What if the Kindle were free?

What would happen to print and e-book sales if the Kindle e-reader were distributed for free? The idea that e-readers could come with no cost in the near future isn’t out of the question, given that Kindle prices are dropping precipitously – today, the cheapest (ad-supported) Kindle costs only $79 in the U.S., down from $359 in 2009.

Bloggers and tech sites have speculated about free Kindles from the beginning, some pegging the date for the change as early as next month. This week, San Francisco Web 2.0 blog GigaOM suggested that free Kindles could be a good thing for writers.

For example, content like Kindle Singles – “not-quite-books [that] can be written and uploaded by anyone” – could get greater exposure if more people owned a Kindle. From GigaOM:

Offering a free – or ad-supported – Kindle would presumably just provide even more of an avenue for these kinds of books to reach readers, and that in turn could (theoretically at least) make it possible for more writers to make a living from their writing.

There’s also the argument that free Kindles could boost the use of new apps and services – for a price. GigaOM writes:

A free Kindle could be just the beginning of an explosion of book-like content from Amazon and others: The company is already talking about a “Netflix for books” that would offer content for a monthly fee. Why not offer a subscription to an author, so I can automatically get whatever he or she writes, regardless of length or format? … I’d be willing to bet more people would read more as a result.

Book links round-up: Mistry wins Neustadt Prize, a wordless book, and more

• Rohinton Mistry wins the University of Oklahoma’s $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature
• Ontario author Mark Zelinski publishes an untitled, wordless photography book to distribute to children’s charities
• Australian industry analysis singles out Indigo for successfully promoting books as a “lifestyle”
• Lack of access to video streaming and cloud storage make Amazon’s Kindle Fire unlikely to take off in Canada

Amazon launches new family of Kindles

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a new lineup of four Kindle e-readers this morning at a press conference in New York City. All will streamline the process of buying and reading books, with the capstone device being the WiFi-only tablet, Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire ($199) provides access to books, movies, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, games, and more with a colour touch screen. It uses a new browser called Amazon Silk, designed to load Web content rapidly, and provides free data storage in the Amazon Cloud. Kindle Fire also costs less than the iPad.

Other devices unveiled today include:

• The latest generation Kindle ($79), weighing under 6 ounces and designed to fit in your pocket.
• The Kindle Touch ($99), with a touch screen for turning pages or interacting with the new X-Ray feature, which instantly pulls up pre-downloaded reference material such as Wikipedia entries.
• The Kindle Touch 3G ($149), with all the elements of the current model as well as free wireless Internet access in 100 countries without a monthly fee or contract.

Prices are in U.S. dollars, with no word yet on what the new Kindles will cost or when they will be released in Canada.

In the September 2011 issue of Q&Q: Guy Vanderhaeghe completes his iconic Western trilogy

Q&Q speaks to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Saskatoon author Guy Vanderhaeghe about the final book in his Western trilogy, the ambitious A Good Man.

Also in September, rekindling interest in history with high-profile political biographies, a look at independent U.S. bookstore e-book sales, and touring the country with Doug Gibson. Plus reviews of new books by Brian Francis, David Gilmour, Marina Endicott, and more.

FEATURES
A good guy
After nearly two decades, Guy Vanderhaeghe has completed his iconic Western trilogy – and now he’s ready to move on

Raising the dead white men
Can a handful of high-profile political biographies rekindle interest in Canadian history?

E-reading’s awkward embrace
If the experience of U.S. indies is anything to go by, Canadian booksellers gearing up to begin selling e-books should expect some bumps along the road

FRONTMATTER
Orphaned Key Porter authors take back control of their work
How digital technology has put audiobooks within reach of small presses
In memoriam: Robert Kroetsch
Montreal violin-maker Tom Wilder turns publisher
Snapshot: Knopf Random Canada executive vice-president and publisher Louise Dennys
Cover to cover: R.T. Naylor’s Crass Struggle
Touring the country with Doug Gibson
Guest opinion: Rolf Maurer on rethinking the role of the arts

REVIEWS
Natural Order by Brian Francis
The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour
The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott
Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis
Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Starfall by Diana Kolpak; Kathleen Finlay, photog.
No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
First Descent by Pam Withers
The Busy Beaver by Nicholas Oldland
Once Every Never by Lesley Livingston

PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Greenpeace International’s Tzeporah Berman on finding a balance between her own voice and that of the organization she represents

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E-book apps for Apple lose e-bookstore links

Big changes are underway in the e-book app world. Since Saturday, iOS (Apple’s operating system for mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) apps for Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Amazon’s Kindle have been updated to remove e-bookstore features and links to external online e-book stores such as kobobooks.com. The Google eBooks app, which has been available in the U.S. App Store since December 2010 (although unavailable in Canada) has been removed from Apple’s App Store and iTunes entirely.

The updates follow Apple’s weekend warning to Kobo regarding compliance with latest App Store rules. The Wall Street Journal (which will soon remove all purchasing options from its own app) reports:

Mike Serbinis, Kobo’s chief executive, said Apple told Kobo Saturday that it could no longer operate its digital bookstore from its Kobo apps and had to stop selling e-books directly through them. Kobo subsequently altered the apps so that they no longer sell digital titles.

Now Kobo customers who want to buy digital books via their Apple devices will have to visit www.kobobooks.com via Apple’s Safari browser to make their purchases, a potentially more laborious process for customers used to buying e-books directly through a Kobo app. Customers will continue to be able to access and read Kobo-purchased books from their library on various Apple devices.

