eReader for iPhone

And it’s out:

eReader Pro for iPhone and iPod touch
JUST RELEASED! eReader Pro for iPhone and iPod touch is an award-winning application used to read eReader eBooks on your Apple iPhone or iPod touch

Haven’t looked into this closely yet, but it looks like I’m going to have to buy a iPhone 3G if the hacks for my old faithful don’t materialise soon…

Borders Sold

It appears that Borders Australian operations have been bought by Angus and Robertson (well, at least by the people who run A&R). Those who followed the A&R saga from last year will no doubt be dismayed, despite the assurances of the new bosses:

ARW group managing director Ian Draper said the Borders business was complementary to the company’s existing assets, with no plans to change the format of the existing stores.

“It’s a model which has proven popular in the local market, and targets a different demographic with its premium format and wide range of products,” he said.

Kindle on fire… ??

Amazon users today saw an interesting open letter from Jeff Bezos apologising for the delay in kindle shipping. According to Bezos, the ebook reader that can has seen staggering demand, and Amazon just can’t make enough of them, quickly enough. The wait list is now about 6 weeks, and this kind of news tallies with anecdotal suggestions that the kindle is outselling the Sony reader (its most obvious direct competition). Actual sales figures would be nice - and I still don’t see kindle as being *the* killer device. But it is another step in that journey of a thousand clichés. More discussion at Engadget.

Apparently, every (Anti)Book should have a DVD

Last night I went to the Sydney launch of (Formula One driver) Jackie Stewart’s autobiography. It was a weird night on a number of fronts and a bit of a throwback to my early childhood when he was *the* motor racing hero of an impressionable seven year old. The night consisted of an hour long DVD, a half hour chat from the wee scot himself and some Q&A from an adoring (and largely old, over 50) audience of over 700 people. What Sir Jackie had to say about the book itself was kind of interesting though. Apparently, it comes bundled with a DVD (the one  we watched) and he reckoned that “every book should come with a DVD”. He went on to recount a conversation with Frederick Forsyth and his suggestion that Forsyth’s new novel (The Afghan) would be improved if footage of the scenery and backdrops he described were included on a disk.Personally, I don’t think that’s not what books are about. For me the whole idea of books is so that readers can engage with the text and ideas in ways that overt imagery do not allow. Maybe it works for celebrity autobigraphies (although Sir Jackie’s DVD was mind-numbingly banal) and other forms of antibooks, but not for the real mccoy.The other interesting discussion revolved around how Sir Jackie had promoted his book; essentially doing a huge number of events (on a rock-star like tour bus) and piling journalists with free goodies. He recounted how his publisher initially baulked, but then releneted when he pointed out that the entire promotion would be *sponsored* by the likes of Rolex and Moet et Chandon, his long time associates. The suggestion seemed to be that *this* was the direction that publishing ought to take; that it was mired in old-fashioned thinking and ideas like DVDs and corporate sponsorship were a natural fit with books. To prove the point, he pointed out that he had sold over 200,000 copies.I have no problem with any of those ideas and approached. Unless it’s done at the expense of all those other things that books are about. So go ahead and produce DVDs and introduce corporate sponsorship. But don’t do all those antibook things at the expense of real books things.And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’d better read my book :-) 

Community pricing

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference came and went, and there’s an interesting snippet that I forgot to blog. Tim O’Reilly describes how Logos Bible software is leveraging the web to make viable publishing decisions. Firstly, they build a business model, then email their 500,000 strong mailing list, inviting registrations of interest and pre-orders. Only when there is enough commitment from potential readers does the company proceed with the project. Real market research then I guess. The other interesting thing they do is what they call community pricing. O’Reilly describes it like this:

Here, they expose the price curve to their users, letting users choose the price they are willing to pay. Once the price crosses the line that allows them to cover their costs, they give that “best price” to their pre-order customers (regardless of which price they actually chose when voting.) They then raise the price to the point on the curve that shows best profit for Logos, for customers who weren’t part of the original subscription.  

 

It’s a novel (sorry) way of thinking about how to use an existing community of users to make business decisions.

