I Want You To Want Me, I Need You To Need Me

In the final of my current series of posts about the e-book business, we're going to talk about the food chain a little bit.

The average run-of-the-mill self-published e-book author is kind of at the bottom of the food chain.  This person goes on-line, accepts the terms of service, the KDP or Nook Press contract, and away they go.

We at JABberwocky, I must admit though I hate to do so, are not that much further up.  We get to be in something called the Kindle White Glove program for agents.  We represent many authors, we have the ability to put up books by multiple published authors, we have people we can talk to.

Above us, I'd probably put small publishers that may be able to provide a few thousand titles, that may have dedicated legal teams to negotiate with Amazon, that may have have a few core titles in a particular category that would be important for Amazon to sell.

Then you've got Open Road or Rosetta Books, dedicated e-book publishers with lots and lots of titles, backers with deep pockets, publishing players running them.  They have multiple major programs from multiple major authors or estates.

And then, the Big Five.

From my experience, I think that the fiercest advocates of self-publishing don't always recognize what it means to be toward the bottom of the food chain.

Let me explain a little bit, what it means:

The Kindle White Glove program goes only so far.  If there is a search algorithm that is screwed up that makes it hard for people to find our books, we have someone we can complain to directly, but this person will not generally do anything to overrule the computer.  Because we are in the White Glove program, our books are nominated for Kindle Daily Deals, but the odds that we will ever get one aren't very good, in part because there isn't a mechanism to explain why it might be particularly appropriate to have a KDD at a particular time.  We can complain about how royalty statements are formatted, and our concerns will be taken seriously, and addressed over a two or three year time frame, maybe.  Just like any KDP author, we'll get treated a little bit better if we do things with Amazon exclusively.  We sign the same KDP contract at the end of the day that anyone else does.

Let's talk about Kindle Daily Deals a bit.  

We recently arranged with Open Road for them to publish six of our Simon R. Green titles as part of a package that will include a Simon R. Green short story collection that will come out this summer.  Within a few weeks of Open Road taking over, they got a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon R. Green.  I couldn't have gotten that.  I have someone to talk to, my titles are in the running, but I don't have a realistic chance at this.  All the people that are higher up on the food chain than me have that chance.  Open Road probably provides slates of nominees for Daily Deals as do the big publishers, with dedicated talk-to-Amazon people at the publisher talking to dedicated talk-to-Open-Road people.  It wouldn't surprise me if there are more Daily Deal slots over the course of a year that go to people lower down on the food chain as examples, models, inspirations, whatever.  Kind of like not too many people actually win the lottery, but you want to have winners to get people to play.  I don't have the scope or the scale to seriously compete for one of only 365 Kindle Daily Deal slots over a year, and I'd have to compete with all the other literary agencies in the White Glove program.

Let's talk about contracts.

We are not sure what to do with Barnes & Noble.  As part of the transition from their PubIt program to their Nook Press program (and why is there a transition, anyway; what is the underlying advantage of making everyone migrate from one platform to another, which there has to be...) we notice, which we hadn't paid as much attention to when our e-book program first started up with PubIt, that B&N isn't as helpful on e-book territoriality in their Nook Press contract as other vendors are.  This is now important to us.  We have more books from our partner agency, Zeno, in the UK, where we may have rights to sell a book only in the US and Canada.  Maybe we'll want to do e-books only in the UK for authors who seem likely to sell something there but don't have a UK publisher.  No vendor promises absolutely for sure that they will sell books only in the territories we say to sell them in, but B&N promises less of an effort.  Not a commercially reasonable effort or a best effort, but not much of an effort at all.

Interestingly enough, if we move from a Nook Press contract to a publisher contract, they will agree to pay more attention contractually to territoriality.  And their price for doing so?  A smaller royalty rate than everyone else offers.  

