and Overdrive, is from a convenience standpoint (customer has a particular device and wants it seamlessly integrated, or a library subscribes to an ebook service and makes all titles available to their patrons) and/or ignorance (the customer may not be aware that we post PDFs for free). I don't want to bank on customer ignorance, but the convenience factor can hold up over time.

These are the main factors influencing our decision making on this new ebook strategy. It will be interesting to see if others follow.

John Warren is marketing director, publications, at the RAND Corporation. He contributes to the Publishing Frontier blog. He was recently selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper, "Innovation and the Future of ebooks," which is available for free download on the RAND Web site.

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009 | | Comments (5) | Listen Speech Icon

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times:

Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We don't believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go," he said.

He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover -- typically around $13 or $14.

In addition -- and this is pure conjecture on my part -- Google's push into HTML 5 is a potential shot across the bow of e-reader manufacturers. Assuming it's widely implemented, HTML 5 will further blur the line between standalone software and Web browsers/cloud-based content. Toss in Google's Chrome browser and the Gears plugin and you can see how the dots (might) connect.

According to the Times, Google intends to launch its ebook project in 2009. This effort is separate from the pending Book Search agreement.

Related Stories:

Undocumented Kindle "Clippings" Limit?

Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

O'Reilly author Shelley Powers is a heavy user of Kindle's "clipping" feature, and has run into an apparently undocumented clipping limit imposed by Amazon:

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Shelley also notes that the clipping limit applies to DRM-free books as well, which definitely doesn't make much sense.

Amazon's Physical vs. Digital Dissonance

Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2009 | | Comments (4) | Listen Speech Icon

In March of 2008, I wrote about the frustrating experience of trying to get this blog added to Kindle. Fourteen months later, apparently that "rather large ingestion queue" is still full, because the blog never showed up, and I never heard another peep about it. (There is now a self-publishing feature for blogs, but as with their self-publishing book feature (known as DTP), the standard terms of service you must accept to participate aren't something many commercial publishers will be willing or eager to swallow.)

As you might expect, Amazon is one of our biggest customers, and our relationship with them is an important one. They give us far more (virtual of course) "shelf space" than most retailers could possibly provide, and their lean ordering systems mean much less exposure to the risk of significant returns. But much of the efficiency and innovation that is the hallmark of their physical-goods business doesn't seem to be translating into their newer digital programs.

Cory Doctorow has a post over on boing-boing venting his own frustrations with trying to get answers from Amazon:

I love Amazon's physical-goods business. I buy everything from them, from my coffee-maker to my DVDs. I love their consumer-friendly policies, and their innovative business practices. I just wish their electronic delivery business was as good as their physical goods side.

(For the record, we're the "major publisher" Cory references -- I passed his questions along to my own contacts on the Kindle team, and despite repeated attempts haven't been able to get a response either.)

I do understand that many of these are new products and systems, and it's inevitable that there will be glitches and problems; it's often important to be willing to be "good enough" in order to move quickly. But some of these things are bordering on the absurd (like the 14-month wait for ingestion of this blog...). For example,  while we were thrilled they worked quickly to help us get The Twitter Book up for sale on Kindle, for more than two weeks (until just last Friday) the product page for the print version not only didn't show the Kindle version as available, it actually included a link saying "Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle." Sigh.

In the wake of releasing about 200 of our books onto Kindle, more than one customer complained that the Preview wasn't up to par:

@timoreilly I love how the Kindle sample of the Twitter book doesn't even get past the preface for the book. Not much of a sample.

Turns out the default preview percentage is 5% of the book, so we asked if we could dial that up to 20% (in line with the amount included in a preview of one of our books on Google Book Search). The response? Since we're the only publisher that's asked for it, it's not a high priority change they're prepared to make right now. (Note to other publishers: please let Amazon know you'd like the option to increase the preview percentage on your Kindle books.)

