It Isn't Just Me

Somebody with a cold weather Kindle casualty clearly doing the Google thing, as this comment was just added to my post from two years ago...

I can sympathize with you on this topic. I left my 12 day old Kindle in the pocket of my car door for a few hours while the temperatures here were between 5 and 23. I thought about it at the end of the day and brought it inside. The next day when I turned it on, I had a screen similar to what you describe - top 2/3rds is wallpaper and the bottom 3rd is barcode-like. Amazon is being kind to replace it, but considering that I haven't even had this one 2 weeks, it shouldn't be having this problem.
By LDZPLN1 on Death of a Kindle on 12/7/10

...which makes me wonder again on whether or not to look into a class action suit that might force Amazon and other marketers of eInk devices to be more upfront about their limitations. In a day and age when everything we buy comes buried with warnings on things that are so very obvious, why don't these warn against the rather not so obvious?

quick newsy notes

The Kindle will soon be available in Best Buy.

The Wall Street Journal is said to be starting up a book section for its Saturday weekend edition.

The NY Times had actual science fiction novel reviews in the paper a Friday back and may do this on a regular basis. The column is from actual sf writer Jeff VanderMeer, and this is the seriousestish coverage of the field from the Times in years.

The Kobo reader is rolling out a desktop computer app.

Not doing the usual linkage because I am still on the road and these filtered in from different places.

news of the day

Borders announced it's earnings, or more exactly the size of its loss for the most recent quarter. Same store sales dropped 7%, not good, but not as steep as other recent reports, but would have been worse if not for an uptick in cafe sales.  Web site sales increased by big percentage but from small base.  They are closing a store in San Francisco near the Giants' ballpark, and are happy to have around a half dozen other leases for underperforming stores like this, DC store I blogged about a couple weeks ago etc. I haven't visited this SF store, may try on my layover heading back from WorldCon. And good or bad, Borders will open Build a Bear workshops in some of their stores. There is now also a two-tier Borders Rewards program, a paid program like the Barnes & Noble program which will offer more discounts, free shipping etc.  while also continuing the current free program.

In other store closing news, Barnes & Noble is closing its large flagship store opposite Lincoln Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side.  The store's original fifteen year lease is expiring, and rumors are the asking rent was at least doubling and maybe tripling. This is the 4th Manhattan BN to close in the face of larger rent in recent years.

On the eReader front, Samsung is introducing a reader into the UK market that will be sold via WH Smiths, which runs many travel stores that tend to be small and some much larger stores on malls and main streets, or "high street" in the local parlance.   Amazon is supposedly making an arrangement with Staples to start selling the Kindle.     

business quick takes

As I type this I'm a few hours away from boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia for WorldCon with some travel Down Under following.  I may not be able to do all the cross-linking and such I try and do usually because the Blogger site I post in is a little more cumbersome to use on an iPad. This post an example of that.  But I will try and do some posting.  

A few business things to mention before I go...

Borders is going live with their AreaE sites this week, and we've been watching them go from big red tables to more fitted out but I'll be away for the official launch. Not impressed. At some stores these big red tables are replacing and thus doubling as the information desk, so customers trying to test a Sony or Kobo will compete for attention. Can't wait to see how that works on 21 December. And even where the table is dedicated AreaE most of the table space is taken up with computer stations, not eReader display space. The center of the table will have room for a few display units of eReaders surrounding a riser with info posters like "download our app.". Nothing like what Barnes and Noble is doing with their Nook desks. I thought they had an intriguing approach of how to contend in the eReader space in spite of being late to the party, but the way AreaE is looking so half-assed it's like they think the war is lost and are fighting for appearance's sake and that alone. 

Andrew Wylie, a major literary agent who recently started his own ebook company, has settled his dispute with Random House over rights, rumor has it ceding the rights battle but getting a higher escalating royalty rate.  Well, those royalty rates have to start going up if agents and authors are to continue to do as much business with publishers, we'll see how many other circumstances Random may need to do similarly.  I spoke in more detail on these questions in a guest post I did for the Clarion blog, which I linked to in an August 17 post.

Barnes and Noble is in the middle of a proxy fight with an investor group having proposed an alternate slate of directors.  Their last earnings report didn't thrill, same store sales down a bit and profit taking a hit from digital initiatives. 

The Kindle 3 has gotten rave reviews from David Pogue in the NY Times and Walter Mossberg in the Wall St. Journal, both major people in technology reviewing. I am not a fan of E-Ink based devices like the Kindle vs iPad multitaskers, but no denying that the reviewer buzz for Kindle 3 is there.     

Quick Link

You can go here to find a guest post I've done for the Clarion blog, wherein I discuss the quickening pace of the e-book revolution and the roles of publishers and agents in the current age. Lots of other interesting stuff to be found on the Clarion blog, so if you go and visit, stay a while!

iPad 2

Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective.

Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to the iPad, which wad done quickly and painlessly so I have that option. Perfect, no. Major issue, no.