There are other issues as well, maybe four or five things where B&N's Nook Press contract offers language that is inferior to other people in the e-book space.  I haven't fully joined the battle and am not sure where it will all shake out at the end, but I am 99.99% certain that we are having problems negotiating our contract that wouldn't exist for people higher up in the food chain.  I can't imagine that a Big Five publisher has to take a smaller royalty rate in order to have B&N respect territoriality.  Another of the clauses we are fighting about, I know we don't have the provision B&N wants from us in most of our contracts with Big Five publishers, so those Big Five publishers can't be agreeing to what B&N wants us to agree to.  If the publisher doesn't have it from us, they can't give it to B&N.

I had lunch with an editor this week.  I mentioned how our last couple of checks from Kobo were bigger than our last couple of checks from Apple.  In fact, we just got our biggest ever Kobo check.  Not big, but twice or more what we were getting from Kobo two years ago.  The Big Five publisher this editor works for is doing a much bigger percentage of their business with Apple. We think, this editor and I, that the difference is almost certainly a marketing difference.  The Big Five publisher can get books promoted in different places on the iBooks store where we cannot.  Impulse buyers can find their authors and titles more easily than they can find ours. 

We would like to sell our books via Google, but in order to do so we would have to set up entirely with self-serve via their on-line system without any human intervention.  I'm not willing to do that; I think I'm big enough and important enough that I should have someone to talk to.  Nook and Kobo don't have White Glove programs, but we do have people we can e-mail, and get responses from.  I am 100% certain that the Big Five publishers can talk to people at Google, while for me, selling books on Google is supposed to be as automated and inhumane a process as trying to get human help for using Blogger or Gmail.

And finally...

Rather quietly, Audible just announced that they are reducing royalty rates for self-published audio books done through their ACX program.  Audible is an Amazon company.

What leverage do the authors have?  None, really.

The bigger you are, the more attention you get.

The bigger you are, the more you can go "mano a mano" with the Amazon lawyers.

The bigger you are, the more marketing you can get.

And the bigger you are, the less likely it is that you'll be forced to take a cram-down on your royalty rates.

And there's a reason for this.  

Amazon and the Big Five publishers may argue with one another from time to time.  Amazon removed all the "Buy" buttons from Macmillan titles.  There was a time a few years ago when Penguin stopped providing new releases to Amazon, including things like a #1 bestselling Sookie Stackhouse title.  But at the end of the day, Amazon can get away for a short while not selling Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance when it comes out next week, but they can't go for an extended period of time not selling major #1 bestselling books from major authors.  Over time, there are lots of other places to buy e-books, but only one publisher in the US to sell Words of Radiance.  Amazon wasn't entirely incorrect to declare in a statement at the end of the Buy Button Battle with Macmillan to declare bitterly that Macmillan had a monopoly.  But for the JABberwocky e-book program, I don't really have a program if I'm not selling through Amazon somehow or other.  I might have a program without selling through B&N, but I don't have one not selling through Amazon.  

So what will we do if Amazon does ever do with Kindle royalties what it just did with ACX royalties? Will we all decamp to selling only on Kobo, B&N and Google? Will Hugh Howey use his self-publishing fortune to set up a site for selling e-books direct to consumers that will be an open platform for anyone wishing to sign the HHDP publishing agreement? Or do we just have to suck it up?

There is no guaranty, no tablets from Sinai, no fine print in the contract, no law, no nothing, that says that we shall always receive a 70% royalty as the sellers of independently published e-books.  There is more room for that rate to go down than for it to go up.  And if Amazon wants it to go down, the Big Five publisher that has a monopoly on selling Words of Radiance next week has a big advantage in holding the line over the agent that represents the book or the run-of-the-mill KDP published author.

Much as I love the ability of any author to publish their own e-books, I am also self-aware of what I can and cannot do as a provider of e-books.  Heretical as it might seem to say this, I believe on the most holistic global level that the bigger publishers add value to the publication and sale of e-books, because they are bigger and have clout and can get marketing and go mano-a-mano with Amazon and Apple.  And I can say this and say at the same time that their royalty rates are too low; it's simple math that I don't believe the value they add is equal to the percentage they take.  It's also simple math that makes me want to stick with the JABberwocky e-book program, to give us leverage to get those royalties up and because globally I can do better across the full range of JABberwocky clients by offering e-books from a full range of our clients.  Individual results may vary.  Some authors are going to be better off being self-published.  The math may change, if publishers offer a higher royalty rate or if the big companies we deal with to sell e-books make it easier to do business with them just like the Big Five do. 