Amazon is a business like any other, and they're entitled to prioritize as they see fit. And I hope that all of the new vendors, sites, and services popping up (or ramping up) to sell ebooks create some urgency for Amazon to improve their own programs so they're as efficient in the digital supply chain as they are in the physical one.

Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

Andrew Savikas
May 17, 2009 | | Listen Speech Icon

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar:

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.


Ebook Piracy is Up Because Ebook Demand is Up

Andrew Savikas
May 12, 2009 | | Comments (8) | Listen Speech Icon

My email, twitter, and "real-world" information stream is abuzz today with references to a New York Times story about the increase in piracy of ebooks:

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.”

John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the “Dummies” series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies. Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books.

The reason there's an "exponential" increase in piracy of ebooks is because there's an exponential increase in demand for ebooks:

That's not a bad thing! It's an indicator of unmet demand (and in particular for non-DRM encrypted content). I know I have no interest in buying an ebook that's locked to a single vendor or device, and I'm sure many of these "pirates" feel the same. This is a good time to revisit Tim O'Reilly's seminal Piracy is Progressive Taxation, which includes the following lessons:

  1. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
  2. Piracy is progressive taxation.
  3. Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
  4. Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
  5. File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
  6. "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
  7. "There's more than one way to do it."

I'm not suggesting publishers stop sending those DMCA notices; but 3 full-time staffers? Putting those resources toward building new ways to meet that demand is a much better investment.

Coincidentally, our research report Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales is now available.


Amazon Demos Large Screen Kindle DX

Mac Slocum
May 6, 2009 | | Comments (3) | Listen Speech Icon

Amazon released the large-form Kindle DX this morning. Notable specs include:

  • The $489 DX ($130 more than Kindle 2) will be shipped this summer. It's currently available for pre-order through Amazon.com
  • The DX screen measures 9.7 inches diagonally; 3.7 inches larger than the Kindle 2. Including the frame and keyboard, the DX is 10.4 inches high x 7.2 inches wide x 0.38 inches deep.
  • The DX holds 3,500 books. Kindle 2 holds 1,500.
  • The DX has built-in PDF support. The Kindle 2 requires conversion through the Personal Document Service, which was recently switched to a $0.15 per megabyte variable fee.
  • Auto-rotation switches between portrait and landscape modes.

During this morning's demonstration, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addressed the DX's two target markets: textbooks and newspapers. Bezos announced an agreement with Pearson, Cengage and Wiley to bring textbooks to the device.

In its live-blog coverage, Engadget offered this quote from Jeff Bezos in regard to newspapers:

"We're pleased to announce that three papers have signed on with us, the NYT, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. They will offer reduced prices for long term commitments on subscriptions."

Adam Ostrow from Mashable says the "reduced prices" pertain to the cost of the Kindle DX, but I'm looking for clarification. Technically, those price reductions could apply to subscription fees. The Kindle-based New York Times subscription currently costs $13.99 per month, and the Times may knock that monthly fee down in return for a multi-year commitment. More to come ....

(Update, 5/6/09, 2pm) -- Ars Technica says a lower-cost DX will be available with newspaper subscriptions. Further details have not been announced.

Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009 | | Comments (5) | Listen Speech Icon

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.

Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:

Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Over 160 O'Reilly Books Now in Kindle Store (without DRM), More on the Way

Andrew Savikas
April 17, 2009 | | Comments (23) | Listen Speech Icon

I'm happy to announce that more than 160 O'Reilly books are now available on Kindle (both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2), and are being sold without any DRM (Digital Rights Management). Though we do offer more than 400 ebooks direct from our website, the number for sale on Kindle will be limited until Amazon updates Kindle 1 to support table rendering ("maybe this summer" is the most specific they would get). The text-to-speech feature of Kindle 2 does work with these books. A list of currently available titles is below.


screen_shot-50931

There's a lot of overlap between the kind of early-adopter crowd likely to buy a Kindle and the audience for our books. So it's no surprise that we received a lot of requests to add O'Reilly books to the Kindle store, and it's great to finally be able to get those readers the books they want. We expect to add another 100 or so titles in the coming weeks; those have needed a more detailed analysis of the table content to identify good candidates.

