Posts tagged ereader
Can bells and whistles save the book?
Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.
This article makes a great point. Given our already-scattered and very distracted reading/TV watching/web browsing, we really can’t stand to have yet another distraction to pull us away from a book or e-book’s main feature: the text.
Has anyone else had similar issues with their “enhanced e-books”?
Amazon's Kindle lending library is contract breach, say US authors
With more than 5,000 titles available, including Michael Lewis’s Liars’ Poker, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young adult series The Hunger Games trilogy and Howard Jacobson’s Booker-winning novel The Finkler Question, the books, said Amazon in its announcement, come from a range of publishers under a “variety” of terms. The “vast majority” are there following an agreement with the publishers to include the books for a fixed fee, while “in some cases”, Amazon said it was purchasing the title under standard wholesale terms each time it is borrowed, “as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents”.
Literary agents were quick to condemn the project, releasing a statement saying “it is difficult to see how this programme is in the best interests of our clients”.
Now authors themselves have also moved to criticise it, with US writers’ body the Authors Guild describing it as a “mess”, asking if any of the books in the programme are there legitimately and accusing Amazon of launching it to push the Kindle Fire as it fights an “unexpected ebook device battle” with Apple and Barnes & Noble.
The Authors Guild claims that the six largest US trade book publishers, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan, refused to participate in the lending library, with the next tier of publishers mainly also refusing. “No matter. Amazon simply disregarded these publishers’ wishes, and enrolled many of their titles in the programme anyway. Some of these publishers learned of Amazon’s unilateral decision as the first news stories about the programme appeared. How can Amazon get away with this? By giving its boilerplate contract with these publishers a tortured reading,” said the Guild.
Amazon’s belief that it does not need permission to include the books, that it is just required to pay publishers the wholesale price of the titles which are downloaded, is “nonsense”, said the Authors Guild. “Publishers did not surrender this level of control to the retailer. Amazon’s boilerplate terms specifically contemplate the sale of ebooks, not giveaways, subscriptions, or lending,” it said. “Amazon, in other words, appears to be boldly breaching its contracts with these publishers. This is an exercise of brute economic power. Amazon knows it can largely dictate terms to non-Big Six publishers, and it badly wanted to launch this programme with some notable titles.”
Publishers who have agreed to participate in the Kindle lending library, meanwhile, “do not have the right to do so without the prior approval of the books’ authors”, according to the writers’ body, which is advising authors whose books are in the programme without their permission to contact their publisher to register their objections.
Sounds like just a complete mess to me. The only winners here are Amazon and Kindle owners.
What confuses me though is why Amazon needs to have this program with all of its problems when they now allow users to borrow library ebooks on the Kindle for free. Is this just about having more time to finish a book (since the lending program involves no due dates)? It seems like a hefty price to pay for such a small benefit.
The Kindle Question
With [last] Wednesday’s announcement of Amazon’s reply to the iPad, the new Kindle Fire e-reader, my Facebook feed filled up with people’s excitement about the new device. Many of these folks were authors whose books we adore and support and sell in our store, and I realized that even they—people immersed in the industry, whose livelihoods depend on book sales—aren’t aware that almost all other e-readers, including Barnes & Noble’s Nook, DO allow freedom of vendor choice. Many folks just don’t know that they can get an e-reader that isn’t locked to a single supplier. Booksellers, we’ve got to do a better job of getting the word out.
I posted the following update to my personal Facebook page and the Flying Pig’s:
“Before you succumb to the Kindle Fire or other Kindles, please consider that Amazon cuts all other vendors out of the picture, including the indie booksellers who are trying to support your books. Other e-readers allow books to be purchased from a variety of sources, and with agency pricing across so many publishers, the cost is often the same.”
I was glad I did, because there were some questions right away:
- Wait, indie bookstores sell ebooks? (Answer: Yes. Many, if not most, of us do.)
- How do we buy them? (Some websites offer ebook options along with other formats; others have affiliate programs with Google eBooks, and if you link to Google eBooks through the indie store’s website, they’ll get that percentage of the sale.)
- Can I buy books from an indie and read them on my Nook? (Answer: Yes. You can buy ebooks from other sources than B&N and read them on your Nook. You can also read them on many, many other e-reader devices. I believe only Amazon boxes out all other formats but its own.)
We indies need to do a better job getting the word out about the fact that we DO sell ebooks, and let our friends, family, and customers know how to buy them from us. It is a matter of survival for all bricks-and-mortar stores. Recently, I made a flyer and posted it at the store.
Even if I weren’t an independent bookseller, it would alarm me to be beholden to a single vendor for my book purchases. It just places too much power in the hands of a single corporate entity, one that could conceivably “recall” books from my device, or decide not to carry certain authors or titles. The world of technology is zipping along, and gadget frenzy is a seductive thing. Once in a while, all of us need to take a breath and think, “What am I really buying here?”
Kindle Connects to Library E-Books
For years the availability of free e-books from libraries was something of an underground secret.
