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.

New media “unconference” in Toronto this weekend

It can be a little tricky staying on top of the latest in new and social media these days. A few hours at PodCamp Toronto this weekend could be time well-spent in figuring out how to make better use of these tools for your business.

On Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 at Ryerson University, the self-described “unconference” will bring together hundreds of professional and amateur Web content producers and online community-builders – writers, bloggers, digital publishers, e-commerce professionals, Web designers, photographers, and podcasters among them. The event has dozens of free sessions, a number of which might be of interest to publishing professionals. Saturday is particularly meaty, with presentations on copyright and social media, social media trends for business, the legalities of blog advertising, online reputation management, core messaging, plus a roundtable on e-book trends, and a panel discussion on community management (a.k.a. online customer service). The schedule is available at the PodCamp Toronto 2011 website. Though the conference is free, there is a registration process.

Last year’s event attracted nearly 900 participants. A video archive of sessions from 2010 is available here.

Bookmarks: The Advent Book Blog helps you shop, The National Post picks a shadow Canada Reads list, and more

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio‘s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

Tweet your way to literary stardom

In the latest race-to-the-bottom trend of cultural idiocy, books composed of Tweets by users of the popular website Twitter seem to be catching on. HarperCollins’ new imprint, IT Books, is publishing one, called Twitter Wit, but, according to GalleyCat, they’ve been beaten to the punch by a self-published author named James Bridle. Described as an “e-book pioneer,” Bridle has produced the volume, entitled My Life in Tweets, using the online print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

Admitting that most of the book “doesn’t mean anything” to anyone other than the author, Bridle says that he was interested in preserving the collected wisdom of two years’ worth of 140-character musings:

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really.

The book covers the period between Feb. 2007 and ’09 and, in what is either a display of unbridled optimism or pure narcissism, the cover claims it’s Volume I.

On the (online) shelf

Ordering books online may be old hat by now, but along comes the next manifestation of the Web 2.0 bookstore: Zoomii.com (the Canuck version is at zoomii.ca), a nifty new online application that marries the ease of online ordering with the fun of browsing through a bookstore.

The ArsTechnica blog explains:

Zoomii, in a nutshell, is a visual bookshelf browser for over 19,000 books from Amazon’s catalog, though it can search for over 162,000 titles. Instead of browsing through flat lists of book titles and their cold statistics, Zoomii stacks books in shelves alphabetically by author, organized by genre. You can click and drag across Zoomii’s landscape of shelves, zoom in and out with your scrollwheel, and click a book’s cover for basic statistics from Amazon, including the ability to add the book to your cart or wishlist. We aren’t quite sure how Zoomii picks the books that stock its shelves, but some kind of system that picks through a combination of top sellers and new releases is a safe bet.

[…] Zoomii’s attempt to bring the bookshelf back to the online bookstore experience is a novel – and mostly successful – experience. Scrolling across Zoomii’s shelves is snappy, and book images render in crisp detail surprisingly quickly. Clicking a book’s cover displays a higher-res version and plenty of details instantly, and all refreshingly without a single drop of Flash.

The blog goes on to point out that, surprisingly, Amazon itself hasn’t actually scooped up Zoomii – the site is the brainchild of a single developer, Chris Thiessen, who worked on the project for two years in an “attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.”

Show fever becomes Web fever

As BookExpo America kicks off in New York City, the L.A. Times has a brief writeup on the U.S.’s annual convention and trade show. And it seems that publishers are going in with Web 2.0 on their minds. “I think MySpace and You Tube and all the blogs are really the coming thing now,” Penguin CEO David Shanks tells the Times, which also notes that MySpace is hosting a panel on networking and is also a BEA sponsor. No mention of the allegedly ubiquitous Facebook, though as we’re constantly being told, that one is for some reason a particularly Canadian fave.