the e-book Revolution 2

I keep seeing more and more and more people with e-book readers. Sunday night on the Acela back from DC, last night on the #5 train from Grand Central to Union Square, it's gone from being a special sighting to being a regular occurence.

Barnes & Noble spends so much time touting their wondrous results and the immense huge hitted-ness of their Nook on their earnings conference call this week that it wouldn't surprise me if the executives on the call shit in their pants from the excitement of what they were saying. As is the case when Amazon shits in its pants in excitement talking about the Kindle, there are all kinds of buzz words and not a lot of specifics. When they sales sales "exploded" beyond expectations does that mean they were expecting to sell 4 and actually sold 6, or they were shooting for 82,900 and sold 126,800? Their market share on e-books on some books is now above their 18% market share of physical bookstore sales. Which e-books? Bestsellers? Ones that sell 2 copies and B&N sold one? All of this stuff needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the Nook wasn't that well reviewed, and in the call they're very happy with the reviews, but there you have it.

We just got royalty statements for a book that came out around 14 months ago. Thru a November royalty report, it sold 475 non-Kindle e-books, with the biggest formats there accounting for 194 for the Sony Reader and 183 copies for another format which it's hard to tell exactly which it is. Then there's an e-book format that sold 2,271, which we guess to be the Kindle edition, for total e-book sales approx 2250 copies. The print version trade paperback sold 31,832, which number could go up or down based on other copies shipped and returned.

This doesn't really include any Nook sales, because that was just shipping about the time this royalty statement was closing.

The E-Book Revolution

So, the iPad! While I type in one window, I'm watching the keynote speech on the Apple web site.

Though I used the Kindle for over a year, I'm not the hugest fan of it. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do before, and I loved it for that. But it didn't allow me to do many of them very well. I could read a manuscript without carrying it around but not in cold weather and take notes on the same device but not easily and the relay to the author was cumbersome. I could read the Washington Post every day without schlepping into Manhattan to buy a hard copy, but the reading experience wasn't very good. I liked the Sony Reader less, because the note-taking interface was cumbersome and the glare on the screen distracting to me. And the Nook was surprisingly bad to me for how much learning curve should have been curved.

I've never been a big laptop fan. They're portable, but not fun. When I live-blogged the Oscars last year, I had to sit at a desk instead of perch in my recliner because it's just too cumbersome to sit with a laptop in a recliner.

I have no complaints about my iPod Touch. I read manuscripts quickly, in colder weather than the Kindle. The limiting factor is whether I have to wear gloves or not outside, which is a much lower temperature than when the Kindle started to degrade. I can take notes fairly easily and send them to my clients right from the device. And it plays music. And shows off photos. And does video. And has a calculator. And when I'm traveling and curled up with it in my hotel room with wireless, I can lose hours to surfing the web just like when I'm at home.

So Apple seems to get it. You have a kind of giant iPod Touch, and Steve Jobs demonstrates it sitting in a comfly leather chair which is exactly the place that I might envision perching with it. It has a dedicated iBook reader. I can pay a fairly reasonably priced $14.95/month to AT&T to have a limited amount of wireless access, or $30/month for as much as I please. All the time, or for thoee trips when I can't hook up my Touch into the hotel wireless?

So I like the idea of the device, but time will tell how the actuality of it works.

Now, what does this mean for publishing?

Fun Times!

In either a good or a not so good kind of way.

Publishers are not fond of Amazon's control over pricing and terms of sale for the Kindle. Apple is willing to give the publisher more pricing power. This led to a dispute over the weekend with Amazon not selling titles by Macmillan USA, which includes Tor, St. Martins, Farrar Strauss, Holt and other imprints, in a dispute over the sales arrangements. And then maybe backing down and agreeing Macmillan could price its own books. I say maybe, because the seeming concession may have come with conditions we don't know about. These kinds of things happen. Not that long ago Costco pulled Coke products from their stores in a pricing dispute. Amazon UK has had some big publisher disputes. Apple is Apple, but Amazon sells a lot of physical books that are still 90% of publisher revenue. But Amazon isn't the only internet store in town. If I were Borders, I'd have done an e-mail blast right away with promo code AMZN24 to say "hey, can't buy [bestselling Macmillan title here], we'll sell it to you and give an extra 10% off your entire order."