There were two main reasons we held our books back from sale on Kindle:

  1. Poor rendering of complex content. Kindle 1 was optimized for the simple text of mainstream trade books (think airport-bookstore fiction and non-fiction), and lacked support for properly displaying tables or computer code, two very common elements in O'Reilly books. We knew customers would be disappointed to find much of the content of our books unusable (and likely to complain to us about it, rather than to Amazon). In this case, Amazon actually agreed with us, and after they saw how those tables looked on a Kindle 1, told us they weren't comfortable selling many of our books until they've updated Kindle 1. (More details below the fold).
  2. Compulsory DRM. We strongly believe DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption adds unwelcome cost and complexity to any digital system, frustrates legitimate customers who respect copyright and want to pay for their content, and is demonstrably ineffective at preventing unauthorized copying -- much of it done by people who either (a.) wouldn't otherwise pay, or (b.) resort to piracy when there's no legitimate sales channel. Other publishers are free to make their own decisions on DRM, but Kindle's compulsory DRM was inconsistent with our views on digital distribution.

Although we've been working for some time with Amazon to resolve these issues, as a stop-gap we'd been directing Kindle owners to oreilly.com, where all of our "ebook bundles" include a Kindle-compatible .mobi version that can be uploaded or emailed to your Kindle. While the table and code issues remained, readers at least had the other, richer formats (EPUB and PDF) for reference. We've now updated all of the .mobi files for sale at oreilly.com to display properly on Kindle 2 (basically undoing many of the hacks we'd done to get something passable the first time around). If you own a Kindle and have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com, visit oreilly.com/e from the Kindle browser to download the updated .mobi files directly to your Kindle. While we will also update our ebooks with Amazon as changes are made and errors fixed, they currently have no way of updating that content for customers who already purchased it.

While the rendering in Kindle 2 still leaves a bit to be desired, we felt it was an acceptable baseline, and look forward to continuing to work with them to improve the display of technical content on Kindle. (Ironically, the Kindle 2 web browser displays complex content like tables and code quite well -- check out the Bookworm mobile version if you have a Kindle.)

Our thanks do go to Amazon for working with us on this. They're a favorite target of criticism (often right here, and often for good reason), but this is a good step and they do deserve some kudos. While we'd prefer that Amazon directly supported the open EPUB standard, this is real progress in giving readers easy access to digital books without locking them in to a single vendor.

If you want to tell Amazon to hurry up and update your Kindle 1, or to improve their rendering of technical content to match Sony Reader, Stanza, Bookworm, Calibre, and others, you can drop them a line at kindle-feedback@amazon.com.

Current Available Titles

(As of April 16, 2009)

The Tables problem

Here's some screenshots showing the table problem:

How Kindle 1 (mis)handles tables:

screen_shot-50931

The same table on Kindle 2:

screen_shot-50931

Open Publishing Distribution System -- an Open-Standards Catalog Format

Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

It's no secret we're big fans of the iPhone/iPod reading app Stanza. While the Kindle App has overtaken Stanza for the top-spot among free book apps in iTunes, Stanza offers a much better reading experience than the Kindle App (for example, by supporting standard formatting like tables and whitespace-preservation) (Update: You can use the latest version of mobigen.exe to get better whitespace-preservation (from <pre> and friends) on the Kindle.) And I'm not the only one who feels that way: "Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now." (Wired.com).

But more than the quality of the software, the major reason I'm so bullish on Stanza is their willingness to experiment. When our own Keith Fahlgren suggested they use the standard Atom format for their catalog system, they responded:

We wound up taking your advice and implemented support for Atom for Stanza's catalog format. Thanks for the suggestion! Using the Atom standard is much better than using our own custom format (although we may need to eventually extend the custom format with our own tags).