Brightness: Inverse problem of eReaders. Great in the dark, not so much in bright. But I have read large chunks during the day, so pmetimes using te case to shade the screen a little bit and just lime I might increase font size on my Kindle in twilight to extend how ,ong I can read with it I can raise the font size in daylight on the iPad. Amazon is right to make a selling point that the Kindle really does thrive in sunlight but again this is something we can work with.

me and my iPad

I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening.

I am quite happy with it so far.

First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza, which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, and I've read another long novel in Stanza. Both are fully customizable reading environments that allow me flexibility on my font, my font size, and other important elements of the reading experience. I like the page-turning on Stanza because it's actual page-turning and now scrolling down in the document. I like that Pages can import a file direct from my e-mail while Stanza requires multiple intermediate steps on a computer sharing the same wireless network. Pages offers better support for the iPad OS cut-and-paste. In both instances, it takes only a few seconds to go from the program I'm reading in to the native Notes program on the iPad to take notes for a client. Those seconds can add up if I'm taking a lot of notes, but once upon a time I'd have to put down a manuscript, grab my note sheet, grab my pen, it's not like that was instantaneous either. And there's still the ability to then e-mail the notes directly from within the note right to the client who's supposed to be getting. Which I could do with the Touch, not with any eReader. It's safe to say that manuscript reading is hands-down better on the iPad than anything else I've ever used, including paper manuscripts, though it's not so much better as to be a complete game-changer over some of the eReaders and the like.

Haven't used the iBook store for an actual purchased book. The interface for the store has rightly been faulted for lacking a lot of the browsing tools that Amazon has. You either find something that's being marketed to you via the bestseller lists or something, or you'll buy exactly what you went to the store wanting to buy. You won't encounter a lot via serendipity. But looking at some sample chapters of Mistborn or the Winnie the Pooh that came with, the reading experience when you do get a book is about as good as you can ask for. I haven't sampled all of the different device-related apps, but I can't see much for them to improve upon other than for allowing you to access your device-specific books on this device.

Second, newspapers. I've been desperate for a second read to the NY Times since the other local papers, Newsday especially, went ever further south in the mid-00s. When I had the Kindle, I liked the idea of having a wireless subscription to the Washington Post, but the miserableness of the reading experience was one of the factors that ultimately allowed me to give up the Kindle without much angst. Then I went to reading it on the web site and buying hard copy when I was in Manhattan. More recently the Post introduced an iPhone app that offered an abridged selection of full articles (like, all the op ed pieces but none of the editorials) in a buggy but attractive and intuitive manner. Now, with the iPad, I'm able to take full advantage of a replica subscription powered by NewspaperDirect. This costs me $100 per year after a seven-day trial and is also available on monthly and quarterly subscriptions, and it is wonderful. I'm given a reduced image replica page of the actual newspaper to look at. I can click on that page and read it blown-up with all the ability to pan and scan and pinch and un-pinch with my fingers. Below the reduced image there's a list of articles on that page, so I can click a particular article if I don't want to peruse the entire page. There's also an ability to click the article in the replica page. I can scroll through the pages. I can scroll through the articles. I can click to a table of contents. I can click to a 30-day archive. I can click to share. As with reading manuscripts, the iPad is offering me the best way to consume content that I've ever had -- or maybe for newspapers tied with the best because I do still find reading actual newspapers to be pleasant.

There are a few faults with the replica subscription. If you blow up the page, you have to go back to the page with the reduced image to hit the button to go to the next page. It would save a lot of time if I could go from page to page within the full page image. If you read an article in the sports section that was given a shout-out on the front page, the article is "married" to the front page image, and you then have to to back to go forward because when you click that article you're taken back to the front. Same thing if there's an article that's given a shout-out on the front page of a section. Yes, you get used to this, but it takes some getting used to and some attention to not think you're going from page C1 to C2 and find that you've actually gone from A1 to A2. And because the touch screen isn't perfectly responsive, you'll blow up to the full replica page, try and scroll down or across, and find out your movement has registered as a tap instead of a scroll. Which then brings you back to the reduced page image, and then you have to tap back. That is a minor annoyance and time sink. On the other hand, have you even been outdoors reading a newspaper on a windy day and you try to turn the pages? Wrangle the pages, more like. While there are negatives to this experience, in its entirety it's as close to holding a dead tree as I've ever gotten.

And of course, I can also go the Post website on my iPad, or to the mobile version of the Post website, or use the Post app, though it hasn't been updated for the iPad and is thus one of those that you can fuzzily expand to a larger version of the iPhone version. As with reading books, I can use the iPad to read my newspaper in a number of different ways.

When people belittle the iPad for being a bigger version of the iPhone, they totally don't get it. Yes, all of the core built-in system features like Mail, Safari, the Address Book, looking at photos, using Google Maps,II' all of these are now bigger. But it's a lot more than just that they're bigger. Its vastly easier to check e-mail on the iPad screen than on the iPhone/Touch screen. You can look at actual web sites on the iPad instead of the mobile versions of same. You can do nifty things for looking at photos like the "origami" slideshow that just wouldn't work on the smaller screen. Pretty much anything I want to do on the iPad in terms of those core functions, I can do not just in bigger ways but in a myriad of better ways. In some instances, though, bigger isn't better. Good photos look sweet on the iPad, bad photos look worse, so I'll have to maintain separate photo albums in some instances to sync with different devices.

