eReaders

KOBO Takes On Amazon with KOBO “Writing Life”

Digital reading company KOBO is launching a competitor to Amazon’s KDP and B&N’s PubIt: KOBO “Writing Life”, a free self-publishing platform for independent authors and publishers.

Writing Life is in beta tests with 50 authors now and will launch in English by the end of June. Authors who were asked what they felt was most important in a self-publishing platform, wanted: openness, control, great royalties, clear and instant reporting and global reach. Powerful but simple.

KOBO takes on Amazon’s KDP program on its website: “Unlike some self-publishing portals, KOBO doesn’t bind you to us. Publish to KOBO and take your ePub to your adoring fans, no matter where they might be. You’re free to sell your eBook the way you want.”

KOBO allows authors to set their book price to “FREE” at any time without restrictive exclusive agreements, in addition, KOBO pays 10% higher royalties on sales in many growing international markets and allows authors much more freedom on pricing. “Writing Life” also gives authors an analytics dashboard showing real-time sales stats, including sales by country.

From their press release:
E-book downloads up 400%, e-reader device sales up 160 % and the number of people reading internationally with KOBO up 280% and 8 million users in 190 countries.

KOBO was acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for $315 million in November 2011 and will be launching in Japan, with subsequent launches planned for Portugal, Spain, Italy, with more launches to follow. These markets have distinct needs for digital reading and KOBO intends to provide access in regions where printed books are inaccessible and where electronic devices can be more easily obtained.

KOBO’s “Writing Life” launch seems to be good news for authors and publishers alike who don’t want to put their “eggs in one basket only”.  

Read more:

http://www.kobobooks.com/KoboWritingLIfe

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/05/4539143/kobo-writing-life-delivers-best.html

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/52275-kobo-to-launch-kobo-writing-life-self-publishing-portal.html
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AMAZON on Shopping Tour?

Amazon has acquired Avalon Books, a small publisher that focuses on hardcover mystery, “wholesome” romance and Westerns, and will make its titles available digitally for the first time. Avalon Books have been geared and marketed primarily toward the library market; now Amazon will seek to market them to a wider audience.

The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, covers Avalon’s entire backlist of about 3,000 titles. Avalon launched in 1950 and is now run by the founder’s daughter Ellen Bouregy Mickelsen, who said she chose Amazon to buy her company because “they care deeply about the writers, readers and categories that have long mattered to our family business and they are uniquely positioned to assure that our titles make the leap forward into the digital future.”

Amazon will release the Avalon titles under its West Coast imprints, including Montlake Romance and Thomas & Mercer. The press release says “these books will continue to be available in print for booksellers and libraries nationwide. Amazon acquired Marshall Cavendish’s children’s book list last December.

To get the whole story about Amazon’s almost 20 years “THE AMAZON EFFECT” (I almost typed: “The Amazon Waste Land”, when I read the last sentence of the story)  – have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and take your time : )  it’s an extensive article, almost a novella or an Amazon “Shorts” to speak in their language.

You will learn not only about Amazon, but about the last 20 years of publishing and book selling. Print out the article, it might make an interesting part of literature and publishing history one day…

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E-book sales in Great Britain rose by 366%

 

Philip Jones wrote about the latest surveys: “E-books are really going global, sales rising worldwide”. Consumer e-books accounted for 38% of Britain’s publishers’ digital sales in 2011, up from 13% in 2010, and compared to 2% in 2009.

This is a hefty shift in the market, and one that will impact pretty much every part of the trade book business: bookshops, agents, commissioning, and of course, writers. However the digital migration had minimal impact on the overall children’s bookmarket, taking only just over 1% of value share of children’s books.”

From scholarly publishing to trade e-books, the industry is facing an unprecedented level of upheaval, some of it being pushed through by the internet, and the huge tech giants such as Amazon, and Apple.

Australia and India have joined the UK and the US in leading the world in e-book adoption rates, according to Bowker Market Research’s Global eBook Monitor with adult fiction the main target of book buyers in Great Britain and Australia, while in India and South Korea the concentration is on both professional and academic/textbooks.