Prior posts on this subject from recent weeks:

Analyzing the Hugh Howey survey results

Marketing and e-books

Quick Newsy Notes

A few items from the past week...

HarperCollins is doing a "this tape will self-destruct" thing on its e-book library loan program, allowing 26 circulations per library purchase. Why? I figured this out before I read it officially. They feel this about matches the iifespan of a printed book in the typical library, and they don't wish to have an e-book purchase become an eternally available sort of thing when a print book truly can't be loaned forever before it falls apart. You can find a Library Journal article on the subject here, link courtesy of publishersmarketplace.com. I'm of mixed emotion on this. I don't think it's prima facie a heinous thing to do because businesses do need to adjust to changing business models, and the longevity of the product sold is enough of a concern that it's just kind of sitting there to be noticed and looked at. On the other hand, it pisses off customers. In the real world, libraries rarely would replace copies of a book that was ready to go to pasture unless it was maybe something like Harry Potter that doesn't come along very often. The book would be discarded or sold away at a Friends of the Library sale for 25¢ and that would be it. The main difference might be that if a patron discovers, let's say, Simon Green's Nightside series when the library had the 10th book, maybe they would go out and buy the first ten and now with e-book lending they could still find the first book sitting on the electronic shelf six years later. But even though readers are readers, I'm not sure the dedicated library patron would be the reader who'd go and actually buy a series like this. Hence, I feel as if Harper is addressing a real problem, but also that they've inflated and enlarged this bogey-man beyond the stature it actually deserved, and thus perhaps come up with a remedy that's a little more punitive sounding than it needs to be.

That same issue of the Publishers Lunch Deluxe from publishersmarketplace.com reports that Bloomsbury is reporting e-book sales at 40% now, while Sourcebooks was saying 35%. On the other hand, Penguin still has print as 85% of its business and thinks people need to be reminded that the lion's share of the book business is still in the old-fashioned print variety. Penguin also reported having a very good year even after taking reserves and allowances for the $42M that Borders owes and additional sums from the bankruptcy of RED Group, the major bookseller in Australia and New Zealand.

Tweeted a link to a NY Times article that went live last night about bookstores dealing with non-bookstore channels to sell books. This is the kind of thing that's hardly news news, though the Times tries to hook it as having new urgency in a post-Borders era. Alas, these channels can't replace Borders. Their selections are too small, maybe you can get a couple hundred appropriate books into a big Whole Foods markets, or twenty in some other retail channel. These sales also don't help a lot, because they can be invisible. Publishers do look at Bookscan. We once had a book by John Zakour, Man's Guide to Pregnancy, that was selling a gazillion copies at Motherhood Maternity. But because none of those sales are on Bookscan, selling the sequel was impossible because (1) we had to take a "trust us" approach in telling people that there really were all of these sales because it was 90% of more and the visible sales to other publishes hardly there at all and (2) if you don't think the sequel will sell to the same place then you have to conclude there's no market to be had.

Finally, we've achieve launch on stage 2 of our e-book program with most of the Hot Blood erotic horror anthologies now up for sale at Kindle. We should have those up on Nook soon. Kobo we're very close, they have a slightly more cumbersome process but the account is set up. We had a problem getting the account set up at iBooks which took weeks to fix, and now we're having trouble getting them to accept uploads of the same ePub files that everyone else is perfectly happy with. We need to get in touch with Sony, still. And Mayer Alan Brenner and James Robert Baker programs are progressing, while Rick Shelley is starting to come up after.

