Borders eReader Contest Deadline

To promote their rather un-impressive "Get Published" program (see my review here), Borders is giving away a Velocity Micro Cruz Reader ($199) and a Sony Reader Pocket Edition ($149). Deadline to enter is midnight Tuesday, November 30th. Anyone stupid enough to waste the requisite $90-$200 publishing fee is automatically entered into the contest. But don't bother. By law no purchase is required in order to enter, so here's how to do it:

Simply e-mail bordersgetpublished@bookbrewer.com

with "Get Published eReader Contest" in the subject line, and include one of the following in the body of your e-mail:

1) What do you plan to publish one day? or

2) Tell us your user name on Borders Get Published.

Borders' idea, of course, is to draw in a bunch of suckers to sign up for their overpriced program in hopes that at least a few of them will actually follow through and send a check. But even if you do plan to use their "publishing" program, you don't actually need to go to all the hassle of signing up for a Get Published account to enter the contest - and you don't need to have a book written, or even in the works - just include a short line with the title or description of a project you might write someday, and you're covered.

Author Central Adds Sales Rank Charts

"The Saga of Beowulf" U.S. Kindle 10-week sales stats

I hadn't been to my Author Central site on Amazon for awhile, so I was surprised the other day to find two new tabs available, featuring some very useful tools. For a long time after my debut novel appeared I watched my Amazon sales stats like a hawk awaiting lunch (and for many authors the comparison is not as metaphorical as it might seem), literally checking the listings for my book in both formats in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France on a daily basis (and occasionally more frequently than that during a marketing campaign). Since Amazon updates sales rankings hourly, the chances of ever seeing the peak position a specific title attains are pretty much hit and miss: books with sporadic sales can leap and fall like children playing hopscotch on a hot sidewalk.

As you can see from the chart, my sales definitely fall into that category, with something like sixteen Kindle editions sold in the last ten weeks. Now, mind you, this is only U.S. Kindle sales on Amazon, and does not include any print editions, nor Kindle sales in the U.K., nor any sales on any other site or in any other format than the Kindle - and more importantly, without a single ad campaign running for at least the past twelve months (if you don't count this blog as such). These are just residual sales from word of mouth or random searches, or those driven from this page. So all in all I'm fairly pleased that my book has continued to sell at all. It's nothing I can make a living from just yet, but it's a start, and hopefully one day this will be a chart of one week's sales, or even one day's (much less likely, but you never know).

At one point I had installed a program called Sales Rank Watcher, which does an admirable job of tracking sales stats for any ISBN/ASIN listed on Amazon, with tools for searching, filtering, and trending stats, as well as saving and printing graphs for future reference. However, it only works with the U.S. site, and being a resident program, only works when running (and consequently using CPU resources and bandwidth), so if you shut it down and forget to start it back up, or your computer freaks out or you shut your system down, you lose that data. Then it starts over with a clean slate. Needless to say, this became a nuisance and wore out its usefulness fairly quickly.

However, Amazon has rendered the need for any external evaluation methods more or less redundant (unless, or course, you have a lot of sales outside Amazon). There is now a "Sales Rank" tab on your Author Central page with various options for date range from "2 Weeks" to "All Available," the latter of which, interestingly, does not range back to the original publication date, probably because Amazon was not saving the data for public use at that point. My print book stats go back one year, while the Kindle edition only go as far as July, even though both have been available for two years now. But from this point forward you will be able to see how your product has been doing, and track its progress against any ad campaigns or other marketing you may be doing, which is immensely helpful in determining what is working and what is not.

The other new tab provides a comprehensive list of all your "Customer Reviews," sortable by date or rating, in either full or truncated versions. This is also greatly helpful, particularly if you have a large inventory of products, the individual pages of which would prove time-consuming and cumbersome at best to check regularly. At a glance you can see if any new reviews (or comments on them) have come in on any of your listed titles, saving you a lot of time and effort that could best spend creating another title to add to your portfolio. As the title suggests, "Author Central" is now more than ever a central location for updating, maintaining, and tracking your inventory.