Books by the Chapter

Another one from the O’Reilly conference. Whilst a model that has been in play in the textbook market for a while, selling books by the chapter hasn’t really hit the trade press. Until now - Random House has announced that it will sell individual chapters of the book “Made to Stick.” I’m not convinced that chapter sales are a panacea for books - what works for singles/albums in the music realm doesn’t necessarily cut it for chapters/books. For education it makes sense, but I’m the first to make a passionate defence for the ‘complete book’. It’s hard to think of a single book that is done justice by reading a mere chapter.Making sample chapters available for free as a marketing teaser might make some sense - but unlike most music albums which are padded with filler, a good book needs every chapter it has to make its case. My five cents

Reality Check

Latest idpf figures on wholesale sales of ebooks in the USA make for sobering reading. Whilst there is some growth (sony and kindle anybody), sales for the last quarter top out at around 8 million dollars. That’s million with a ‘m’. Barely a rounding error on a rounding error for the multi-billion (that’s billion with a ‘b’) printed book publishing industry.Teleread has its take on this and places much of the responsibility on print publishers, who don’t (as well as being paranoid about copyright infringements) appear to have embraced an e-culture:

Many traditional book people are uncomfortable with tech and the mechanics of transferring books from machine to machine and among different brands. Perhaps they think all consumers are the same. Not so. Young people, especially, plan to trade up to new machines and move books around on their existing ones–overwhelmingly without piracy in mind.  

 

Like I say in the book, cultural change is *much* harder than technological change. But it does happen - and those who drive the change are often the ones who benefit the most. 

EeePC First Impressions

I got my hands on an Asus EeePC last night - the little subnotebook computer that has some geeks salivating. It’s smaller than a trade paperback (although it’s pretty heavy) so I’ll be having a closer look at it to see if it hits the mark as that ideal “multi-purpose computing device that makes a good ebook reader.”First impressions were positive - the whole family thought it was really cute - and the five year old wanted one for himself right away. But after spending a couple of hours playing, my instinct is that it’s not the one. It’s cheap (around $500 here in Oz) and it feels like it - the trackpad and mouse button don’t scream ‘quality’ and the seven-inch screen means you have to scroll around to see entire web pages. I kept wanting to touch and slide the screen like on my iphone, but couldn’t :-)That said, it browsed the web happily (Playhouse Disney flash animations worked fine!) and its Linux OS was stable, if not the snappiest thing in the world. What I missed was attention to detail - the typography in the pdf reader was not hugely impressive, and after an hour or so of playing, the thing just felt ‘clunky’. And by then the battery was flat and I had to stop and recharge. (To be fair, it wasndidn’t have a full charge when I started.)I kept comparing it to my seven year old Psion Series 7,  which (still) goes all day on a charge, and has a bigger screen (albeit not as bright and with a lower resolution); and my iphone – which is infinitely more usable and made much better use of its much smaller screen (see the Edward Tufte video here.)But that’s first impressions. I’ll spend some time with it and get back to you. If I can tear it away from the kids :-) 

Google fingered :-)

Check this link from O’Reilly Radar. We all know that google is busy scanning the world’s books for us (!) which probably means that there’s hundreds of underpaid call-centre refugees scanning and flipping pages 24/7. Here’s a lovely photo of someone mistiming the process, just a little bit!

The Rise of the Celebrity Novel

Now that Christmas is upon us (and making demands of blog-time), a reminder about which books really sell. It’s an old link, but The Guardian noted a couple of months ago that Jordan’s novel is outselling the entire Booker Prize shortlist:

…[model and wife of Australian singer peter Andre] Jordan’s contribution to the world of fiction, Crystal (159,407 sold and counting), is outselling the whole of the Booker shortlist (120,770 in total)…

I haven’t read Crystal, so probably should refrain from commenting specifically, but apparently these celebrity novels allow more freedom to ’speak freely’ than an (auto)biography might:

The history of celebrity novelists is not a noble one. But whereas William Shatner (sci-fi, surprisingly) and Ethan Hawke (self-obsessed twaddle, surprisingly) took themselves relatively seriously, the new generation of celebrity novels offer a more voyeuristic appeal.

Only really relevant because today I was chatting with a colleague who was lamenting the lack of attention given to some titles - none of the local bookshops stocked (or had even heard of) a scholarly collection on the war on terror. I’m sure they would have found room for Jordan though