thinking aloud, the e-book

We at JABberwocky put up our first e-book this week, for Simon Green's Beyond the Blue Moon, which is now available for the Kindle. Why when I knock the Kindle early and often is this first? Well, Amazon has had a one-time NYC editor Dan Slater working in their digital department for many years, Dan has always been available to us and pushing and prodding on getting content for Amazon, first for their Amazon shorts program and then later for Kindle. He's there to meet with us, he's there to put us in touch with people if we need help, or even if we really don't need the help but it's nice to have the person there at the other end (kind of like the security of having the music in front of you even when you know the song by heart). Barnes & Noble, emails vanish into the mists and there's nobody to talk to without writing a certified letter to the head of the company to get some attention. Some other places even worse. We'll have more books up soon in more formats/stores, including for Nook, iPad, probably Kobo, and we'll have to start digging through into Google's new e-book store. Five other Simon R. Green books, and Hot Blood anthologies and other titles from Jeff Gelb and/or Michael Garrett. Want to have as many in as many places come Christmas as we can, but also do see Beyond the Blue Moon as a kind of cold launch where we can see if the files have been well-converted and figure out the process. I felt a little bit the dummy not to realize until we were partway through the upload process for this that we'd need cover copy, as an example, and that's something to spend more time on earlier in for the next book.

In general, as we got closer and closer to having the first book up, the process seemed to become bigger as we found all the little things beyond just sending a book to a conversion house that needed to be done. And the process as a whole was a goal for 2010 that I envisioned reaching fruition earlier than the last month of 2010. Some of the things we've looked at: where to go for file conversions; where to go for cover art; whether to have an exclusive release somewhere in exchange for promo support; how to share costs of the conversions with the clients; what price we'd put on the books; which books to start with; and oh -- yeah, you need cover copy you idiot.

Simon was the obvious lead choice for the program. because books like this have been unavailable and have people wanting to buy and tie in to other books that are in print, in this case the obvious being Blue Moon Rising. Alas, that isn't available in e-book right now because the contract is so old it didn't talk much about e-books. So we're reaching out to the publisher to address that, but it will be several months before both books are available as e-book.

We're pricing Beyond the Blue Moon at $9.95. A physical copy of Blue Moon Rising costs $16, and Amazon sells that for $10.88, so we are charging less than physical for a fairly similar book. With the cheapest used copies around $7.50+ after the S&H charge, it's not like any other copy can be had for much less. We're charging more than the $6.99 cost on Kindle for his mass market backlist titles that Penguin has in print. My initital thought had been to charge $9.95 across the board, but I might go down a bit for some of Simon's shorter books like Down Among the Dead Men, or might go down after we've generated sufficient sales to have fixed costs (conversion & cover being the bulk) covered.

Covers, we wanted to have things that were a distinct upgrade from a lot of the other small house POD/e-book covers that you can find out there, while also recognizing that we can't go around paying thousands of dollars or even many thousands of dollars to have Michael Whelan or Chris McGrath. For the Simon R Green books we ended up reaching out to Isaac Stewart, an illustrator and cartographer who's done interior art and maps for Brandon Sanderson and others. For other titles, we secured John Fisk, a friend of Eddie's, who has a great sensibility.

In general, we feel the e-book business is now mature enough where it's important for any literary agent to be invested in it. We see this as a service that we can and should offer to our clients. In part, this is because I do believe e-book royalty rates offered by the major publishers need to increase from their current 25% of net, or at least to escalate at some point in a book's life from that, and offering some e-books of our own might help to accomplish that over time. In a nutshell, when authors have more options they have more leverage in a negotiation. That being said, our goal in the e-book program isn't to be directly competing with or stepping on toes of our publishing partners. These aren't books where the rights situation is vague. These are books that we've tried to get Simon's publisher to do at various points. I'd argue that Simon might sell more e-books for his books with Penguin when there are no longer availability holes in his backlist, where people can buy a Blue Moon Rising somewhere but not a Beyond the Blue Moon.