Google Editions Preview

Google yesterday published what appears to be the first ever "Google Edition" online ebook. Titled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web, the illustrated children's picture book styled publication requires one of the new HTML5 enabled browsers to be viewed in its fullest animated glory, although you can still view and read it in older browsers, albeit in a somewhat stunted and clunky version. The short booklet is essentially a crash-course in Internet history leading up to the impending advent of the next-generation web browsers next year, with sections covering everything from online safety to JavaScript and CSS.

In order to see exactly how it works, I updated to IE9-Beta this morning. Result: excellent marks for Google, not so good for IE9, which completely bollixed some of the basic features and functions of my web experience, so that I had to uninstall it almost immediately just so I could do this post. For example, I could no longer add links or graphics in these blog posts, and Blogger responded so erratically and sluggish that this is now my fourth attempt to write this post. That said, HTML5 is quite impressive in itself, and I highly recommend checking out some of the test sites being created with it, such as Steaw Comix cleverly interactive graphic comic strip Never Mind the Bullets, or the physics-based Javascript animated storybook edition of Jack & The Beanstalk (similar in many ways to the iBooks edition of Alice In Wonderland created for the iPad, but without the hardware).

As for Google's new book, which was created entirely in HTML5, it functions quite nicely, with smooth page flow and animated graphics, all incorporated in a browser-based format, and thus, readable on any device. That is, after all, the entire point behind Google Editions: to liberate ebooks from any proprietary software required to read them (excluding HTML5 itself, of course, which is open-source and included in all next-gen browsers). The book even has a simulated hardcover binding with a different "stiff" page turn than its interior flexible page flow animations. And while this one features content only on the right-facing page, two-page layouts such as those currently found in Google Books are presumably possible as well, allowing for a complete "book reading" experience, without the book.

The question remains, however, whether this newly published literary dissertation is simply an HTML5 coding project or a tester for the impending launch of Google Editions proper (or both). Since it appears to incorporate all the features touted for the proposed Google project, it seems to succeed in that respect, regardless of intent. If even a portion of Google's massive digital archive becomes available online, it will instantly become the world's largest public library, with the ability to read any available book at any time, on any device, anywhere.

In addition, while some books will continue to be viewable online only as samples (as with the current Google Books editions), any book in the Google Editions archive will theoretically be available for purchase as a print edition via Print-On-Demand (pending author and/or publisher approval), thereby potentially bringing back into print virtually every book every published, and making obsolete forever the "out of print" status most books are ultimately relegated to in short order due to lack of substantial interest: the costs of traditional print production, storage and shipping allow for only a very narrow window of opportunity for most titles before the pulp machine prematurely ends their life. A book like The Lord of the Rings, for example, which was enormously expensive to produce and took over ten years to finally find its market, today would never have remained in print that long (and the fact that it did at the time is one of the great miracles in publishing history).

On a related note, Google this week reached an accord with Hachette, Europe's largest publisher, to scan its backlist of copyright-protected, but out-of-print editions into its rapidly growing digital archive, as part of the great Google Print Initiative leading up to the launch of Google Editions - still supposedly (but unlikely) by the end of this year. With so many details concerning rights and royalties to work out, it's not at all surprising they're so far behind schedule.

Comic-Con Crashes Again

Apparently there are a lot of comic fans out there. Apparently they all live in San Diego, or thereabouts, or plan to visit the sunny seaside metropolis this summer, apparently with the intention of attending the 2011 International Comic-Con to be held at the convention center there. For the second time in as many weeks, the online registration system for event was crashed almost immediately upon opening this morning by the vast influx of would-be attendees, leaving the promoters scrambling for a back-up plan for ticket distribution, thus far without result.

This is all the more surprising given that the event is still eight months away, and only roughly twenty guests have been announced so far, none of whom are scheduled to appear on any given day. Now, generally there are more than enough events planned for each day - more than any one person could actually attend, in fact - so there's likely to be no shortage of interesting activities in which to partake; but if you plan to attend for just one day, rather than all four, it would be nice to have a look at the schedule before locking yourself in to a specific date.