I do think Macmillan's position in the matter (CEO letter here) is the better one, which may be why Amazon ended up seeming to cede. The world is full of variable pricing for the same thing at different times and different places, from bargain matinees vs. Saturday night at the movies, the paperback vs. the hardcover, the last-minute fare deal vs. the prepaid reservation vs. the regular rate. Just because Amazon woke up one morning and decided a bestselling e-book should cost $9.99 doesn't mean an e-book should forever cost $9.99 or less.

Also making things interesting... the Amazon iPod Kindle application will work on the iPad. I do my manuscript reading using Stanza, which is now owned by Amazon, and that will work on the iPad. Will Amazon continue to want to add value to Apple's iPad even while Apple is trying to squirrel in on Amazon's e-book business? Then again, how will the Apple Pages application work on the iPad? When I use Pages on my iMac, I can do track change and comments right in a manuscript, export to Word, and send away to a client. Will I be able to do that on an iPad? And will anyone care what Amazon does or does not do to support the iPad when they can iBook?

As I said, Fun Times. I think there's a lot of potential in the iPad, but I think the arrival of Apple as a major player in e-book retail is going to lead to a lot more shoving matches like what we've seen between Amazon and Macmillan as all of the different e-tailers and the publishers all jockey for position.

Our client Tobias Buckell is among those who've done particularly good commenting on the Amazon/Macmillan dispute.

In the midst of this, JABberwocky is starting to explore how it can best enter the e-book world. We've spoken in recent weeks with people at Amazon, BN.com and Rosetta Books and are starting to think seriously about all of this. Lots of interesting questions. Do we go with a third party vendor like Rosetta or eReads? Do we become our own eReads? Depending on that, where do the costs of cover art and scanning/converting reside? How much upside do you trade to reduce the investment in those costs? Do you go one way for some books and another way for others?

Those are just the back-end decisions. At the front-end of what we actually show to the world... Since Simon Green has the most enticing out of print backlist do we start out with a single author-based promotable program and see what happens? Or do we look for original content, short story collections perhaps, from half a dozen top authors and make that the launch? Or go with that, and the top two dozen other backlist titles? Or make our entry with 100 books or 250 all at once? Feel free to vote!

And we'll start to explore these questions just as Apple, Amazon and the other publishers jockey for position. With as many as 40 different e-book reading devices scheduled for a big unveil over the course of 2010. With different permutations of format, exclusivity, cross-compatibility, etc. etc.

Nookie Nookie

I played around some with a demonstration model of the Nook at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on Thursday and was not impressed.

E-Ink is E-Ink, so the screen look like all the others. But if the initial Kindle had a knock that it was too easy to turn the pages accidentally, I found it took too much effort to turn the pages on the Nook. And when I did turn the pages, the refresh rate was very slow, a good two to three seconds. B&N did acknowledge this problem, and they say it will be fixed with a software update in the near future. But isn't that the kind of thing you should work on before you release the product? Anyone think they decided to rush out something for the holidays?

And then there's that LED screen at the bottom that's used for navigating. It's a nice idea, on one level, because one knock certainly on the first generation Kindle was the awkwardness of the little sliding side thingie to navigate around. But I think if they were doing the second screen they should have worked very hard to make it an intuitive and natural sort of thing, and I didn't really find it to be. It has the same learning curve as the awkward navigation on other e-book readers. I often found myself pressing the wrong button or finding that the button seemed to do something different than I would have intuitively expected.

So I think I'll stick to reading on my iPod Touch with Stanza for the time being. I was disappointed, really; with all this time to learn from Amazon's experience and mistakes, I was expecting the Nook to be a much clearer step up in the e-book gadget war than it is at this moment.

That being said, the fact that you have an e-book reader that people can go around and play with in many B&Ns and look/see/touch/feel is definitely a major step forward in adaptation of the technology. Borders has had little kiosks for the Sony Reader, but their investment and the quality and accessibility of the presentation was nothing or nowhere like what B&N is doing to put the Nook into people's hands.

