eBooks and the Library

David Vinjamuri, writing at Forbes, points out that how libraries lend books will change as more and more people read eBooks. The problem is that neither pricing nor usage has stabilized  as a result, libraries are spending a significant amount of money on eBooks that a limited (but growing!) amount of patrons use, and publishers are looking to charge higher prices - and dictate more limitations - for eBooks than they do for printed books. Money quote:

For better or worse, Big Six publishers are unlikely to adopt a pricing model for eBooks that mirrors how print books are sold to libraries.  But current pricing and lending restrictions unfairly penalize libraries to the detriment of publishers and readers.  A system based on actual use would more fairly allocate cost and risk as long as eBooks are not governed by the First Sale doctrine.

Personally, despite reading more and more eBooks, I use the library less and less because I don't really understand the lending process and so few eBooks are available for lending. It's a problem that will need to be solved at some point, between the lack of eBooks at the library, the question about what happens to eBooks when an account goes dormant, and other factors, a real availability issue may be starting to take shape.

H/t to the Dish for pointing out the article. Also interesting at the Dish is the reading trends graphic.

Bequething eBooks

Something I've never thought about before: when you die, what happens to your eBooks? Turns out, they might not be able to be passed onto your next-of-kin like the physical objects:

...with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files — but they don’t actually own them. Apple and Amazon.com grant “nontransferable” rights to use content, so if you buy the complete works of the Beatles on iTunes, you cannot give the “White Album” to your son and “Abbey Road” to your daughter.
According to Amazon’s terms of use, “You do not acquire any ownership rights in the software or music content.” Apple limits the use of digital files to Apple devices used by the account holder.

I knew something was fishy with eBooks because of the tight restrictions in loaning them out that obviously don't exist on physical objects, but this is even more disturbing. Part of the fun of building up a library is knowing that it's yours and that you can do with it what you will. Or is this just scaremongering? I have a hard time believing that someone who has a collection of 1000 eBooks won't be able to pass some of those along to his kids. After all, couldn't they just use the original account to access the content?

What do you think?

Nookd in War and Peace

Alyssa pointed me to this article by Saul Tannenbaum which detailed how "Barnes & Noble’s formatter, converting War and Peace for the Nook from a Kindle edition “changed every instance of ‘kindle’ or ‘kindled’ into ‘Nook’ and ‘Nookd’" Both Alyssa and Tannenbaum astutely lift the conversation from an  amusing antidote on the incompetence of profit-focused corporations (OMG classic being butchered!) to a larger issue of quality that even I, in my short time reading eBooks, have noticed. Many of the books that i've read on the kindle suffer from quality issues that I just don't see in printed books - from typos, to formatting issues. Just last night, an entire paragraph of 2313 was presented in italics when it most clearly should have not been. It's a serious problem in the industry, and one that I doubt will get better any time soon, given the eBook price wars.

I also think there's a bigger opportunity being lost to build some true interactivity into books. To choose just one example, hyperlinking in the books i've read - so far limited to footnoting - is awkward at best and unusable at worst. Given the advances is book building technology - see this demonstration of Creative Book Builder to see just one of the tools out there - I feel that we should be aiming for something more in our eBooks, not just a pale imitation of what is usually better presented on the printed page.

DRM-free SciFi

Boing Boing reports that:

"Today, Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, announced that henceforth all of its ebooks would be completely DRM-free. This comes six weeks after an antitrust action against Tor's parent company, Macmillan USA, for price-fixing in relation to its arrangements with Apple and Amazon."

The author things that this might be the start of the demand for DRM-free books, noting that

"Now that there is a major publisher that has gone completely DRM-free (with more to follow, I'm sure; I've had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers), there is suddenly a market for tools that automate the conversion and loading of ebooks from multiple formats and vendors. For example, I'd expect someone to make a browser plugin that draws a "Buy this book at BN.com" button on Amazon pages (and vice-versa), which then facilitates auto-conversion between the formats. I'd also expect BN.com to produce a "switch" toolkit for Kindle owners who want to go Nook (and vice-versa)."

