Category: Analysis

E-Book Sales Have Tripled in the Last Year!

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Stack of books graph shows ebook sales

Today the Association of American Publishers finally released their estimated sales statistics for February. It’s conclusion? E-book sales have more than tripled from where they were just one year ago!

I’ve updated this post because originally I hadn’t realized just how much the sales had increased. “According to AAP’s monthly sales estimates, e-book sales jumped 202.3% at the 16 publishers that reported results, hitting $90.3 million,” Publisher’s Weekly reported this morning – and a 200% increase means the sales are triple where they were from the year before. Again, these are the official statistics from the official trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry, which reported that e-book sales “have enjoyed triple-digit percentage growth, 202.3%, vs February 2010.” And they also acknowledged today that people really love to read e-books.

“The public is embracing the breadth and variety of reading choices available to them,” announced the association’s president, adding that while the reading public maintains an interest in printed books, they’ve “made e-books permanent additions to their lifestyle.”

It’s nice to see that book publishers are aware of the changes rocking their industry, and that they’re approaching it with a sense of history. The association’s president noted today that “publishers are constantly redefining the timeless concept of ‘books,'” and identifying new audiences they can serve in new emerging technologies. “Publishers have always strategically expanded into all the markets and formats where readers want to find books,” he added enthusiastically, “whether it was Trade Paperback, Mass Market or now digital.”

But the statistics tell an unusually compelling story. Publishers are selling more e-books than they are books in any other format, according to a larger survey of over 84 different publishing houses. And in fact, nearly every kind of printed book has shown a decline in sales from the sales they reported just last year. For example, in February hardcover sales dropped a massive 43% from the year before, and they’re now earning the publishing houses just $46.2 million.

And mass-market paperbacks didn’t fare much better, dropping 41.5% in February (down to just $29.3 million) from their sales figures a year ago. In fact, combining every category of printed book, you’d still see a drop of 24.8% in their February sales this year. There was only one kind of printed book which showed any increase in sales this year: religious books, which sold 5.5% more in February than they did in February of 2010 (earning $48.5 million). But no matter how you approach these figures, e-books still come out as extremely popular.

So what’s their explanation? E-books apparently got a big boost from the people who received a Kindle (or another digital reader) as a gift this Christmas. There’s not only more reading devices to choose from, but now there’s also more digital titles available, their report noted today. And people may even be reading more once they purchase a digital reader, the report seems to suggest. “Additionally, trade publishing houses cite e-books as generating fresh consumer interest in — and new revenue streams for — ‘backlist’ titles, books that have been in print for at least a year. Many publishers report that e-Book readers who enjoy a newly-released book will frequently buy an author’s full backlist.”

This may be the year that everything changes — when digital texts really start to replace the printed book as we know it.

Will Amazon release a $99 Kindle?

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Sale for 99 on a sign

“A Kindle priced below $100 seems almost a sure thing.”

That’s the opinion of Chad Skelton, who’s both an investigative reporter and blogger for the Vancouver Sun. He predicts that Amazon’s going to make big cuts in the cost of a new Kindle — because it will bring them more customers. “Amazon has already shown a willingness to make deep price cuts on the Kindle,” Skelton writes, documenting the drops from its original $399 price to just $139. He does disagree with the prediction that Amazon may give away a free Kindle (and then try to earn back their money on e-book sales). But he notes that “there are likely a bunch of customers who Amazon can bring into the market once they drop the price down to two digits.”

“The only question is when. If I was a betting man, I’d figure Amazon would drop the Kindle’s price to $99 in time for the holiday shopping season.”

He isn’t the first person to predict Amazon will keep lowering the Kindle’s price. Last August, a technology columnist at Slate argued that Amazon would drop the price of a Kindle to $99 before Christmas of 2010! They didn’t — but it’s still a fascinating article, because it broke down the actual cost Amazon paid for the parts of a Kindle. Over a year ago, E-Ink collaborated with a silicon chip manufacturer to create a way to run the Kindle with a much cheaper semiconductor. And in addition, at least one Amazon’s competitor unveiled a $99 digital reader last July.