Death of a Kindle

So my Kindle died completely after being taken out in the cold last week.  I'm not sure the Sony Reader would be any better.  They are honest in their documentation (i.e., honest in that "buried in the PDF owner guide you get only after you've purchased it" kind of way that Amazon also is) in giving the operational temp for the PS 700 as forty-one degrees, which is more in line with when I started to see my Kindle start to misbehave, so I'm not sure their screen will do any better if it's in your briefcase while you wait ten minutes for a cab at the airport on a cold day.  I'm pasting below the letter I am mailing today to the heads of Amazon and the E Ink corporation in Cambridge that makes the electronic ink "guts" for the Kindle and Sony Reader.

The bottom line on all of this is that if you are thinking of buying one of these things you need to be aware that your outdoor use -- i.e., the whole "portable" thing -- might be limited for as much as six months of the year if you live north of the Mason Dixon line and in or east of the Sierras/Rockies etc.  And regardless of where you live, you may not be able to take your Kindle or Reader out of your house in December, January and February because even a 10-minute wait for a cab at JFK or Logan just might kill it.

Mr. Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com, Inc.

1200 12th Ave. S., #1200

Seattle, WA  98144-2734

Dear Mr. Bezos:

I am extremely disappointed with the inability of the Amazon Kindle to handle cold weather.  I feel very strongly that you need to encourage your partners at E Ink Corporation whom I am copying on this letter to develop a technology that is more robust in colder weather.  More important, I think your marketing of the Kindle needs to be much clearer in stating that the device will be impaired at temperatures below 45F, and will break down, die and become a paperweight below 25F.

I first noticed as far back as October that my Kindle started to suffer functional impairment in the low 40s.  After twenty minutes outside, the Kindle would refresh with both pages visible for a brief period of time instead of cleanly flashing from one page to the next.  Once it warmed back up indoors, functioning returned to normal.  Since my assistant has a Sony Reader, I’ve been able to compare his PRS-700 specs which are at least honest in saying that their device functions from 41-95 degrees while the Kindle documentation claims a 32 degree minimum operating temperature which I would not consider to be correct.  E Ink has to do better.  A portable reading device should be portable and usable at lower temperatures.

In any event, I found out only after I purchased my Kindle that it wasn’t like my cell phone or an iPod and that I was going to have to have more old-fashioned paper reading for almost half the year to deal with outdoor reading in normal NYC temperatures from late October to late April.  

So come November, I stopped use of my Kindle outdoors during colder days.  This was a real and unexpected limitation on my ability to use the device.

But then I found out when I had my Kindle in my backpack while on a long walk during a wintry evening that the battery became so chilled that it wouldn’t take a full charge for two days.  It was cold, but not as cold as the Kindle’s alleged storage temperature of 14 degrees.  So then I realized the hard way that I would have to keep the Kindle in the part of the backpack that was up against my back instead of in the organizer pocket that was most exposed to the cold weather.  Again, this is a serious limitation on the Kindle’s usability that I find out only after I’ve purchased the machine.

And then last Thursday I took the Kindle with me on a family trip to Hartford on the coldest day of the year.  I tried very hard to tend to the Kindle’s needs.  I didn’t read it outdoors.  I tried to keep it in the warm part of my backpack while waiting for a bus from downtown to my hotel or walking a bit to the hotel.  I believe I may have had it in a pants pocket for a 5-minute walk each way from my hotel to an old-fashioned book store when the temperature may have been near the 14 degree storage temperature.  Maybe I shouldn’t have.  I went to turn on my Kindle that night in the hotel and could tell even before  I turned it on that something was wrong.  It wasn’t dust in the pointer window on the right of the Kindle but rather the dead remnants of the pointer, and the Kindle screen was no longer usable or functioning.

Yes, it was very cold.  But you know what?  It gets cold in the United States for large parts of the year.  Here in NYC we’ve had 12 days in the past month when the low temperature has been within ten degrees plus or minus of your storage temperature.   It’s been weeks that the high temperature’s been at or below the 40 degree mark when the Kindle stops working well or the Sony Reader would say not work at all.

Another Kindle owner came up to me at the the theatre on the 11th, temps between 26 and 32 in NYC, and told me she’d left hers in the car.  What if she’d left her Kindle in the car during a show a few days later when the high temp was only 18?