While it sounds hyperbolistic, it would be really nice if one really had freedom of devices. Hell, i'd be happy with the ability to loan out your books from one device to another, even on a limited time basis. Here's hoping that this news will take us one step closer to that world!

Related Posts:
Kindles, Collusion, and Copy Protection

Broken Kindle

 The fire has gone out of my Kindle.  Its death was announced by random horizontal and vertical lines across the screen, with sections of the screen that would not refresh. 

The same thing happened to my wife nearly a year ago.  At the time, her Kindle was still under warranty, so Amazon promptly sent her a new one.  I have no such luck.

Since it is no longer under warranty, I figured I'd open up the back and see what it had going on inside.  That big white brick is the battery.  No wonder it got such nice battery life.  It looks like it is upside down, but in fact I am holding the device right side up.  The positioning is odd.  If they were to move it toward the bottom, the Kindle would be less top heavy, and would "feel" lighter to the reader.  Perhaps this is different in the new models.

I've enjoyed my Kindle plenty, and the new models are even nicer.  So, I am happily buying another. But when you consider the cost of replacing the hardware every few years, Kindles do not make book reading less expensive.  They just make it more convenient. 

Kindles, Collusion, and Copy Protection

NPR gives us a good history of the recent governmental ruling against Apple and several book publishers for price collusion, and makes this prediction:

“No matter what the outcome of this mountain of federal and state litigation, the agency model [an agreement that allowed publishers to set the same price for digital books across all online marketplaces.], in its present form, is dead. Within the next month, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other e-book retailers will undoubtedly mount a fierce price war for control of this new market. Publishers will bemoan the loss of the tool for preventing predatory pricing, brick-and-mortar booksellers will struggle to compete in the digital marketplace, and cash-strapped book buyers will cheer the competitive prices.”

The article also claims that: “The model may be moribund, but [successful in that] customers no longer think of $9.99 as the only possible price for an e-book. We regularly pay everything from 99 cents to $14.99 for a best-selling e-book.”

This is interesting and all, and I’m looking forward to being able to pick up some ebooks at rock bottom prices. However, I was surprised to not to see anything in the lawsuit about the ability of ebook manufacturers to look their customers into devices. It turns out that I’m not alone: Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing points out that “Every dollar that is spent on a locked, proprietary platform is a dollar of opportunity cost that society will have to spend to get out from under the would-be monopolists of ebooks when (not if) they abuse their power (see my latest PW column on this)."

Frustrating! I guess this came about because the publishing industry, the device came before the format. Thus, if you buy a book on your Kindle, you can’t read it on an iPad or Nook and vice versa. This is opposed to the consumer win in the music industry, where the format for sharing music (mp3s) came before the portable devices that you would use to listen to the devices. Thus, any device that wanted to be successful needed to be able to play mp3s that you could pick up anywhere.

I love my kindle, but amazon's market power and being frozen into one device does makes me nervous. Interesting to see how this will play itself out.

Kindle Nation: What We're Reading

Thumbing through the The New York Times Book Review this morning, I was surprised by how different the e-book best seller lists are from the print best seller lists.

In particular, the fiction list is dominated by titles such as this week's best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey, described on the list in this way:

An inexperienced college student falls in love with a tortured man who has particular sexual tastes.

Of course there are certain titles which are very inexpensive, or perhaps only available, in e-book format.  An example of the latter would be the #17  best seller, Western Ties:

When Leah Hollister flies to Los Angeles to take part in the bondage scene, she unexpectedly connects with her high school crush, Sawyer Compton.

But that doesn't explain books such as the #4 e-book best seller, Fair Game, which costs $12.99 on the Kindle, compared to $11.33 in paperback -- yet appears nowhere on the paperback best seller lists.  It is described in this way:

Two werewolves, an Alpha and an Omega, help the F.B.I. track a serial killer who is murdering preternatural beings.

