So once upon a time, and not that long ago really, I could look at my Nielsen Bookscan numbers and know that I was really and truly getting my weekly report card. Now, it's hard to be sure if I'm even getting an incomplete.
And it's all because of those darned e-books.
With Tanya Huff's permission, let us look at her excellent series of "Valor" military sf novels.
Two years ago when Valor's Trial came out in hardcover, I could very easily look at those numbers and look at the numbers for the hardcover of The Heart of Valor from the year before, and I could see that it was good. Over the first few weeks, hardcover sales of the 2008 release were up something like 40% from the year-before book. And now I'm looking at the release of The Truth of Valor, and that's up by 25% from what The Heart of Valor did in 2007, but it's down 15% from what Valor's Trial did in its first few weeks in 2008. Down 15%!!
Panic time? Well, no...
Let's look at just the Kindle. 2008 it's a novelty item not yet into its second generation just starting to get caught up on the orders from its first several months of existence. Now, though we don't know exactly the Wiki entry for the Kindle reports a number thru the end of 2009 between 1.5 million from outsiders and 3 million from informed insiders. Shall we all agree by now that sales are almost certainly over 2 million? Amazon in its fudgy statistic kind of way has told us it now sells more Kindle books than hardcover books, which isn't exactly the same as saying that Kindle sales outpace hardcover sales on any given book.
And that's just the Kindle. There are millions of iPads sold, and I can iBook Truth of Valor for $11.99 in seconds. And then we've got the Nook and the Kobo and all kinds of other gizmos and gadgets all with apps that allow me to read to my Android from my SmartPhone while sitting on my Desktop and balancing my Laptop with my other hand with all of these devices probably wirelessly syncing to one another.
And there is no Bookscan for e-books, at least not yet. The sales for e-books are totally opaque. Even more opaque than was once the case for print books, where I can visit stores and count copies on Friday vs. copies on Monday.
So what, really, does it mean that the hardcover edition of Truth of Valor is down 15% from the hardcover edition of Valor's Trial? It means nothing, nothing at all!
Did the e-book business also drop 15% like the hardcover did? Well, fat chance of that. I'm certain that more people have purchased e-books this year than two years ago. But by how much? If I think e-book sales have doubled, then a 15% drop is a smaller drop. If I think e-book sales quadrupled, which they may well have, then the 15% drop on Nielsen Bookscan for the hardcover becomes an increase in total sales inclusive of e-books. The 15% "decrease" could actually be a 15% increase, all dependent on those e-book sales increases.
Why can I even contemplate the thought that e-book sales might have quadrupled in two years? Well, for a new book like Tanya's the print sales are still the lion's share of copies sold, but every month more and more little tidbits like these... For Elizabeth Moon's Hugo-nominated Remnant Population, the e-book sold three times the number of copies as the trade paperback on her most recent royalty statement. For David Louis Edelman's Jump 225 Trilogy, which are wonderful very tech-oriented novels very well-suited to an e-book adapting audience (I think they're the first set of books to really take the conceptualization of William Gibson's Neuromancer and bring it along into today), I've seen numbers for Kindle sales that are about equal with the Bookscan scales, so total e-book sales could well exceed those of print.
Hence, when I'm looking at Tanya's statements, there's this big gaping hole of uncertainty where I know the e-book numbers are up but I've no way to fill in that blank right away. And it's hard to even say when I can. Depending on if an e-book vendor reports monthly or quarterly, or with a 15 day, 30 day or 45 day lag, the first royalty statement I get for this book could reflect e-book sales for one month to 30 September of for three months thru 30 November or anything in-between.
Suffice to say, I hate this. I like information, I feast on information, and here I don't know, instead I compare the Kindle store rank to the bookstore rank on Amazon, guess what it means, then read tea leaves. And there are more and more instances like with the new Tanya Huff book where I have to recognize the presence of "known unknowns." And while the example here has a two year gap between books in series, the growth in e-book sales is now so strong that I can't even trust 2010 over 2009 comparisons.
This I can trust: if I negotiate a deal tomorrow with a publisher, and I'm looking at a 5% or 25% drop in hardcover sales, the publisher will almost certainly try and tell me that the sales are down by 5% or 25%, and hope I'll ignore the fact that the e-book sales are up by 300% or 400% and the total sales actually increased by 10%.
Bottom line, more and more, day by day, the print side of things isn't the full story for the publishing business.
If you haven't yet tried Tanya's Valor books, the place to start would be with the DAW omnibus edition of A Confederation of Valor, which has the first two books for just $8.99. Tanya served in the Canadian Naval Reserve, so she knows her stuff. Book Loons says in reviewing The Truth of Valor, "Tanya Huff writes the best space opera around." Night Owl reviews says "the Torin Kerr books are my favorite novels in this genre." And Book Yurt thnks "Torin is definitely who we'd all like to have our back when the shit hits the fan."
And Sept 30, we get word of this rave review from BlogCritics.org "Huff has taken the genre light years beyond what anybody in the past could have imagined it being. This is not just a good book for its genre, it's a good book—period."
Showing posts with label iPad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPad. Show all posts
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Think of it as Evolution in Action
One of the major appeals of the CD in spite of the audiophile accusations of diminution of sound quality was that it liberated us from having to get off our duffs to change sides on an album complete with cleaning album and stylus. As I finally start to burn my CDs and put them on my iPad now I see why this whole MP3 thing is so popular. No longer do we need to get off of our duffs to change CDs or even to change our six CD changers. No, we just sit in the easy chair and play 49 straight CDs without getting up, all we need is someone to feed us grapes or Skittles (grape Skittles!). And the audiophile snobs still think any of it's about sound quality. Yeh. Right. What they need to think about are the cunning evil aliens now one step closer fattening us for intergalactic slaughter.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
e-Reading
Here's an interesting post from Pyr SF editor Lou Anders comparing some of the iPad e-reading apps.
The Kindle came out in December 2007 and it was a while before I started to see them. The iPad clearly seems to be ahead in month-to-month sales comparisons if my own experiences are any indication. Multiple people at Balticon had. My client Peter V. Brett got one the day before we headed down to the convention and was telling multiple people over the weekend that he never wanted to be without and would probably never again take a laptop around with him ever ever again. On the train ride back to NYC yesterday, somebody else in our car already had an iPad. This is a lot of adaptations, awfully quick.
I've been kind of holding out on principle, that if they want to sell me one, I should be able to go into a store and buy one. But the more I see them around, the more I'm not so sure I can hold out. Especially seeing the iPad in the very thin case which Peter purchased for his, squeezing into his shoulder bag, taking up about as much space as some very big square-bound issue of a magazine, my iPad envy was definitely ratcheting up.
I spoke with a B&N bookseller recently who wasn't radiating enthusiasm for the Nook. Told me they've got to spend a lot of time trouble-shooting them instead of selling books. They're on a daily sales quota that adds up to around a couple dozen that should be sold over the course of the week, which quota they have made only rarely.
Monday, February 1, 2010
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.
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