And yet this doesn't seem to be holding anybody back. Maybe they're all just planning on spending the whole weekend there. Maybe they're just not that picky about who they'll go to see - after all, there's bound to be someone interesting there each day. But personally, I can't think of very many other marketing events where people are so willing to attend they don't even care who's going to be there. Star Trek conventions, maybe. Adult video awards shows, certainly. I'm excited to go myself, and I'm not even that big a fan of comics. I don't even know who half the announced guests are. But I bet half the real fans do. And I'd bet they have their costumes made already, too.

Comic-Con 2011 Registration

Just a quick reminder that registration for the 2011 San Diego International Comic-Con begins on Monday. After an initial systems glitch three weeks ago, badges will finally go on sale for the four day event running from July 21st through the 24th. Four-day tickets with Preview Night on the 20th sold out at the last event, but both standard four-day and single-day entry tickets are still available. No badges will be sold at the door, and they usually sell out fairly quickly, as this is the biggest convention in the comic market pretty much in the entire world. So get your tickets early!

I mention this mainly because I will be attending this year, with an eye toward acquiring a booth for next year's convention. You get a price break if you reserve and pre-pay your table in advance, so this will be both a scouting expedition and a chance to save a little money while getting a vacation out of it at the same time. I had hoped to get a booth for this year's event, but as I am hopelessly behind schedule on my current project, that seemed a bit overly optimistic. Looking at my tentative production schedule I realized there was really no way I was going to get The Ring Saga into print by then without quitting my day job, which, unfortunately, I still rely on fairly heavily to keep my computer running and the snow off my head.

But I will go so far as to officially announce that at least the first two volumes will be out in time for Comic-Con 2012, so you can come and visit with me then.

Amazon Leaps Ahead of Kobo

Preempting Kobo's recent announcement that it will soon introduce an ebook gift giving program, Amazon this morning implemented a "Give as a Gift" program for the Kindle with no advance warning whatsoever. Whether programmers were working feverishly all night or this was the best kept secret in digital delivery yet this year, Amazon has with one fell swoop once again reclaimed the technical edge in the digital book delivery market.

As with Kobo's proposed plan, recipient's of a Kindle ebook gift do not need to own a Kindle device to read or receive their gift: they only need an email address and any version of the Kindle app on whatever platform they prefer. But, of course, with five million Kindles sold this year alone, it's a sure bet most benefactors will already own one, or will get one as a gift along with their new ebook. And you can bet Amazon is counting on it to increase their sales. From a marketing standpoint alone, it's a ridiculously overdue aspect of digital book sales that should have been implemented years ago. But then, better late than never is an appropriate adage, I suppose.

UPDATE:

Apparently Kobo's proposed ebook giving program will include the ability to schedule a future date and time to send your gift, whereas Amazon's at present only allows you to send the book at the time of purchase. This is a handy feature others will surely implement, as it makes holiday giving much more convenient. So kudos to Kobo for coming up with it.

Kobo Introduces eBook Gifting

Click image for larger readable version

If you've visited the Kobo Gift Guide page recently, you might have noticed two new features tagged as "Coming Soon!" The first is the ability to purchase an ebook from the Kobo store and have it sent to someone other than yourself, addressing one of the more legitimate complaints about digital editions thus far: the inability to give an ebook as a gift. And with Kobo using the near-universal ePub format employing basic Adobe DRM, the file will be readable on virtually any device - except the Kindle - so the recipient doesn't even have to have a Kobo reader. Or any dedicated reader, for that matter: free Kobo software is available for mobile devices running iOS or Android, as well as desktop systems.

The second part of Kobo's latest coup over every other eBookstore out there is the introduction of eGift Cards for digital books. So you don't even have to decide which book to send your tech savvy Uncle Sal if you're unsure of what he'd like - he can choose for himself! This was an obvious - and necessary - next step in the evolution of the digital book revolution, if ebooks are indeed to capture a majority of the market anytime soon. And while Kindle, Sony and Barnes & Noble are sure to follow in their electronic footsteps soon enough, it looks like this holiday season Kobo has a corner on the eGiving market.

Color E-Ink Promos

Here's a promotional video for E-Ink's new Triton color display technology, which will be used in Hanvon's first color eInk reader to be released next March in China. The image change rate is said to be about 20% faster than current eInk screens, but is still not fast enough for full-motion video.