There are conflict issues. We don't intend to be the originating publishers for things, at least as we're thinking of it right now, but we are still now the publisher for this book as well as just the literary agent for it. We don't intend to become an eReads, the e-publisher that agent Richard Curtis started many years ago, doing books for a wide swath of authors. I think the business of actually being an agent selling all kinds of rights throughout the world is still too critical and important to want to have an entire huge side business. For most books moving forward, we will only be able to get the rights reverted from the publishers if the books are failing to meet certain sales or royalty earning thresholds, and I'm not sure even as the e-book business matures that there's a lot to be gained investing in books that are having trouble selling 350 copies a year. I'm not sure it makes sense for us to reach out to former clients with a book or series we liked just for the sake of having more product, but I've been very tempted by that idea nonetheless.

The big next thing is to gear up promotional efforts. Minimally, that means having a page on our web site either for Beyond the Blue Moon specifically or for Simon Green as a whole where we can put up more information on our ebooks and have robust links to the various places to buy them. Do we take out banner ads or key words somewhere? For the Hot Blood books, we've reserved an entire domain name to promote but aren't sure yet what we're actually going to do with that domain.

We've purposely chosen to keep these efforts in-house, but I think the question of the day is whether that will always be so. It's only with the experience of what we're doing now that we can see what the trade-offs are. Obviously we and the author make more money per copy doing e-books ourselves. But will we sell fewer copies because we aren't a destination like an eReads? Will our e-book efforts divert us from other agently things to where we're making more money on e-books but losing bigger sums elsewhere? Maybe tomorrow we'll end up looking for an actual e-book publishing partner, maybe not.

The JABberwocky Digital Rights Manager Jessie Cammack has been on the front lines of our efforts and deserves a lot of credit for this, and she and Eddie and I have batted around a lot of stuff together in the office.

Maybe this approach makes me the literary equivalent of the dude who gets loster because he won't stop for directions or floods the kitchen because he wants to fix the sink before calling the plumber. I hope not. My instinct for a while has been to put an investment in this ourselves when the time seemed right. But we'll see. Feel free to put in your two cents in the comments here, or to contact us in the office.

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?

The Unbearable Darkness of E-Books

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."

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.     

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.

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.

E-Reading

So the Father's Day advertising war for various e-book devices, including the Kindle, Nook and iPad, was followed by the after-Father's Day price war. B&N came out with a bare-bones Nook that sells for $149 but has only Wi-Fi access, i.e., no 3G or no downloading a book anywhere with a cell phone signal. The fully-equipped Nook was also given a price cut. Amazon immediately responded by dropping the price of the Kindle to $189. Borders was already starting to sell some e-book readers, including first shipments in time for Father's Day, for $149. They're now offering a $20 gift card with that, and double Borders R Reward bucks. Since you get $5 for $150, then buy this and a truffle ball and your net price for the Kobo eReader becomes $120.

One article I read says that B&N is now making more Nooks than Amazon is Kindles, so they seem to have some quiet success leveraging their store presence to sell the e-reading device. And Apple has sold over 3 million iPads in just a few months, even though it's impossible to actually buy one anyplace because they're in a perpetual state of being sold out. Nobody knows how many Kindles or Nooks have sold, but the combined total would be well up into seven figures.

In part, this is a natural thing in consumer electronics. As more and more are being made and purchased the component price goes down and the fixed costs are more easily leveraged and the price comes down.

But there's also more flexibility on the gadget price because of the switch in pricing on the e-books. Last year Amazon was paying $13 for a DEAD AND GONE e-book and selling it for $10, losing money every time out. This year, DEAD IN THE FAMILY is now publisher-set at $12.99, and Amazon gets to keep $3.90 of that. When you make $4 on every book instead of losing $3 you can price the gadget for less.

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...

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.

iPads for e-Inking

All kinds of nice photos and stuff I took at BEA and maybe I will have time to post more on the subject at some point.

One quick post I did want to make was about the array of eReaders that were on display at BEA. We could play with the Kobo, which is the new eReader that Borders will be selling, and the BeReader, and the Sony Reader, and at least one or two more.

The good news for Amazon is that nobody's been able to improve upon the Kindle in a total way even though all of these people have had plenty of chances to learn from the Kindle's mistakes.

