You know what you just did, right? You essentially drove up to the Kindle store in a big dumptruck, and then you dumped about sixteen tons of tripe onto it, and then–oh ho, here’s where you got sneaky!–you asked your staff, and your authors, and your author’s friends to all download copies of the titles so they’d overtake the Top 100 Free list.

So congrats, Ellora’s Cave, now the Top 100 Free Titles list is filled with stories of boobies and engorged naughty bits. You did it! You’re now a player on the Kindle store, and you didn’t even have to invest the resources in coming up with covers, like a real publisher would!

But you also just broke the store for everyone else; until your little tantrum of “look at me” publicity subsides, we all have to sit around wondering what other titles are out there.

Although my ire this morning is focused on Ellora’s Cave, it’s not the only publisher to engage in shady marketing nonsense. Zondervan, publisher of treacly fiction-with-a-Christian-twist, does it almost as badly.

I heartily support the “give it away for free” marketing strategy. What drives me crazy is when a publisher blitzes the stored to intentionally take over the list and gain more attention. The publisher is hoping that it can use sheer mass to grab the attention of shoppers, and that by dumping all the titles at once, someone who sees one title might then stumble upon a second.

For me, at least, all you do is make me roll my eyes and click away from a title as soon as I see who the publisher is.

(Also: seriously, an erotica publisher that essentially names itself “a woman’s cave”? This does not fill me with confidence that you understand your topic area.)

Why big publishers love old-fashioned bestseller lists

When Publishers Weekly broke the story last week, an executive from HarperCollins told the magazine that this was a wonderful idea because it will make the list more consumer friendly. Her reasoning, however, sounds mainly like justification for her company’s marketing departments:

…she thinks Amazon is certainly doing the right thing by splitting the list, noting that consumers “want to know what books everyone is reading, and buying,” and that a list which combines free downloads and books for sale doesn’t deliver this information.

Aww, that’s sweet, but of course it’s a little misleading. Traditionally, the bestseller list has been a tool for publishers more than consumers; if you can manipulate the market enough (with pre-orders, ad campaigns, bulk purchases, media appearances, etc.) to get a title on a bestseller list, you’ll gain free publicity at the retailer level, in newspapers, and in the general consciousness of the population. People tend to be interested in, or at least curious about, what’s popular, so being a bestselling title becomes self-sustaining to a point.

That marketing system breaks down when more than half of the top 100 best “sellers” on the Kindle Store are fast-moving freebies. For one thing, “free” is a premium than any publisher can offer, even the smallest independent publisher with no marketing budget, which means the competition to get on the list is greater. That leads to a second complication, which is that to compete on the Kindle Store bestseller list a big publisher has to drop the price of books to zero, which eats into profits. HarperCollins has already spent tens of thousands of dollars on traditional marketing, and doesn’t want to have to give away books on top of that just to compete with the indies.

Why readers should be optimistic about having two lists

So the Kindle Store bestseller list is going to become more traditional this summer which will make big publishers happy, but that’s not a bad thing entirely. As long as Amazon doesn’t institute an arbitrary minimum price requirement on titles included in its bestseller list, what this will really do is enlarge the competitive space for publishers–and that should benefit consumers in the end.

With the free titles removed from the list, the best way to send a little-known or undermarketed title to the top of the bestseller list will be to mark it down as steeply as possible, to get it as close to free as you can in order to entice more customers to give it a shot.

This should lead indies and aggressive big publishers to continue to offer titles at huge discounts, and force other publishers to start looking at deep discounting as a necessary strategy to make it on the Kindle Store list.

But since the free list isn’t going anywhere, it will also remain a viable marketing option for publishers, especially smaller ones who don’t have big marketing budgets. Big publishers’ titles may not show up on the free list much in the future, but that might be a good thing in that it will create a second “discovery pool” of new titles that would otherwise remain invisible to casual shoppers.

Amazon could sabotage the free list by keeping it hidden from casual view, but those free titles offer such compelling value to Kindle owners that I doubt that will happen. And if it does, well, there’s now a well-developed network of blogs and websites that can promote those hidden gems for Kindle owners. Unfortunately for big publishers but fortunately for us, those free Kindle ebooks aren’t going anywhere.

(Photo: hyperscholar)

If you’ve read reviews about the nook, the new Kindle competitor from Barnes & Noble, you may have heard that you can lend ebooks to friends. But don’t get suckered in by this claim. Barnes & Noble is conveniently leaving out some crucial information about how the process works, and it turns out the “loan your book” feature is a lot less useful than most bloggers and journalists are making it sound.

So how does the lending feature work? Barnes & Noble doesn’t provide a lot of detail on it–the Nook promo page on barnesandnoble.com simply says the device “lets you loan eBooks to friends, free of charge.” Naturally your friends will also all have to have registered nooks to participate, but I’ll assume that’s evident to most consumers.

But here’s the trickier part. Some readers over at the MobileRead forums asked Barnes & Noble to clarify how lending would work, and they found out the following details:

• You can only lend an ebook if the publisher allows it; this can be turned off exactly like how publishers can turn off the text-to-speech feature on Kindle titles.
• You can only lend an ebook out for 14 days maximum.
• You can only lend an ebookonce; after that, lending is permanently disabled on the title.

The first condition is ridiculous, but I don’t want to hijack my own post just to rail some more about stupid/greedy publishers. Some people won’t have a problem with the other two conditions, either because their friends are fast readers or because they rarely lend physical copies of books more than once. But for the rest of us, watch out. For example, say you loan your mom your copy of The Road and she doesn’t finish it within that 2 week window; she’ll have to go buy her own copy to get through the last few chapters. You won’t be able to lend it to her for a second 14-day period, and you’ll never be able to lend it to anyone else ever again, either.

Barnes & Noble could make this feature actually usable with just a couple of small changes. They could expand the lending window to 30 days, plenty of time for most people to get through an average book. More useful, they could expand the number of times you can loan out a book, say to five instances. That would provide enough flexibility so that you and your friend can decide how long the loan should last.

But it’s unlikely Barnes & Noble will bother. You see, the real point of this feature isn’t for customers at all–it’s for Barnes & Noble, because it gives the company a ton of positive, free press: “Wow, the nook lets you lend books! The Kindle doesn’t do that!”

So take all the hype with a grain of salt, and remember that if you want to really find out the details of a new device these days, look on forums and message boards. That’s where actual target customers are likely to come together and ask the hard questions, even if the media doesn’t.

Here’s a cool new use for the Kindle: the distribution of movie and TV scripts. To promote the new Edie Falco series “Nurse Jackie”, Showtime has put the script for the pilot episode on the Kindle store as a free download. That’s right, free! I can see this becoming a niche reading category for fans of TV shows and movies, and a great way for studios to use the Kindle to distribute content in a new format that doesn’t compete with the main product they’re trying to sell.

You can grab a copy for your Kindle or iPhone/iPod Touch here.