Similarly, what to make of Taking a Shot (#20), which is $9.99 on Kindle and $8.52 in paperback, but again, only appears on the e-book list:

Will Jenna Riley, who's reluctantly running family's sports bar, decide to live for herself -- and does that include getting involved with a handsome pro hockey player?  

Some of the reasons may have to do with marketing.  But more significantly, I suspect that there are certain categories of books that people want to read but do not want to be seen with.  On a Kindle, nobody knows what you are reading.

Kindle Covers

The more I use my kindle, the more I think that amazon missed out on something really slick. Rather than one of their generic screensavers - which admitably are pretty cool! - I think that they should display a random book cover on the screen when the device is off. Along with the items I listed here, I'm really missing seeing the cover of the book every time I pick it up to start reading. Perhaps with the next kindle OS?

Related Posts:

Thoughts upon My Entry to Kindle Nation

Gilded Covers

Judging a Book by it's Cover

Thoughts Upon my Entry into Kindle Nation

So i'm 37% of the way through my first Kindle book (Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus) and I thought I'd share a few of my observations of the kindle experience so far. The size and weight of the device is simply amazing. It really is easy to hold and read in just about any position, from sitting to lying down on the couch or bed. The screen is generally very legible, although there are occasional small glitches where a word or two are not as crisp as the rest of them - but this doesn't happen very often. However, I have two main quibbles so far:

1. No page numbers. This is bugging much more than I would have thought. While I admire the precision of knowing that i'm "37%" of the way through a book, it doesn't mean much to me yet. I also miss the ability to quickly flip through the pages to find out how far I have to go until the end of the chapter.
   Related: I'm curious how to share where a quote is located in a book if you're reading on a kindle and the other person is not. How do students indicate where a reference is located on an ereader? Do they need to highlight? Which leads me to quibble #2...
2. Highlighting. By default,   "popular highlights" was turned on, meaning that occasionally a page would appear with an underlined passage and a note stating "Click X to see how many people have highlighted this passage." Now, I'm the first to admit that I like highlighting, although I stopped the practice a while back in favor of noting what passages I like on the book's bookmark. But I've found this setting very distracting; it's like picking up a used textbook in a college bookstore and having trouble studying because of all of the other student's calculations scribbled in the margins.
   Perhaps the useage for this would be the same as page numbers in tradtional books - when pointing people towards a passage, you would direct them to highlight X on your kindle account - but the paranoid in me isn't comfortable in sharing so much information with our corporate overlords. (This may have something to do with Barry Lynn's disturbing reportage on amazon's use of their monopolistic powers in "Killing the Competition", located in the February issue of Harper's.)

In the end, I like the experience, but can't shake the sense that i'm missing out on something. Perhaps this is cheap nostalgia, but I think it's something more. In the past, when I was done with a book, I could store it, sell it, share it with other people, etc. - it was a physical object that I controlled. I don't have that sense of ownership with the kindle books. For one, you can't realistically loan them out yet, and those that you can loan have some undue restrictions on them - and, of course, the other person has to have a kindle as well. Perhaps i'll get over this the more I use the kindle, but for now, I'm intrigued with the reading, but ambivalent on the entire experience.

Related Posts:

Kindle Book Exchange

Sign of the Times

The Content Wrangler reports that

The publishing industry is reluctant to give out detailed sales figures on eBook sales, but David Roth-Ey from publisher HarperCollins said: “The electronic market is really booming. We are seeing 600% growth year on year in eBooks. That is in a frankly stagnant book selling market.”
On Amazon since April 2011, 242 Kindle eBooks have been sold for every 100 hardcover books, SkyNews HD reports.

Pretty soon i'll be joining this group... just as soon as people stop giving me physical books to read. A nice problem to have!

So What's Next?

So I got a shiny new kindle for my birthday, and it's just sitting there unused because I also got Murakami's 1Q84 on the same day. However, I’m closing in on the last page of the big novel (only 100 more pages to go!), and will want something to new read when it's done.

I know it's sick of me to be thinking about my next book when I'm not even done with 1Q84, but that's just how I roll, baby. At times it feels like I almost get more enjoyment about of perusing and thinking about books then I do actually reading them!