The Kobo Reader is cheaper than the others, and the navigation wasn't bad, but it seemed a little slow going from one screen to another. It also felt cheap, without the same heft as the others. On balance, I do think this might be a good purchase if you want to go below the $150 price point on an eReader, but it's not a threat to the Kindle.

The Be, I didn't like that very much at all from a quick playing around with.

I finally played with the Sony Reader Daily Edition which is a slightly bigger screened reader. It had much better navigation for going from place to place in the sample May 17 Wall St. Journal which was installed on it, so that was better than the Kindle newspaper reading experience. But they still have a dreadfully unintuitive note-taking experience, and I still don't like the glare on the touch screen.

So, yeah, it's not like these are bad, but none of them are near good enough to overtake the market position that Amazon brings to the Kindle.

On the other hand, the Kindle and the Kobo and the Be and the Nook and the Sony -- they all look so 2008 to me. The e-Ink screens love bright sunshine, but anyplace else they look dingy and gray and have an overall unattractive appearance, the way all PC-based computers looked boring beige before Apple starting doing funky thinks with the Mac and Mac laptops. They all refresh pages much slower than my iPod Touch or an iPad. They all turn pages with a back button and a forward button, but for anything more complex the navigation is not intuitive or appealing or quick.

So the bad news for Amazon is that I don't think any eInk based eReader compares favorably to an iPad, other than maybe for battery life if you don't leave the wireless on your eReader. They cost less than an iPad, but that's it. The iPad isn't dedicated to doing this one thing, but as part of the many things an iPad can do, the iBooks application is fantastic. And then you can have a fantastic experience with the Marvel app, and then check your e-mail, show off your photos, so many other things. I've never been fond of having 3-in-1 office machines, but for this, I know just from playing around with it that I want to get an iPad and pay more for a machine that does many things than pay less for an eReader that does that very well. By 2008 standards.

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.

the finest news around

This week's edition of The Onion introduces us to the version of the Kindle I'd like to buy, down a few paras in their highlights from the CES in Las Vegas.

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.

The Apple E-Book Reader

So let's just say the iPod Touch is an amazing thing.

Yes, the screen is kind of small, but overall I've found reading manuscripts via the Stanza app and Stanza desktop to be no worse than reading manuscripts on a Kindle.

The Stanza desktop program works with more file formats than I could wirelessly send to my Kindle, though not with docx. One ms sent in that format I had to open in Pages, convert to .doc instead of .docx, and it did then go over to my Touch but as one long paragraph. So far I've been able to keep track of it all, but paragraph breaks to have a certain virtue.

The battery life is better than I'd thought. In part because my hotel room has free wired internet but not free wireless I've mostly just been using the Touch to read on, and setting it at the lowest comfortable screen brightness, and I can probably read an entire decent-size ms on one battery charge. The Kindle battery lasted longer in theory, but the circuity for when I turned on the wireless each morning to take my newspapers tended to eat up way more battery than you'd expect, and the Kindle said its battery likes to be charged often instead of drain-and-charge, so I can settle with the battery life on the touch. Reading on Stanza or not, if I were using the wireless more or blasting music more at loud volumes the battery will go. As I slowly burn more of my CDs, buy music on iTunes, maybe I'll find the battery issues more annoying. But so far, so good.

Lots of font size options on the Touch, just like the Kindle.

The Touch has a smaller screen so I have to turn the pages more, but the pages refresh in the blink of an eye which the Kindle's do not. So I'm not losing the fractions of a second I've been used to using on the Kindle with each page turn. I think that ends up being a draw.

Note-taking on the Touch is fine. Press bottom button, hit the note pad button, start taking a note. You can't see the manuscript, but the note screen on the Kindle covered up half the page so I couldn't really see the manuscript there either. Theoretically I like a physical keypad more than the touchscreen, but as I'm getting used to the keypad on the Touch, getting used to its auto-suggest, and sometimes taking advantage of the landscape mode in the 3.0 iPhone/Touch upgrade that makes the keys bigger, I'm finding the overall typing experience to be better on the Touch. Fewer mistakes, those I make are more easily corrected, typing symbols is easier.