Apple first announced the new App Store rules, which strictly forbid in-app links redirecting customers to online e-bookstores, in February and set a June 30 deadline for compliance. Apple’s enforcement of this policy comes as a surprise since the tech company dropped some of their original conditions last month, and the cutoff date came and went without much change to existing apps. From WSJ:

Apple in February laid out new terms for companies wanting to sell digital content via its devices. Apple said that companies selling digital media, including books, needed to make that content available for sale via an app, rather than through a link within the app to an outside website. As part of the change, which was aimed at giving Apple more control over the business, Apple said it would take 30 per cent of each sale.

In June, Apple appeared to relax those rules in content companies’ favour, giving them more freedom over pricing and selling their content. Apple dropped its requirement that any content sold outside the App Store also had to be available inside the store at the same price or less, with Apple taking its cut.

The updates to these e-reading/e-bookstore apps mean content providers maintain ownership over customer information and avoid cutting Apple into 30 per cent of a sale. Ultimately though, it makes purchasing e-books for Apple devices less user-friendly, which, unless Quillblog is mistaken, is a big part of the appeal of Apple devices and e-readers in the first place.

Book links round-up: Neil Gaiman’s defence, Babstock at the DMV, and more

• Neil Gaiman fights back against accusations that he’s a thieving “pencil-necked little weasel”
• Happy foot, sad foot: how the podiatry sign became a literary symbol
• William T. Vollmann’s new Kindle single is filled with danger
• Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu reinvents Kerouac
• Director Jean Seaton says the theme of this year’s Orwell Prize shortlist is fear
• VIDEO: Poetry fan recites Ken Babstock’s “To Inflame the Civic Temper” at the DMV, courtesy of How Pedestrian

Book links round-up: Winter, Donoghue make Orange shortlist, Crummey’s IMPAC nod, and more

• Kathleen Winter and Emma Donoghue shortlisted for 2011 Orange Prize; judge declares women’s writing in “rude health”
• Michael Crummey’s Galore is the only Canadian novel on the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist
• Winnipeg artist Ray Fenwick transforms used book covers into typographical art
• What your favourite childhood book says about you now
• This link brought to you by Amazon’s cheaper model Kindle, now with ad content

Daily links round-up: Free Kindles, James Frey, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Robert Fulford on the “long service in the trench warfare of editing” of Oxford University Press’s William Toye
• The Association of American Publishers reports a staggering 116 per cent increase in e-book sales in January, but most other categories are down
• The British government downplays concerns that legal protections for U.K. libraries are under threat
• As Borders outlines downsizing, Australia’s RedGroup Retail lays off 26 head-office staff
• The battle to get Amazon to collect sales taxes in the U.S. is heating up; plus, is the free Kindle just around the corner?
• The New York Times launches new paywall in Canada today; the rest of the world will have to wait until March 28
• Salon’s Laura Miller on James Frey’s latest contrived controversy

Aussie readers asked for input about future of publishing

Last week, the Internet behemoth Google launched its e-book sales site, Google eBooks, in the U.S. The e-book market is now crowded with offerings from Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Sony, which in turn has spawned a cottage industry for articles about the future of reading and the future of publishing. Amid all this cacophony, it’s small wonder publishers have responded to the rapidly diversifying marketplace with a mixture of fear and confusion.

In Australia, a consortium called the Book Industry Strategy Group is directly petitioning readers about their reading habits, desires, and preferences as a way of gaining clearer insights into the way forward. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Barry Jones, chair of the BISG, states that the group is “seeking ideas from all Australians on how to face the challenges of the digital age, and to turn them into opportunities.” Jones suggests that opportunities lie in the flexibility and ready availability of e-books as against their print counterparts:

Where Amazon and Apple have got it right is the immediacy of purchasing an eBook. Both the Kindle and the iPad come with wireless connectivity to the Amazon and Apple stores, respectively. In the case of the Kindle, if you have an Amazon account, the Kindle comes preconfigured with your details so you can buy a book at 3am if you so desire. New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton calls this Me Economics, which is really just instant gratification in book buying. But it beats late-night television.

And although Jones throws a bone to those of us who still enjoy reading printed books (which he refers to as “pBooks”), it is clear that the digital arena is where he and his group are most invested:

And what about people who like the smell of books or the feel of books, or the cover artwork, or who just want to scribble over the pages? No, these sorts of people will mix up their reading habits and buy both pBooks and eBooks.

Public libraries are starting to offer access to eBooks via downloads or by access, by borrowers, to subscriptions taken out by the library. We want to hear about these initiatives and your experiences with them.

School kids will agree that carrying an eReader with all their textbooks on it beats carrying a heavy school bag with all their textbooks in it. And textbooks form a large part of the book industry in Australia. Can we hear your thoughts?

The public can submit comments and suggestions to the BISG until Jan. 31, 2011. One hopes that they will be slightly more innovative and nuanced than the sort of shopworn analysis Jones allows himself above.

Amazon gives authors more reason to doubt themselves

Agents everywhere shuddered and screened their calls today as Amazon.com allowed authors to view their own sales data from Nielsen’s BookScan. A handy map of the U.S. highlights how many copies in each state have sold. From the L.A. Times:

The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.

BookScan’s sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.

Authors who use Amazon’s Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.

This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn’t been cheap. Nielsen’s BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.

It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.