Anyways, here are the candidates for my next book. It’ll also be my first kindle book, so I’m hopking that it’ll also be memorable. The following are a mixture of books that sound interesting to me or have been recommended by people that I trust. What do you think I should choose first?

• Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
• C - Tom McCarthy
• Aurorama - Jean-Christophe Valat
• Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
• This Boy's Life - Tobias Wolff
• Septuagenarian Stew - Charles Burkowski  
• Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared - Christopher Robbins 
• The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories - Don Delillo

Related Posts:
Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda
1Q84: Hardcover
Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten for 2011
National Book Awards: The Finalists

Kindle Book Exchange

Would you like to borrow one of my Kindle books?  If so, read on . . . . 

One of the potentially great features of the Kindle is the ability to loan books.  I say "potentially," because there are three significant restrictions. 

1. You can only loan a book one time.  After that, you can never loan it again.
2. The loan will be for fourteen days, regardless of the length of the book.  If the person to whom you loan your book is not able to read it that quickly, too bad.
3. The publisher must give permission for the book to be lendable.   

It is this third condition that is the most restricting.  As with some of its counterintuitive pricing, Amazon blames the publisher, but in any case, of the 51 books that I have purchased on my Kindle, only three are lendable.  (See the screenshot below.  On Amazon.com, under "Manage Your Kindle," each of your books has an "Actions..." button.  If "Loan this title" is an option, then the book is lendable.)

These are the books I can currently lend:

• Archimedes to Hawking, by Clifford Pickover
• Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, by Kingsley Amis
• Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

So, who wants to read one of them?

Here's the deal.  Leave a comment and let me know which of these Kindle books you would like me to lend to you.  In the same comment, let me know what lendable Kindle you have, that you would be willing to lend to me.  If you have something that I might like to read, we'll swap books.

(And even if you don't like what I've got, go ahead and post what you have - you just might find a new trading partner.)

Related posts:
So Many Kindles
Kindle

So Many Kindles

I'm intrigued by all of the different Kindles that were announced today.

Given that both of you currently use one, do you have any opinions on what you think might be the benefits/faults of these new versions? Do either of you use a tablet or is it just the Kindle?

I ask because I'm starting to envision the day when I have a tablet that not only serves as a replacement for my home PC but also something on which I can read my books, but i'm not sure how viable this is. For one, both of you have stated that  eye strain is almost non-existent on the current kindle, something that would be reintroduced in these back-lit versions.

Kindle List

Here the unread books currently awaiting me on my Kindle:

Birchwood, by John Banville
Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black
Troubles, by J.G. Farrell
The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer
The Child in Time, Ian McEwan
Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

Sex and the River Styx, by Edward Hoagland
Archimedes to Hawking, by Clifford Pickover
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, by Oliver Sacks

Several of these were temporarily on sale at one time or another on Amazon.com for 2.99 or 3.99. Though they offer a lot of crap at that price point, hopefully I've found a few gems.

Are there any here that you can comment on?

Kindle

I bought a Kindle last year and I have really enjoyed reading with it. It is lightweight, the screen is extremely readable, and the battery seems to last forever. My only concern when I bought it was that not all of the books I wanted to read were available on the Kindle. But so many books were available, that it wasn't really an issue. Plus, with most books priced at under $10, I figured that the device would quickly pay for itself.

Has anyone else noticed that most Kindle e-books are now being priced at $11.99? And I'm not talking about new releases. I'm talking about books that have been out in the marketplace for years.

What really annoys me is that this price point is higher than the price of buying a new paperback. To take just a few examples:

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami: $11.99 (Kindle); $8.62 (paperback)
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell: $11.99 (Kindle); $10.20 (paperback)
Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey: $11.99 (Kindle); $10.85 (paperback)
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro: $11.99 (Kindle); $8.64 (paperback)

I suppose to deflect criticism, Amazon has been including a note next to the Kindle pricing, stating that the price was set by the publisher. But I don't particularly care where the responsibility lies, I still find it irksome, and I plan to begin reading paper books again.