The Kindle did auto-insert a location # which could be used to help an author find where I was taking a note but in an imperfect kind of way. The Kindle also inserted lots of extraneous stuff like the date and time each note was taken that I'd have to strip out before sending the comments on to my client. Stanza tells you you are 37.45% thru the manuscript so I can add that easily enough and it's about as helpful as the Kindle location. I haven't yet e-mailed my Touch notes to my home base to pass on to an author, so this story isn't complete.

The Kindle with its black on gray E-ink seemed to thrive on bright daylight. The lighter it was the easier the Kindle was to read, and then the darker it got the harder it was until you couldn't read at all. The Touch has backlighting, and it's a little less fine in the brightest daylight and you need to up the brightness, but it was wonderful reading on the Touch walking down MD Rt. 355 from White Flint Mall to the Grosvenor Metro Station at night and being able to read the whole time when I wouldn't have been able to read on the Kindle or even on a magazine with very bright glossy white paper for contrast. Advantage, Touch.

I was able to read the Touch while using the elliptical at the gym, just like a Kindle, though the added page turns from the smaller screen size meant a slightly less vigorous workout for the arms.

But basically, for reading manuscripts I'd say I'm delighted with the Touch even though I'd never purchased it with that in mind, and the Kindle can go light itself a nice campfire.

The Kindle did have rudimentary internet on a wireless network, so in that regard somewhat better than the Touch.

The Kindle did offer wireless newspaper delivery, and I need to see how the Newspaper Direct version of the Washington Post goes. But let me say that I never enjoyed reading newspapers on the Kindle. I liked having a Washington Post wherever I wanted it to be, but the actual reading experience was not very good. The Touch would be even worse for actually reading a newspaper.

I think if I could buy a used Kindle at a cheap enough price I might well do so, but I'm pretty firmed up now that I ain't paying $180 for a refurbished or $300 for a new Kindle 2. So Jeff Bezos and Amazon will lose hundreds of dollars a year in subscription income from me. I don't love multi-function gadgets that print/fax/copy but I kind of like the way that the Touch plays music really well, gives me a better Address Book than my cell phone, surfs the internet decently enough for the screen size, plays video really well for the screen size, and on top of that I find I'm able to read manuscripts on it just about as well as I was doing on the Kindle.

Update #1:  The docx manuscript that came on to Stanza as one long paragraph ultimately got to be too big for Stanza to handle well.  It likes to divide things at part or chapter breaks into little bite-size chunks.  Once I got past the halfway mark into the ms without any of these breaks in the file, I had to finagle a bit to get it past each page turn.  So I saved the second half into a separate file, and I assume what will now work without difficulty.

Son of Dead KIndle

So now I have 2 broken Kindles.  Notice that nice horizontal line across the top of my Kindle when turned off.

Everything else works fine.  I can watch the pointer line on the side go up and down when I restart or turn my Kindle on or off.  I can use the USB connection.  But the Kindle is dead.

So what does one do?

They want $180 to send me a refurbished Kindle, plus shipping.

I don't want to send them $180.  I've gone through two of them now in 15 months.

I don't want a Sony Reader. I don't like the screen and the glare and the note-taking isn't good and intuitive as I need it to be.  I like the wireless subscriptions on my Kindle.  And the other thing is that all of my problems have been with the screen, and all the screens on all the e-readers use the same basic E Ink technology so I'm not sure I trust any of them right now.

I don't want to go back to reading manuscripts on paper.

I didn't do anything to the Kindle yesterday.  It was fine in the morning when I turned it on to get my newspapers.  I just walked around with it some in my backpack.  And then this morning the screen is Dead Again.

I was planning to go away for the weekend but hoped to get some reading done while I was away.  I just don't want to  have 3 manuscripts to print out and cart around, not that I'd get to reading 3 but just in case I bail out of #1 there's got to be some backup.

I'm feeling terribly addicted right now, when I know I shouldn't spend money on something because it's going to be bad for me, and yet I'm not sure I can stop myself from it.