And when we proposed using Stanza to create a standalone book app (for iPhone: The Missing Manual), they were eager to dive in head first, and we both learned a lot in the process.

That Atom-based Online Catalog feature turned out to be an interesting prototype for a distributed digital discovery and ecommerce system, and it's awesome to see them willing to embrace the potential for such a system well beyond the boundaries their own product, and to join with Peter Brantley and the Internet Archive in laying the groundwork for what's being called the Open Publication Distribution System:

Users of compatible Reading Systems, in addition to being able to access content they have previously acquired or acquire via other means, are also able to access a catalog (list of online sources of content). Typically, the catalog offers a number of free titles, which may be hosted by the Reading System vendor and/or other sites, as well as the opportunity to purchase or borrow paid content from stores and libraries. Additional stores and libraries may be added by the user to their personal catalog. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. The remainder of this document will discuss each of those components in turn.

One of the reasons we've thrown our support behind the Bookworm online ebook reading system as part of O'Reilly Labs is to help support the development and testing of new standards like this one, and we're excited to contribute to this new initiative. It's also great to see Adobe support this as well, and is a nice follow on to our work with them on EPUB output for the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets.  

Readers Boycotting Kindle Titles Priced Above $9.99

Andrew Savikas
April 3, 2009 | | Comments (8) | Listen Speech Icon

Pricing is a red-hot topic among publishers when it comes to ebooks. As I said in a Q&A for Forbes.com last week, cost-driven pricing (especially when the costs in question are calculated based on printed output) is a poor approach for ebook publishers. Readers simply don't care how much it costs a publisher to produce an ebook -- they only care how much it's worth to them. (This is especially true for the iPhone, where books must compete alongside games, music, movies, and other "apps" primarily priced well below $10.)

Now a group of readers is rebelling against books priced above $9.99 in the Kindle store (using Amazon's own tagging system, ironically) and there's a very interesting explanation of the rationale over at Electronic Cottage (all emphasis from the original):

The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn't usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.
...
I joined the boycott yesterday when I went to buy the new Harlen Coben book, only to be stopped by the high price. Since then, I've added the boycott tags to books over $9.99. I'm not happy about it. I'd rather buy the latest installment of Myron Bolitar's adventures and Chris Knopf's 2008 release, "Head Wounds." In fact, I was one of those who clicked Amazon's "Tell the Publisher" button to indicate that I wanted a Kindle edition of "Head Wounds." But not at $15.40. I'll wait for the paperback. Or get back into the library habit that I abandoned for my Kindle habit. I was irresistibly tempted by the lower prices of Kindle editions, I admit it. I just counted my Kindle orders since I got the reader in December 2008.144 Kindle books. Yikes. 144 books. I had no idea. Publishers, are you paying attention?

That's a very good question.

Software Development as Collaborative Writing

Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

Following a lively backchannel email discussion, I'd planned to blog about what writers, editors, and publishers can learn from software developers (specifically their tools and techniques) but Tim beat me to it over on the Radar blog.

As I said in my email, The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.

Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

Programmers faced with annoying problems like "how do I make sure that changes I make to this text don't conflict with someone else's changes" or "how do I tell who among several writers made a particular change to some text" solved those problems long ago (Wikis are a great example of applying some of those tools and techniques to the writing process; API-based offline blogging editors are another).

And while using those tools as-is probably won't make sense for a lot of non-technical writers, those willing to at least try them out will learn a lot about what the next generation of collaborative, distributed, digital publishing tools will look like.

Pragmatic Programmers Now Doing "Ebook Bundles"

Andrew Savikas
March 26, 2009 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

It's great to see other publishers picking up on the "ebook bundle" concept and including multiple formats -- the Pragmatic Programmers are now selling a combo of EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket files for their ebooks. I especially like the way they've phrased it:

You’ve bought a license to the content, not to a particular file format, so you are free to enjoy that content on whatever device, using whatever display technology you choose.

Well said.

Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader

Mac Slocum
March 19, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale:

Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices.

