Kindlerama

As of late summer 2010, the ebook device “war” has more or less come down to four choices–Kindle, nook, Kobo and Sony Reader–and the company behind each has worked hard to differentiate its product.

Nook split into two versions so it could offer a cheaper Wi-Fi only model. Kindle quickly followed suit. As for Kobo, this week’s rumor is that it will release a $99 device by Christmas, but the rumor is literally just party gossip for now. And Sony just announced updated Readers with better touch-screen technology.

There are more expensive options if you want to go for a multi-purpose device (iPad, Dell Streak, perhaps upcoming Android tablets), but if you’re trying to spend as little as possible to acquire a high quality single-function ereader device that’s linked to a big ebook store, those four are the serious contenders.

So which one is the best?

Over at The Reading Edge, Len Edgerly decided to compare the same book across all four devices to see how they stacked up. If you’re planning on buying an ereader this fall, you’ll find the video immensely useful as a source of hands-on demonstrations, which is something that’s more or less impossible in real world shopping scenarios.

The video (embedded below) is nearly half an hour long, so I’ve also summarized the key points. Read more…

Earlier this year, Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles partnered with Ken Clark to create a non-profit group called E-Books for Troops. Its purpose is fairly self-explanatory: to provide free ebooks, and devices on which to read them, to deployed U.S. military personnel.

The first test-run of the organization involved sending two second-generation Kindles to Afghanistan in June. Now they’ve expanded the program, and they’re accepting donations of functioning Kindle 2 devices through Thanksgiving 2010.

The organization has teamed up with M-Edge so that each Kindle will be shipped with a case and light as well.

Check out the official E-Books for Troops website for details. Two other quick things to note: First, the group has an application pending for tax-exempt status, and that will have to be approved before your donation can be deductible (update: the group’s tax status has been approved, so your donation is tax deductible!). Second, if you want to support the program but can’t donate a Kindle 2, you can click their Amazon Affiliate link before doing any shopping on Amazon to help them raise funds.

“Support Our Troops – Donate a Kindle 2″ [E-Books for Troops]

(Photo: M.Lubinski)

I’ve spent too many days this summer visiting this page on Amazon’s Kindle store, waiting for the price of the latest book from Charles Stross to drop to $9.99 (as of the date of this post, it’s $11.99). Clearly, it’s not going to happen until the publisher feels it’s notched as many $12 purchases as it can from eager fans who aren’t as price-conscious as I am.

But wait a minute! I too am an eager fan, and because of this pricing issue, I ended up reading the book for free. I’m still a fan but now I’m no longer a potential customer. The publisher lost the author an easy sale.

I bring this up not to post yet another gripe about agency pricing, but to suggest an alternative strategy, one that might help the publisher and author earn more money but that would also benefit casual fans like me.

Sometimes I get the sense that publishers think I’m looking at all formats at the same time, then making a decision about which one to buy. But that’s not the case at all; I’d say this is a more accurate profile of me as a book consumer:

• I buy >95% of my books digitally now, and save my print purchases for special items (e.g. art books, gifts, out of print and used).
   
• I’m never a superfan, hardcover collector, and general fan at the same time for the same title/author, so it’s unlikely the publisher can force me into a higher spending bracket by limiting purchasing options.
   
• When I decide to pay more than $10 for an ebook, it’s usually for emotional reasons, not simply because it’s a new release; scarcity has a weaker influence on me in the digital space.
   
• Publicity, marketing, and the social aspect of reading all help build up a desire in me to purchase a book as soon as it comes out, not in six months. However, due to the points listed above, I’m generally unwilling to pay a 20-40% “new release” premium for an ebook.

I think the publisher missed out on two things by pricing the book at $12. First, by not lowering the price to that magical $9.99, it lost at least one sale from an eager fan who was more than willing to buy the book immediately. That argument about cheap ebook prices eating into hardcover sales doesn’t apply to me, because I would have never bought the hardcover in the first place no matter what it cost–this isn’t the sort of book I want as an heirloom or physical object.

Second, I don’t think the publisher maximized its potential revenue from those superfans who can’t wait to read an author’s latest book, and who aren’t nearly as price sensitive as casual fans like me. I know from reading the author’s blog that he had a draft of this book turned in nearly a year ago, well before the original deadline, and that subsequently the publishing date for this title was pushed up by several months. This seems an easy win for the publisher: offer exclusive early access to the latest title in a series for a premium price. Instead, Penguin only priced the ebook $2 higher than “normal” Kindle prices and stuck with a traditional release window. I think superfans would have been willing to pay far more for immediate access–especially if the book wasn’t available anywhere else at the time.

Based simply on my own buying behaviors, here’s how I’d sell books these days: Read more…

(This is a housekeeping post. Please bear with me for a moment.)

Almost every day, I post a “daily bargain” book from the Amazon Kindle store. If you visit Kindlerama you can see the new titles in the sidebar on every page. If you read this blog via RSS or on your Kindle, you see the daily bargains as individual posts.

But what if you don’t want to see those daily bargains in your RSS feed? They might get annoying. I don’t want to annoy you!

That’s why as of today you can choose the RSS feed that suits you best:

Posts & Daily Bargains – This is the original full feed. If you currently subscribe via RSS, this is what you’re using.

Posts Only – This will only show posts that aren’t part of the Daily Bargain sidebar. If you don’t want to see free/cheap book offers so frequently, you might want this feed instead of the original.

Daily Bargains Only – This is for those of you who don’t care about my blatherings and just want to see what the Daily Bargain is each day.

If you tend to categorize your RSS feeds according to subject, you may even find it easier to subscribe to both the “posts only” and “bargains only” feeds, so that you can keep the content separate according to your RSS needs.

And finally, if you subscribe via email or through the Kindle blog subscription, nothing has changed–both of those options still provide the full feed of both regular posts and daily bargains.

Thanks!

(Photo: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, Mary Cassatt)

Last week, Keith at BIT-101 used a USB-powered microscope to zoom in on the displays of a Kindle, an iPad, and three printed paper samples. Mainly he was just having fun with his new microscope toy, but the results were interesting because they helped illustrate why the Kindle screen feels more like printed paper than a digital display.

If you’re wondering why the Kindle image has such an irregular, pebble-like distribution of dots instead of nicely ordered pixels, it’s due to the microcapsules that make up the display. Here’s a simplified illustration from the E Ink Corporation of how the technology works:

“Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal.” [BIT-101]