What I really want to do is find a class action attorney, I think, maybe talk to the one who's suing over the case cracking on the Kindle 2.

Update #1:  The $180 refurbished Kindle comes with but a 90-day warranty.  A used Kindle is available currently on Craig's List for $140-$150, in the low $200s for a Kindle 2.

Update #2:  I have downloaded the Stanza app for my iPhone, and I am busily transferring content to my iPod Touch.  This isn't as good as the Kindle, but maybe my iPod touch won't break every few months... 

Update #3:  A Washington Post subscription via Newspaper Direct if purchased in advance costs less than a Kindle subscription.  A Wall St. Journal subscription for a first-time subscriber can be nicely discounted for a whole year over the Kindle price.  I don't like being chained to my computer to look at them, but none of them require me to buy a $180 or $300 device that keeps breaking down, and which doesn't work so well in cold weather in NYC for six months of the year, and etc.

credit where due

I've knocked on the Kindle a bit, but I should give Amazon some praise for having made some improvements in the Kindle operating system between my original Kindle that had something like 1.15y98y98u on it and the replacement in January with 1.2 (299870016) on it.  Still the first generation Kindle, but a slightly more developed version of the OS.

The first Kindle crashed just often enough that I kept thinking how nice it would be to travel with a toothpick to hit the reset button, not daily or even weekly, but at least once every month or two.  And then usually one crash would be followed closely by a second crash before it would then be good for a stretch.  So far, 3 months and counting, the replacement Kindle with the slightly updated OS hasn't needed a reset.

The first Kindle, every so often you'd put on the wireless and wait and wait for the Kindle to talk to Amazon and for the newspaper to download, and sometimes I'd have to give up, turn off the wireless, and try again.  3 months and counting, so far the replacement Kindle has checked in and quickly downloaded whatever there is to download in 60 seconds or so just like advertised.

Lynxswift commented asking me about the news reports  of a new bigger screen Kindle and other e-readers that might be more suited to a newspaper.

I would love this.  I'm very glad to be able to subscribe to the Washington Post and the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle.  Along with the NY Times which I get home-delivered they are the only good newspapers left in the country.  But the Kindle is not great for reading newspapers.  The content is all there, but I miss the ads and feel kind of guilty that I might be giving the Washington Post some part of the $9.99 Kindle subscription fee but not eyeballing the few ads that are left.  It's a lot of page turns and back and forth to read the paper.  Even on the 1st generation Kindle there's a little more aggresiveness particularly with the Wall St. Journal to put in charts, but they are often shrunk and take up an entire page.  And any page with a photo takes longer to draw on the screen thus slower to refresh thus adding time.  If the Kindle or some other company could come up with something that would give me more of the newspaper experience I've grown up with along with my newspaper, I would probably buy it in an instant.

In fact -- and it shocks even Luddite me to admit this --  I would even consider foregoing a printed NY Times subscription in favor of the electronic version so long as I could still have free access or very small add-on access to the web site (currently a Kindle WSJ subscription gives no access to their web site, which is probably reasonable when they get but pennies from Amazon on the $9.99 I'm paying) in order to print out the Sunday magazine crossword puzzle or something like that.  Yes, today we all have free access to the NYT website, but when they had their Times Select section blocked off I did get access for my home delivery $$.  The paid web site is coming back, someway somehow, and I would not want to have to pay for a Kindle subscription and then pay again for that.  

Or to put it simply in less detail, the Kindle is still inferior enough for reading newspapers that I'm sometimes happy to pay $1.50 for a Times in print instead of $.75 for a Kindle version when I am traveling.  Make the experience just a little better, and maybe I'm totally there.

Of course today it was nice in a drizzle on the way to Pathmark to buy Diet 7-Up and Ben & Jerry's that were on sale to read a printed NYT that holds up to a drizzle.  It's been very rainy in NYC the past week so the Kindle utility hasn't been great.  Maybe they can come up with a waterproof cold-weather friendly version with a little Kindle umbrella...