According to the research 24% of respondents in India have bought an e-book in the six months prior to the survey, putting that market ahead of Australia (21%), the UK (21%), and the US (20%). Respondents in France and Japan were the least likely to have purchased an e-book, at 5% and 8% respectively.

The report reveals that the market for e-books is set for a rapid increase in Brazil and India.
Over 50% of respondents from these two countries said that they were likely to buy an e-book in the next six months, a prediction that would double the number of e-book buyers in India, and triple the number of e-book buyers in Brazil. About a third of respondents in the UK and US say they have plans to purchase an e-book soon, compared to one in five in France, and one in seven in Japan.

Purchase rates in India, Brazil, the UK, US and France are highest in the 25–34 age group, with Australia, Spain, Germany, South Korea and Japan highest among 18-24 year youngs.

“The market for e-books is experiencing exponential growth internationally, with news each week of new e-readers and specialist e-retailers,” said Kelly Gallagher, vice-president, Bowker Market Research. “Publishers and retailers must adapt to a very changed landscape.”

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Harry Potter e-Books on Amazon and B&N

 

Amazon.com Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. reported they will offer Harry Potter e-books, according to Reuters News.

Amazon said it made a distribution deal with J.K. Rowling’s new website, Pottermore.com, which allows customers to read the Potter series e-books on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and Kindle Fire tablet.

Similarly, Barnes & Nobles made a deal that allows its Nook e-reader and tablet customers to buy Harry Potter e-books through the Pottermore Shop.

Although financial details were not released, analysts said Amazon likely accepted a smaller cut than 30 percent of the sale price of the Harry Potter e-books.

The deals suggest the companies made big concessions with author J.K. Rowling for electronic access to her bestseller series. But both companies will take a hit as they have to send customers away from their websites to Rowling’s Pottermore.com, which will be able to gather valuable customer information.

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Shopping For Literature: Book and e-Book Prices

Amazon’s prices on books that can be discounted (and don’t belong to the “agency model” of the big Six), are generally less expensive.

A former sampling of pricing between Kindle and iBooks for the New York Times Bestsellers revealed:
80% of the books were the same price on each platform. And the 20% that are cheaper on Kindle were cheaper by an average of 11% or more.

If you want to shop around, a free tool like Inkmesh.com can save you a lot of time. The benefit of inkmesh is, that even if the prices listed may be different from time to time, it compiles all the links in one place, making it easy for a reader to compare the prices before purchasing. Most e-book prices are pretty similar from retailer to retailer but not all retailers have all those e-books available.

Free e-Books
There are also many classic books for free ( I read somewhere over 16,000 and counting to download) because their copyrights have expired. And the number of free books increases from year to year as more and more copyrights expire and go public.

Free books are also offered daily by Amazon. Even when you choose very carefully among these e-books and download only the best, you will have a whole library in no time. You don’t need to own a Kindle, just a free Kindle app and the e-book goes to any device.

And then there are the e-books that you can lent at your local library – or at Amazon, if you have a Prime membership. This is even a good deal for authors as well as they will receive an average of $1.70 for their book if it is lent by a Prime member, no matter what the retail price is: 99cents or $9.99, this way making more money with “unsold” books.

 

 

Apple iBook Author Reviews

 

iPad

iPad

1GB per iBook: More memory needed…

As pointed out during the event, some of these textbooks can be 1GB in size, so entry-level iPads for the educational setting may be out the question.

This means that poorer schools will be even less likely to buy the more capable iPads, while richer schools may still be able to afford them, but could be hit harder than they thought.

As one Twitter user put it: “If people knew just how bad the state of technology budgets is in most high schools, requiring tablets would seem hilarious.”

Other Challenges: more expensive iPads as iBook is not working on and with Windows…
Read more on this great blog post:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-rocks-the-e-publishing-boat-three-key-questions/67193

Stats Forecast Tablets in Canada

 

CWTA and the Media Technology Monitor estimated that 5% of the population already had a tablet as of this spring, suggesting there could be in the neighbourhood of two million units across the country.  88 per cent of tablet owners said they would definitely or probably recommend their device to friends and family, while only 50 per cent said they probably would not, and three per cent said they would not.