But Amazon significantly increased the potential visibility of library e-books on Wednesday when it opened up its popular Kindle device to these books for the first time. “Libraries are a critical part of our communities,” Jay Marine, director of Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement. “And we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country.” The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits. Library e-books are already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out. “We do get asked the question frequently: ‘Can I use my Kindle to download your e-books?’ ” said John F. Szabo, director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. “And the answer has been no.” The move by Amazon “is a big deal and it’s a big step forward in public libraries being much more central in the whole e-book growth,” said Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools. Connecting libraries with the Kindle, the most successful device and the largest e-book bookseller in the business, “is going to bring millions of readers to the public library,” he said. The publishing industry has been reluctant to criticize libraries and their e-book systems because of the cherished status libraries hold in communities. But some publishing executives said privately that they found the development troubling and were concerned it might lead to a further unraveling of the traditional sales model. As e-books have taken off with readers, libraries have been building their e-book collections to meet demand, successfully persuading many publishers to sell their titles to libraries in e-book format. Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulating operations at the New York Public Library, said that to meet demand from Kindle users, the library has already moved more money into the e-book budget and changed its default lending period for e-books from three weeks to two weeks. “This is massive for libraries,” Mr. Platt said. “It opens up another avenue of access to the collections that we already have.” From January to September the number of e-books checked out increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, he added. About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries. There are usually rules attached to checking out e-books. Publishers have said that libraries must treat digital collections the same way they treat physical collections: if a library buys 10 copies of a certain book, for instance, then only 10 copies can be digitally checked out at one time. Library patrons appreciate not having to visit a physical library to access e-books, which can be downloaded remotely from home or on the road. That convenience has publishers worried that e-reader owners who used to buy digital books will begin instead to borrow them. At least two of the six major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, do not make their e-books available to libraries. “Our e-books are not currently available in libraries because we haven’t yet found a business model with which we are comfortable and that we feel properly addresses the long-term interests of our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster. “We are in an ongoing dialogue with our library customers, and holding meetings with the different vendors who are offering e-book distribution to libraries, so that we can stay abreast of all the possible options.” I can’t emphasize enough what HUGE news this is. If library ebook lending takes off as much as it can (and SHOULD, given the increased number of ebook buyers who own the Kindle), this could radically change the publishing industry and role and culture of libraries.
In E-Books, Publishers Have Rivals: News Sites
Book publishers are surrounded by hungry new competitors: Amazon, with its steadily growing imprints; authors who publish their own e-books; online start-ups like The Atavist and Byliner.
Swiftly and at little cost, newspapers, magazines and sites like The Huffington Post are hunting for revenue by publishing their own version of e-books, either using brand-new content or repurposing material that they may have given away free in the past.
And by making e-books that are usually shorter, cheaper to buy and more quickly produced than the typical book, they are redefining what an e-book is — and who gets to publish it.
On Tuesday, The Huffington Post will release its second e-book, “How We Won,” by Aaron Belkin, the story of the campaign to end the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. It joins e-books recently published by The New Yorker, ABC News, The Boston Globe, Politico and Vanity Fair.
The books occasionally snap up valuable spots on best-seller lists — “Open Secrets,” an e-book published by The New York Times, landed in the No. 19 spot on The Times e-book nonfiction best-seller list in February.
“Surely they’re competing with us,” said Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company, part of Macmillan. “If I’m doing a book on Rupert Murdoch and four magazines are doing four instant e-books on Rupert Murdoch, then I’m competing with them.”
Definitely a competitor I would not have anticipated!
Hybrid Books: 'Illuminations' And The Future Of The E-Reader
..What is worth fighting for in the new landscape is not printed matter itself (which will likely survive either way, as a rarified collectible even if nothing else), but the preservation of reading as a special act.
What’s really in danger is the unique bond between book and reader; a pact that is sealed with an artifact to prove the connection — the creases and marginalia we leave on physical books show that we were there; a human touched and absorbed these words. What’s lacking from the digital experience is this sense of ownership and a concrete relationship with the material. E-books lead to a grand flattening of the titles we read.War and Peace on a Kindle weighs as much to lug around as The Sun Also Rises. A reader takes the same clicking actions to purchase Danielle Steel as she does to buy Homer. The web is one big, fluorescent superstore where every title exists in equal and judgment-free aisles, and we have the whole store to ourselves.
This shift has, in many ways, infused democracy into the reading process. It allows for self-published authors to rise along with those minted by major houses, and it frees customers to stock up on the genre fiction that they might have otherwise been embarrassed to bring up to the counter at an indie bookstore. But what we sacrifice, that spark of excitement when opening a new book for the first time, that moment we seal the pact — it’s that thrill that cements many a young reader’s lifelong love of books, and it is a lot to lose.
So how do we make reading an extraordinary experience in the age of flattened text? This is a question that many publishers and authors are trying to answer right now, not only to keep up profit margins, but to preserve the energy that got them into the business in the first place.
One new idea, which comes from the Brooklyn independent publisher Melville House, is that of the “Hybrid Book.” The idea, says publisher Dennis Johnson, is to both distinguish the Melville House e-reading experience from others, and also to push paper books by offering a little something extra on the top. The program, which launched in August, adds the equivalent of DVD extras to books in packages called “Illuminations.”