In the exclusive TeleRead interview, Steve [Haber, President of Sony's Digital Reading Division] emphasized that this program is part of Sony's commitment to an open platform, as opposed to the closed platform of its major competitor (hint, hint, the name starts with an A). The ePub conversion is being done by Google itself, as noted; and Sony and Google are exploring ways to make copyrighted ePub material available.

Catalog expansion and mobile devices are propelling recent ebook/e-reader announcements. Google Book Search opened mobile access to its archive of public domain books in February, and Amazon recently made its Kindle titles available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through a free iPhone app.

Related Stories:

One-Question Interview at BookNet Canada Tech Forum

Andrew Savikas
March 19, 2009 | | Comments (1) | Listen Speech Icon

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2009 BookNet Canada Technology Forum in Toronto (motto: Even colder than you expected!), and Mark Bertils caught up with me on my way out for a quick video interview:

Two follow ups on what I said, now that I have my del.icio.us feed handy:

  • The Peter Drucker reference is from his 5 Deadly Business Sins: "Cost-driven Pricing. The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay--and thus what the competition will charge--and design to that price specification."
  • It was Mike Shatzkin (referencing Michael Cader) who made the recent point about the relative low cost of experimentation for publishers around pricing digital products: "You can't get rich or go broke whether you price the ebook 50% too high or 50% too low. Try everything. You'll never have a cheaper opportunity to experiment."

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Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific

Mac Slocum
March 16, 2009 | | Comments (1) | Listen Speech Icon

Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices:

For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures. [Link included in original post.]

(Via Joe Wikert's Twitter stream)

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Is Print a Preference or a Habit?

Andrew Savikas
March 16, 2009 | | Comments (6) | Listen Speech Icon

Over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Dale Dougherty posted on students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

[Jonathan Berger] has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

It sounds a lot like the complaints leveled against digital books, which often turn into litanies of the sensate qualities of print: touch, feel, smell, sound. I hear those comments all the time, unsurprisingly from people for whom printed books have been their primary means of reading for most of their lives. But in about 30 years, no one who's not eligible for AARP membership will remember a world without the Web. Print will always have a place, but by then I doubt it will be a primary format for many, many readers.

What do you think?

Related Stories:

O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog

Andrew Savikas
March 9, 2009 | | Comments (9) | Listen Speech Icon

Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?).

To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15 for a limited time.

If you have Stanza on your iPhone or iPod (it's free -- click here to get it), here's how to get to the O'Reilly Ebook Store. From your Stanza Library, click the Online Catalog link:

Stanza Library.PNG

From there, select "O'Reilly Ebooks" to browse by Bestsellers, New Releases, or All titles:

O'Reilly Catalog.PNG

Select the title you want to see a description:

Select Title.PNG

Book Info.PNG

Press "Add to Cart" to buy the ebook, which will take you through to the O'Reilly shopping cart to complete the transaction (you'll need to create an O'Reilly account if you don't already have one). We're working to make the purchase experience a bit more mobile friendly, but wanted to roll this out right away. There is an awkward step when you'll see what appears to be some gibberish in a confirmation dialog -- go ahead and click download:

Confirm Download.PNG

We're working with the Stanza folks to try and make that a little cleaner.

If your download is interrupted -- or if you ever want to re-download an ebook you've already purchased -- you can always return to your purchased ebooks by visiting the "My Bookshelf" link from the O'Reilly Catalog in Stanza (or by pointing your iPhone to oreilly.com/e or visiting members.oreilly.com from any web browser):

Select My Bookshelf.PNG

My Bookshelf Sign In.PNG

We'll be adding new titles, free samples, and more ways to browse, search, and sort in the coming weeks.

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

Mac Slocum
March 4, 2009 | | Comments (6) | Listen Speech Icon

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.

Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App

I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.

Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion
(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)

Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone
(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)

... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

Kindle for iPhone Review
(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)

... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.

Read more…
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