I've used the iPad for entirely trivial things. Numbers is a powerful spreadsheet app, I used it to make scorepads for Scrabble and for Hearts, now if we play a heated family game of Hearts, it can be e-mailed to the rest of the family just like that and clutter their inboxes.

There are so many things that I can do with the iPad that I kind of feel like it's a sports car being driven around Manhattan on rush hour. Until I really app it up...

As I get more and more of these gadgets, certain things I've been doing one way I now need to start doing another. This morning I spent some time tidying up my Address Book, and now I need to add to it substantially. It used to be that it was just as quick to have client contact info in a word-processing file which could be searched just as quickly as any file, now I need to really start using things like the Address Book/Contacts.

As Apple is in the habit of doing, the iPad doesn't work with OS 10.4. It's actually more compatible with older versions of Windows machines than it is with Apple machines. I've gotten a new Mac for my apartment, but until I get a new Mac for my office or upgrade its OS, there are some things that I have to sync with the iPod Touch and then sync at home to sync with the iPad.

The battery life of the iPad is excellent, but unfortunately the recharge time is slow slow slow. It can take an hour, maybe a little more than that, for me to recharge my iPod Touch in an outlet, it can take me three or hour hours to recharge the iPad.

Would I recommend the iPad? In an instant.

blatant linkage

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin. We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November.

He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has actually sold a shitload of Kindles and I do see them all over the place. So Amazon might be coy on giving hard sales #s as a matter of policy or of habit, the iPad may be selling on a much quicker pace than the Kindle when it launched at the end of 2007, but they've still sold a lot of these suckers, they've sold a ton of books for people to read on these suckers, and Randall and I might be entirely correct that this isn't what people will be reading on in 20 years but certainly near term the Kindle is an important part of our lives. I'd have come across this article when I read the hard copy of the Sunday times, but I first saw courtesy of a tweet from Tobias Buckell, who is settling back from Gencon.

The retail front

So let's see what's happening this week in the world of e-books and retailing.

Borders officially launched its e-book store today and has new low prices on the Sony Reader in their e-reader department, which is also charging forward and looking toward the opening of in-store AreaE sections in stores next month where people can play with the Sony, Kobo and Alutek devices, promises of more to come. Their goal, expressed in this news release, is to gain a 17% market share in e-books.

And now here's an article from Publishers Weekly, reporting on a Barnes & Noble investor conference presentation. An article in the print edition of PW this week further elaborates, saying B&N claims a 20% share of the e-book market currently compared to a 17% share of print books, that they now sell 80% of their Nooks in retail stores vs. internet, and that currently print retail accounts for 90% of book sales but will drop to under 70% by 2014. Even though they see brick and mortar sales diminishing, the current economic situation is allowing them to renew leases at lower rents, so they don't expect to close more than 35ish stores over the next few years.

They also think e-books will be great, opening up sales of more books to more people just like mass market paperbacks did 50 and 60 years ago. I'd like to think they're correct, but as I discussed a bit back B&N is very optimistic about a lot of things right now because management is trying to preserve itself against a corporate raider.

And the other bit of news from Publishers Weekly is that Books a Million has quietly started its e-book store.

Well, it's all very exciting and interesting to watch.

And in closing here is a review of the Kobo from the wonderful Jessica Strider, who helps make World's Biggest Bookstore a must on any trip to Toronto, and made me very jealous with her recent vacation reports.

The Kindle is on Target

& today's eReader news, Amazon and Target have announced that Target will become the first brick-and-mortar retail outlet to be selling the Kindle. So Best Buy can get your Nookie and your Sony going, Target will have the Kindle, Borders will have a huge selection of the eReaders nobody else has heard of.

And I'll be very eager to hear what SciFi Fan Letter thinks of her new Kobo...

& more e-readers

Borders announced that it will be offering something called the Libre eBook Reader Pro as part of its "Area E" section come August. This comes from Aluratek, a company not heretofore known to me. So if Borders continues to sell the Sony, along with their major partnership with Kobo, and now the Libre, that's three eBook readers, and Borders is promising in their press release to be offering up to ten devices by the end of the year. And the Libre has the cheapest offering price yet of $119.

I'm beginning to like this approach. If you're too late, and Borders is too late by far to offer its own branded device, just like they were way too late with their own e-commerce site and way too late updating their IT and supply chain, this is probably the best way to go. While everyone else offers their own device, Borders is the place where you actually get to choose your poison. The best thing might be if Borders would come to an agreement with Apple to sell the iPad. It's not like Apple doesn't sell its products through third party channels, including iPods aplenty at Costco and a selection of things at Best Buy, why not Borders? I don't really think there's any chance of that happening, but that would kind of cover all choices to all people, instead offering whatever color of e-reader you want so long as it's another gray-on-gray E-Ink screen.

Here, Borders will be offering a clear choice to customers and differentiating itself in the market. The only question is whether it's kind of like having the other guy offering the Nestle cookie dough and the Pillsbury cookie dough and then you're offering six brands of cookie dough that nobody's ever heard of, wants to hear of, thinks they need to hear of.