Two other video clips show off a few of the new LG eInk prototypes. All of these devices seem to hover around the 10" screen size, which looks to become a new standard for color readers, given their ability to showcase graphic novels and comics, as well as glossy color magazines. The image change rate of these LG displays lags way behind that of the Hanvon model, and even current black and white screens. But then, they are just prototypes, after all.





As you can see, the color is still somewhat muted and washed out, like old colorized photographs or those first tentative efforts at making color movies - although they have a certain charm that actually looks quite nice in the periodicals and hand-drawn comics. Vibrant color will come in time, and from the rate of progress and effort being made, it may not take long.

September Sales Figures & Forecasts

September sales figures for the U.S. book market are in and ebooks are the clear winner again, with revenue jumping 158.1% to 39.9 million for the month, bringing the total thus far this year to 309.6 million - a 188.4% increase over the same period last year. Meanwhile, print book sales dived even further, with adult hardcover, trade paperback and mass market titles down 40.4% to 180.3 million for the month. Digital editions are on track to fall just shy of one billion for the year, with projected estimates coming in at around $966 million, according to a new five-year forecast report. The report also projects digital sales to reach three billion by 2015, at which point, it states, the industry will be "forever altered."

It has been my firm belief for some time now that we are living in a year which will be seen in retrospect as historically significant, and experiencing a change which will be equivalent to the advent of the printing press. That event opened the world of literature to a vastly larger audience and forever changed the structure of society, as more and more knowledge became available to the average man. Digital distribution will have that same effect, bringing the "printed" word to an exponentially broader populace, both in terms of geographic location and social strata.

For example, kids who generally only play games might tend to read if their multimedia device offers that choice in new and interesting ways. Residents of small towns throughout the world who have limited access to large bookstores and vast libraries can have the latest bestseller the same day as everyone else. A family that could never afford to buy several hundred books can have several thousand for the cost of a Kindle. The economics of 30,000 free books available at a touch alone offers an enormous opportunity for literary advancement.

The coming decade will be seen as a dividing line in history, before which books were expensive to produce and cumbersome to cart around, but after which literature is available everywhere to anyone at any time, and personal libraries are just something everyone has with them at all times, allowing for instant access to information and vastly improved literacy rates. Publishers should be ecstatic.

Color e-Ink Coming First to China



Hanvon color eInk reader

 The New York Times today reported that Hanvon, the largest seller of e-readers in China, have announced the launch of the first color eInk reader, which will begin shipping to eastern Asia next March. With a 9.68" screen, the iPad-sized device is large enough to read in two-page landscape orientation, a boon for graphic novels and comic books. And while the color is still not bright and vibrant, from the official image released it's not the washed-out colorized pastel we've seen previously (although it still can't do real time video). Battery life for color eInk is equivalent to its monochromatic counterpart, and it can be read outdoors in full sunlight. The reader will feature both WiFi and 3G, and is priced at around $440.

In other news, The Bookseller reported last week on a new study which estimates that 25% of the book market will be digital by 2015. The industry survey, of 3000 people from six key nations, also predicts that 15-20% of the reading public will own e-reading devices, with multimedia tablets making up two-thirds to three-fourths of total sales and dedicated e-readers picking up the rest. Interestingly, Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins, said at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair that she believes 50% of books will be read electronically by 2015.

But the study's conclusion was what caught my interest, warning that the book industry will not benefit from this shift "unless it innovates in its operating methods and content," saying that new experimental formats such as "non-linear, hybrid, interactive or social" are where future opportunities lie. In other words, interactive multimedia content that only electronic devices can provide, and against which print cannot compete. So all you game designers and illustrators out there get together with your favorite author and get to work. There's a new wave of digital content coming, and you could be on the cutting edge.

The Impending Death of Barnes & Noble

I read an article over at the Forbes blog the other day with the auspiciously dire headline "The NookColor Won't Save Barnes & Noble."And even though I've been harping on the demise of the printed book for some time now, this caught me by surprise.

But several points it made got me to thinking, and over dinner at Andrade's last night I discussed a few of them with my folks. Like most parents, mine are always slightly behind the current trends, being now a few generations removed from the cutting edge, and only moderately up to date on modern technology. But my mom's an avid reader, and she likes to browse the aisles at the local B&N, though I know she also orders books online, since they live out in the country now and the local B&N is not quite as local since they retired. So I asked her where she does most of her actual shopping, and her answer was Amazon.