What if somebody came out into the cold at LaGuardia last Thursday and had a five minute wait for a cab while their Kindle was in a pocket or carry-on?

What if somebody came out of their office in Chicago last week with a Kindle in their attache and was waiting several minutes for the El?  The average January low in Chicago of 18 is perilously close to a safe storage temperature for the Kindle.

Or was on the platform in Braintree waiting for the red line to Boston with a Kindle in their pocketbook?

Seattle is much more temperate, but even there the past week the Kindle would be off limits or impaired for use to your own employees waiting for Sound Transit at the Bellevue Transit Center to whisk them downtown because the morning temp woulds be in the low 40s. 

I’m glad that Amazon will be sending me a replacement Kindle, but I’m not much glad beyond that.  It’s common sense that you don’t use electronic devices in the rain, but it isn’t intuitive that the Kindle won’t function correctly below 45.  It’s certainly not intuitive that you take the Kindle at your own risk from your home to the office or on a five minute walk to the gym if it’s one of those cold days that we get a few of each year in New York City and much more often than that in other parts of the country -- Minot, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Detroit.

Now that I’ve had a Kindle, I don’t want to go back to being without, but I am extremely upset that I wasn’t able to make an informed decision on buying an expensive gadget that can be used on only a limited basis for as much as 6 months during the year when the temperate might dip into the low 40s or below, and might die if I put into my gym bag on a bitter cold day just to take five minutes from my apartment to the gym.

All best wishes,

JOSHUA BILMES

cc:  Russell J. Wilcox, E Ink Corporation

Compare & Contrast

So I did a little reading on the Sony Reader we got for Eddie.

With the Calibre software that Charles Stross suggested to me way back when, we are as yet experiencing no problems in putting files on to the Sony Reader for Eddie to read.  However, I'm told it prefers to eat RTF, and since most people send Word, Eddie has to convert the .doc to .rtf and then Calibre along to the Sony Reader.

With the touch screen atop of it, I am finding a lot more of a glare problem with the Sony Reader than I do with the Kindle.  Eddie doesn't seem to be bothered by this, but it bothers me a lot.

You run your finger along the touch screen either left to right or right to left to turn the pages back or forward, and then at the bottom there are two small buttons to do the same.  Reading on the Kindle, you have to teach yourself not to press down on the sides because there is too much forward/backward button.  If you don't put your Kindle to sleep while putting the case on or other things like that it will advance 68 pages without you wanting it to.  On the Reader, there maybe isn't enough forward/backward so you have to learn to hold the reader in a way that you can get your finger on to the screen, and then do the screen thing right, more left/right than up/down etc. so that it will be gracious enough to respond to your stroke and turn the page.  What happens when you finger the screen in which direction is a user setting you can change so you can decide if moving left to right with your finger or right to left turns the pages forward or backward, and this is very good for lefty/righty issues.  This ends up being a wash between the two reading devices for me.  I like the touch screen a lot, I like having forward/back buttons someplace other than just small at the bottom a lot.  Each of them requires the human being to adjust to the machine.

The page refreshing on the new Reader is distinctly faster than on the Kindle.  I didn't realize how much of a small wait there was on the Kindle until I'd read on the Reader.  

However, if I want to change the font size on the Kindle it adjusts instantly.  If I want to change on the new Reader you need to wait a while for it to reformat.  If you only read in one font size, advantage Reader, if you read in more than one font size, advantage Kindle.  I do change the font size on the Kindle a lot as I read indoors and outdoors and in different levels of ambient light. 

I hated the font on this new version of the Reader.  It was wispy, and in equivalent light settings I had to put the Reader on a larger font size so I could use it, which meant I had to turn pages more often.

The Kindle abandons the idea of pages in favor of locations.  The location of a particular paragraph is the same no matter how big or small you read it.  But if I relay the notes to an author I have to explain "this has 8400 locations, 4200 is the halfway point, etc."  The Reader does use page numbers, and it takes notes like "page 150 of 663."  What's nice is that I don't need to tell an author that this is just before the quarter mark of the manuscript.  What's not nice is that if I then change the font, the next note might be taken on "page 136 of 500" or on "page 222 of 800."  If you as an author got notes from us, which of these would you prefer?  To have to always remember to divide by 8400 if I gave that as the total # of locations, or to look closely at each note to see what page it is in reference to an ever-changing total?  I'm not sure.  I am sure that if you had a manuscript with notes from multiple readers using different font sizes that your agent could put a note on "page 150 of 300" and your editor a note on "page 200 of 400," and these would both reference the same line and yet have two very completely different page #s.  If we all read it on the Kindle, all the notes would be "location 4200" out of 8400.