MTM is forecasting that tablet ownership will double in 2012 with about 10 per cent of Canadians projected to own one.

How Much Does a 99c eBook Cost on Amazon?

 

World Wide Web?

World Wide Web?


No, not a trick question.

“Amazon may not be selling a 99c ebook for 99c. It may well be selling this 99c ebook for $3.50, and grabbing most of the difference.” 

I just ordered on Amazon. com an ebook written by a friend in Germany (in German language) that was priced at $0.99 and experienced just that: I had to pay $3.49 for the book. Download fees and sales tax. Tax is ok with me, but download fee?  It is a world wide web and no one ever asked me for fees to download something on the internet.

And in case you’re wondering, a “free” book isn’t free either. Your free book will cost you $2 in Italy. Or if you order a book in the USA, written in Italien language, it will not be “free” here.

Amazon and B&N: why are they not global players?
Why not tap into the worlwide customer base?

“The new Kindle Fire is not, and for the foreseeable future will not be sold in the UK or Germany or France, despite those countries having Kindle sites. And a reminder here that the B&N nook is utterly useless outside the US as B&N do not download outside the US borders. Two fantastic new e-Readers, purpose built for ePub3, are in fact exclusively for the US market. The rest of the world is stuck with the old black & white Kindle.”

Customers may order from an ebook store where the company doesn’t penalize them for where they live. What about the Sony ebook store? 

Did you ever order books, published in other countries from them?  Did they charge you more than listed on the website?

 

 

Entrepreneurial Authors and Self-publishing


The e-book revolution is a blessing for both, readers and authors, entrepreneurial authors have the highest success of all when self-publishing.  I am predicting that e-Readers soon will be more common than a TV in households.

The old monopoly of agents and publishers controlling what and who gets published is totally broken. History proves that this elite is no better at judging the quality and potential success of books than the reading public.

Only a few bestseller authors are chosen by traditional publishers for the royal treatment —  often those who don’t need the support. Their books are everywhere. At the same time, though, the volume of online review sources has exploded. And the number of reviewers who review self-published and/or indie authors is climbing.  In addition, there are a host of websites that will feature your traditionally published novel. So it’s not as if promotion and support isn’t there–  it’s just moved online.

“During the last weeks, HarperCollins has seen its ebook sales growing almost 10 percent, week-on-week”.  And Random House: “We’ve seen e-book growth outstrip our total sales.”

Don’t forget: E-book readers tend to buy more books than none-ebooks readers.

 

 

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Bravo ! Amazon ! Finally !

Suddenly e-books are much better looking…

Amazon is releasing “Kindle Fire” by mid-November, and the company is already working on tweaking its immense collection of e-books for maximum compatibility with the Kindle Fire.

Amazon is actually retiring their MOBI format in favor of the new .KF8 format (or Kindle Format 8), this includes support for 150 new formatting tags, supporting HTML5 and CSS. This is quite a shift in direction for the eCommerce giant from supporting MOBI 7.  HTML5 is quickly becoming the new web standard and Amazon is moving in this direction.

They will convert all existing content into the .KF8 format, and users also have the option of updating existing titles they have on their Kindle ebook readers and Kindle readers on other mobile platforms.

 

 

KindleFire

KindleFire

 

Amazon is also releasing a new set of Kindle Publishing Guidelines, which ebook authors and publishers should take into consideration when building their content for distribution via Amazon.

This is where a professional formatting/conversion company gives helpful support to authors and self-publishers.  Publishers will need to update their titles in order to use the new format.

The new Amazon Kindle format will ideally support a wider array of devices, and not just Amazon’s proprietary Kindle ebook reader. The new format also allows for more versatile formatting, as well as a more portable format. The company is said to be looking for a replacement for its .MOBI format, and this seems to be it.