Often the Illuminations are longer than the book itself, stuffed full of illustrations, maps, articles, photographs and historical documents. It’s the kind of trove of information you might find if, after reading, you decided to Google everything you could about the author and the book’s subject. Melville House has simply run the search for you, and is hoping you’ll find their curated findings to be frosting on top of the text. They’re offering the Illuminations via QR code, e-pub file, PDF — and if that doesn’t work, you can e-mail a member of Melville House’s staff. As Johnson says, “If you want to get the materials, we willfind a way to get them to you.”
The idea is interesting in that it provides a bridge between the e-book and print copies (both come with “Illuminations”), and gives booksellers on the frontlines more ammunition to use when trying to push physical books. But it’s also meant to make the e-book experience feel differentiated, and to give the reader the sense that a person (in this case, one of Melville House’s editorial staff) lovingly selected the companion materials and is presenting them directly to you. If it works, it can create another kind of pact.
“The best publishers going into this transition are the ones that are not trying to change the experience, but are going to create new delivery systems that enhance the experience,” says Dennis Johnson. “Reading has always been a social act, has always been about influencing you as you go out into the world. The Hybrid Book is social as well. It’s a person giving you a gift of extra information. There’s nothing to be afraid of with digital media if you think of ways to maintain an organic experience.”
How To Copy, Paste & Share Your Kindle Highlights
Over the weekend, Kindle users noticed Amazon’s quietly launched social network. Back in February, we published a quick tutorial about how to use this basic network on your Kindle–below, we’ve listed five easy steps to copy, paste, and print your highlights and notes from inside Kindle eBooks. Amazon has been building a number of social networking tools into the Kindle, including public profiles and the ability to share highlights with other readers. These new tools also make it easy to share, copy, and paste your notes. Click the link for a how-to.
Pottermore defends selling e-books directly
Retailers hit out at J K Rowling’s decision to sell the Harry Potter e-books directly through her Pottermore website, which will launch in October. A Pottermore spokesperson said: “Pottermore is designed to encourage the reading and re-reading of the Harry Potter books in all formats and editions, both print and digital, to both existing and new generations of readers. We think this will have a positive effect on those selling physical books as well as on sales of digital ones.” He added: “The decision to make e-books exclusive to the site was to ensure ease of availability across all reading devices and to the widest possible audience and also to support the ultimate intention of the site to be an online reading experience.” Among the retailers who attacked the Pottermore plans was Waterstone’s. A spokesman for the chain said last week: “We always sought to add value for the fans when a new Harry Potter book was released and their launch days have become the stuff of legend at Waterstone’s and other booksellers. “We’re therefore disappointed that, having been a key factor in the growth of the Harry Potter phenomenon since the first book was published, the book trade is effectively banned from selling the long-awaited e-book editions of the series.”
College students’ use of Kindle DX points to e-reader’s role in academia
The researchers interviewed 39 first-year graduate students in the UW’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering, 7 women and 32 men, ranging from 21 to 53 years old. By spring quarter of 2010, seven months into the study, less than 40 percent of the students were regularly doing their academic reading on the Kindle DX. Reasons included the device’s lack of support for taking notes and difficulty in looking up references. (Amazon Corp., which makes the Kindle DX, has since improved some of these features.) UW researchers continued to interview all the students over the nine-month period to find out more about their reading habits, with or without the e-reader. They found: Lee predicts that over time software will help address some of these issues. She even envisions niche software that could support reading styles specific to certain disciplines. “You can imagine that a historian going through illuminated texts is going to have very different navigation needs than someone who is comparing algorithms,” Lee said. It’s likely that desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and yes, even paper, will play a role in academic reading’s future. But the authors say e-readers will also find their place. Thayer imagines the situation will be similar to today’s music industry, where mp3s, CDs and LPs all coexist in music-lovers’ listening habits. “E-readers are not where they need to be in order to support academic reading,” Lee concludes. But asked when e-readers will reach that point, she predicts: “It’s going to be sooner than we think.”
Amazon sets deal for e-book loaners
Amazon’s service also will be available through its free Kindle app on other handheld devices, such as the iPad and Android phones, among others.
It will not be a free-for-all, however, as library card holders will still have to wait for high-demand titles. For instance, at the New York Public Library, if a member orders an e-book, others wait on a list until that digital version is free again.
That list can get awfully long. Yesterday, the most popular title at the NYPL was Harlan Coben’s mystery novel “Caught,” with more than 275 people on the waiting list.
E-books do eliminate late fees, however, as loans expire after a given timeframe — usually three weeks. The Kindle also allows readers to take digital notes.
Amazon said the library option would launch this year, but it didn’t give a precise date.
Not all publishers are on board, however. HarperCollins, which like The Post, is owned by News Corp., has set a limit of 26 for the amount of times a digital version of one of its books can be borrowed before a library has to buy a new one. Simon & Schuster and Macmillan don’t participate in library e-lending.
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