I felt as if I would be more accurate in typing my notes with the Reader's touch screen, but only with a lot more effort.  i.e., I could type a note on my Kindle keypad while walking across the 59th St. Bridge (and I've done this) and I could just keep on walking at the pace I was walking and there would be typos but the note would be readable.  I probably wouldn't get more or less accurate short of hunting and pecking.  With the Reader's touchscreen keypad, if I didn't slow down the note would probably be gibberish, but if I did type very carefully I would probably make fewer errors.  It's a little easier on the Kindle to begin typing a note someplace, though I'm not hugely fond of either interface.  The Kindle appears to allow you to access more symbols for use in your notes; somewhat cumbersomely but they're there, while with the Reader you have fewer symbols more easily accessed.  

So make of all of this what you will.   Eddie was clearly much more taken with the Sony Reader than with the Kindle and seems to be enjoying it after a week of use.  I was instinctively drawn to the Kindle moreso than to the Reader.  After a practical examination of a lot of pros and cons as outlined above, I don't think either has a huge advantage and your preference might decide on how you intend to use it.  I will say that I would be very happy with a next generation Kindle.  The glare issue and weaker-looking font on the Reader are distinct minuses for me.

Film @ 11

We did it!  Eddie played around with a Sony Reader as well and said he liked it, so we got one this afternoon at the Borders at Park Ave., and I'm going to be curious to find out what he thinks of it.  I'll play around a bit with it myself, I'm sure.  Stay tuned for further updates, sometime or other.

A Game of Leapfrog

I think that my Kindle was/is better, certainly for me, than the first generation of the Sony Reader.  But I was playing around some with the new and improved Sony Reader at the Borders in Manchester, CT on Saturday night, and I think Sony has leapfrogged over the Kindle in many significant ways with their 2nd generation reader.

Instead of using buttons to move the pages back and forth, you can do that kind of iPhone touchy thing and drag across the screen to move forward or back a page.  Sweet!  The touch screen also can become a keyboard for searching for text.  Theoretically you can also bring that keyboard up to annotate text, but the fact that I wasn't intuitively able to figure out how to do that with the demo model suggests they might be able to improve upon that a tad (unless I was pressing the right buttons but the demo models don't let you do that so some 12-year-old won't look at the notes and find a pornographic treatise, which I'm thinking is a possibility?).  I worry some about the use of touchscreens, as I'm sure anyone would who's tried to use one at an ATM and found the corner with the button you need won't let itself be touched no matter what, but then again the little keyboard on my Kindle isn't exactly like new after eight months of vigorous annotating.  

The Kindle still has kind of a killer app with the whole wireless thing, while the Sony Reader requires hooking up to a computer as well as 3rd party intervention for use with Mac OSX.  And the subscription feature of the Kindle was a major plus for me as well.  I love having a Wall St. Journal and a Washington Post sent to my Kindle every morning; the Post is cheaper for a month on the Kindle than the NYC newsstand price of 3 Sundays.  And when I'm on the road I like being able to buy a full single issue of the NY Times instead of having to walk around with the National Edition in newsprint without the full NYC and Sports sections.  

So I'm not saying the Sony is a hands-down winner, because at least for me the overall functionality of the first generation Kindle still rates ahead of the Reader.  But if all you want to do is get books and read them, Amazon isn't the only player in this game right now, and we at JABberwocky may think on buying a Reader for my #2 for his manuscript reading using the 3rd party software that Charles Stross suggested in comment on my first Kindle post.  If Amazon gets too complacent about rolling out a new and improved 2nd generation Kindle, this is definitely NOT going to be a one-player game.

(All that being said with the caveat that playing around with the Sony Reader in its display at Borders may not be the same as the experience of actually using it, but even added display cuddliness is not a minor thing.)