Not Barnes & Noble's online store, but Amazon. She'll browse the local shelves at B&N, and maybe even buy a book or two from time to time, but more often than not she'll go home to compare their price with Amazon's first, and even put a title in her Amazon wish list until she has enough to get free shipping, and only order then. She doesn't shop at B&N online at all.

And this brings home a major point about B&N that the Forbes blog was making: Barnes & Noble have been unable to take the lead - or even keep up - when it comes making the shift into the internet age. Whereas Amazon is fully focused and committed to an online presence (and taking advantage of every aspect of it that they can, like customized recommendations and email marketing), B&N are saddled with the albatross of brick and mortar stores, and all the requisite operating costs involved. And I would hazard to say that it effects their perspective on book selling negatively, tending to make them too conservative in their vision rather than forward-thinking and innovative like Amazon and Apple.

The NookColor is a perfect point in case. As sharp and exciting as it first appears (and I was quite excited by it), on closer inspection it really has nothing new to offer in the ongoing battles of the electronic gadget war. As Forbes points out, it's not quite a tablet and it doesn't add anything relevant as an ebook reader. In fact, the one and only feature that the Nook has over other reading devices is its lending program, which was already available on the original eInk Nook, and which Amazon will dutifully implement on the Kindle shortly. Basically it's a mini iPad with a fraction of the real estate and fewer features. Consequently, it's stuck somewhere in the middle with no real dedicated market. 7" tablets have yet to impress (or even prove themselves financially viable), and $249 has already proven too steep a price point for a general consumption eReader.

Now, Forbes is a finance-oriented publication, so when they say Wall Street greeted the NookColor with a yawn, I give that some credence. The blog post points out the Blockbuster comparison that I had mentioned in a previous post, only to say it's an unfair comparison because B&N is more willing to "evolve" than Blockbuster was. This is certainly true overall, but only to a point. They may not recall Blockbuster's abortive attempt to emulate Netflix - though I do, because I was working there at the time - and it was a vastly superior program, allowing the renter to return online movies in store for immediate exchange rather than having to wait for it to be mailed back. And while this came fairly late in their final death throes, it didn't save them any more than the NOOKcolor and B&N's online store will likely save them without a radical change in the traditional outlook. The operating expenses of brick-and-mortar stores are just too great. The fact is that we're rapidly transitioning into a global economy in which the vast majority of commerce is done online. Only physical stores with enormous inventory turnover will be able to survive, and that means diversification. Like it or not, the local independent retailer is dead. And the smoking pistol is now a Gatling gun.

Forbes points out three main factors working against Barnes & Noble's future success, these being:

1. Execution. While Barnes & Noble's brick-and-mortar stores are world-class, that same level of execution has not yet translated to the internet age. Gauging by market share alone, Amazon is firmly in control of the online bookselling game. The NOOKcolor may help some here, but it's unlikely to take the lead away from the Kindle anytime soon. This point inevitably leads to the next...

2. Economic viability. The divided interests of having both online and physical stores limits Barnes & Noble's ability to focus fully on either, and the costs of operating one fundamentally detract from the other. However, this is really a question of the viability of brick-and-mortar bookstores in general, which is only going to get worse going forward. Without some fundamental shift in operations, such as introducing Print-On-Demand kiosks in place of physically stocked backlist titles, the brick-and-mortar bookstore will not survive. And the introduction of eReader "stations" and WiFi networks within those walls will not help, since there's inherently no need to go there to get your digital content. In fact, as the Forbes post very aptly points out, you can buy books on Amazon from within the walls of a Barnes & Noble store.

3. Scope. Amazon's embracing of virtually every product available gives it a distinct advantage over both B&N and Apple (and nearly everyone else for that matter). While Amazon began strictly as an online book retailer, they didn't restrict their inventory options for long. This wide ranging outlook gives them a revenue stream that allows them to dabble and experiment in areas that may not prove fruitful initially, but which tend to pay off over time. Barnes & Noble just doesn't have that luxury, and is, in fact, saddled with huge operating costs which prohibit it to a large degree.

I haven't purchased anything from Barnes & Noble for quite a long time - several years in fact - while I've ordered literally tons of stuff from Amazon. However, I still go into Barnes & Noble stores from time to time, mostly to browse the graphic novels section and see what the latest works look like, something which is still imperfectly presented online, almost entirely due to format issues: you often have to see a graphic novel spread laid out to comprehend the overall flow and experience completely the atmosphere which it presents.

So while I was initially quite excited about the pending release of the NOOKcolor, after looking into it further I've decided to wait for a color eInk reader, and to get an iPad in the meantime for reading graphic novels. And that leaves Barnes & Noble out in the cold.

PW (e)Reader Poll Results

For those who may have missed it, Publishers Weekly today released the results of last week's readers poll, with the astonishingly inaccurate heading "It's the Year of the Print Book." Granted, at first glance, one might eye that big blue line beneath "Good Ole' Death Tree Books" accounting for 50.84% of proposed book-related purchases for this holiday season and come to the same conclusion. But a closer (i.e. more perceptive) look tells an altogether different story.

First of all I should explain the poll. PW readers were asked what "reading devices" they would be buying this holiday season, meaning either electronic readers or traditional format books, and presumably (though not explicitly stated) either as gifts or for themselves. So the first point of clarification here is that these are readers of Publishers Weekly, and therefore devoted book buyers and avid readers, not your average holiday shopper. As such, they very likely have a higher "early adopter" rate for new technology than most. But then, they are also just the sort of folks who best represent the future trends of tomorrow's book buying public, so the results are worth taking note of.

More important is the fact that an unequal comparison is being implied right from the start. As you can see, all print book formats are lumped into one big pile, while each different e-reading device is broken out separately. A more accurate comparison would be to break down print books into hardbacks, softcover, periodicals, children's board books, etc., because what we're really talking about here is format, not content.

An eReader is a delivery mechanism, and as such exists apart from any content it provides (which these days can be almost anything, including not only books, but games and video as well). One eReader can provide a wealth of content, and most come pre-packaged with a fair amount installed already, or free for the downloading; whereas one print book can provide the reader with only one title - ever - and a limited range of content at that, consisting solely of text and images. An eReader is a gift that keeps giving, whereas a printed book is a gift that gets stuck on a shelf. The fact is that we're really comparing minerals to vegetables here.

Still another important statistic that plays a major factor is the discrepancy in price. Sure, a nice coffee-table book might set you back fifty or sixty bucks, but most books given as gifts cost half of that or less. Even a hardcover new release at $24.95 is a fraction of the lowest priced eReader: less than 1/5th the cost of a Kindle, for example. You can get your kids a book for five bucks and a bow if you like, but the cheapest you'll get off for prodding Granny into the 21st century is $129, and the price goes way up from there. Looking at our poll results, 9.87% of respondents plan to shell out at least $499 for a base model iPad. In economic terms, that's the equivalent of 20 hardbacks gift-wrapped and shipped to all your relatives, or some fifty or so board books and comics for the kids.

But let's look at our poll results another way...

If we ignore the 3.57% who have no literary inclinations whatsoever this holiday season, we're left with 45.58% who intend to give digital this year. That's almost half, which hardly justifies the PW remark that "by far" print books were the most popular gift choice, and that "readers aren't rushing to embrace e-reading as fast as we might think/wish/fear." Compared to the 50.84% who prefer a more traditional holiday experience, 45.58% sounds a lot like ebooks breathing down the neck of traditional publishing to me. And if you consider the monetary footprint represented by that 45%, the results are overwhelmingly in favor of digital. After all, we're not comparing e-books with print books here, we're talking e-readers versus traditionally bound and printed texts. If ebooks themselves were added to the poll - in the form of gift cards or pre-paid downloads perhaps - there might be another tale to tell. But ebooks weren't included as an option in the poll, so that stat will have to wait for another day.

For now, the right half of the pie chart is print and everything else is not. But I can guarantee you the left half will generate far more excitement when it comes time to open presents.

(By the way, who spells "old" Ole' anyway? What exactly is that apostrophe truncating?)