“All of these trends likely guarantee that Amazon will release a $99 e-reader someday,” Slate‘s columnist concluded. (And he compared Amazon’s pricing to that of an aggressive salesman in a TV ad, joking that Amazon’s CEO was “the Crazy Eddie of the e-book business: Every time a rival gets close to the Kindle’s prices, Bezos goes even lower. He will not be undersold!”) But there’s already been research into how consumers would react to a $99 Kindle, Slate‘s reporter also notes. While less than 20% of the adults in America would consider a reader costing more< than $100, “nearly 65 percent said they would consider one” if the price were below $100, “and almost 40 percent said they’d buy it within six months!”

Imagine what that would mean for Amazon. Suddenly there’d be three times as many people who wanted to buy the newest Kindle. Presumably they’d triple the sales of e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store. This would give Amazon even more leverage with publishers — though I don’t know whether it would ultimately result in lower e-book prices.

It’s hard to predict the future — as Slate’s columnist found out when he started writing that “tech companies usually ramp up production and lower their prices for the holidays.” But maybe he was right about everything except which holiday Amazon. It’s still possible that Amazon will roll out a $99 Kindle for Christmas.

But instead of Christmas of 2010, it could be Christmas of 2011.

Magazine Publishes First E-Book List in 100 Years

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Publisher's Weekly

It’s a fascinating moment in time. For more than 100 years, Publisher’s Weekly has compiled an annual list of the year’s best-selling books. But for the first time ever, this year they felt that they also had to include e-book sales. “We asked publishers…to submit e-books with sales of more than 10,000 last year,” they reported yesterday. (Though they focused this question only on publishers who’d had a least one best-seller in print that sold more than 100,000 copies.)

Their annual list is an important tradition in the publishing industry, and it looks like this change encountered some resistance. “The response from the houses was mixed,” they noted. “Many declined to share this information, others only submitted selected titles.” In the end they were able to gather statistics about 275 e-books, which they felt were “enough to underscore that the publishing model has indeed changed and that what is available in e-book format is ubiquitous.” In fact, at least two of the year’s best-selling books achieved nearly 30% of their sales in the e-book format!

The first was The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (by Stieg Larsson), which dominated the top of Amazon’s best-selling e-book list for most of 2010, and sold 775,000 e-book editions (vs 1.9 million printed editions). And the second was John Grisham’s new thriller, “The Confession,” which sold 550,000 e-book editions and 1.36 million print editions. Publisher’s Weekly declares them to be the #2 and #3 best-selling books of the year, respectively, when you combine their print and e-book sales, behind only former President Bush’s biography Decision Points. Interestingly, the president’s book sold many more of its copies in print — nearly 90% — with just 10.3% of its sales coming in the e-book format. When you consider only e-book sales, the former president’s book drops down to the #3 position.

But other books ended up with a very small percentage of e-book sales, including Life, the biography of The Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Keith Richards. Its combined sales made it the sixth best-selling book for all of 2010, but just 4% of its sales came in the e-book format — 34,467 copies — compared to print sales of 811,596. And even fewer people bought the e-book edition of Bill O’Reilly’s Pinheads and Patriots. Though it sold 662,950 print copies — making it the #10 best-selling book of 2010 — it sold just 26,290 e-book editions, representing just 3.8% of all its sales.

There were also at least 12 different e-books that were authored (or co-authored) by James Patterson among the best-selling e-books in 2010, according to Publisher’s Weekly. Five of Patterson’s suspense stories even made it onto the more select list of the top 30 best-selling e-books.

I, Alex Cross (#6)
The 9th Judgment (#13)
Private (#16)
The Postcard Killers (#17)
Don’t Blink (#28)

But publishers are even reporting high e-book sales for perennially-popular “back list” titles like The Great Gatsby and Gone with the Wind. So it seems like this once-a-year event has provoked some thoughtful analysis about what lies ahead for the world of publishing — and what lies ahead for the book. Publishers Weekly remembered the day when Stephen King published the first e-book — Riding the Bullet — back in March of 2000. At the time, a spokesperson for Simon & Schuster announced “This could change the model of publishing.”

But then Publisher’s Weekly turned their attention to an insightful blog post by Mike Shatzkin, a consultant and analyst who has more than 50 years of experience in the publishing industry. He likens the new popularity of e-books to the days when publishers first began producing cheap paperback editions shortly after World War II. “Much less expensive editions, combined with access to audiences for authors that couldn’t get past the gatekeepers in the established houses, can create millions of new readers,” Shatzkin writes — and Publisher’s Weekly optimistically admits that now the same thing is true today.

“Anything that creates more readers is a boon for all kinds of publishers.”

Is Amazon Planning a Free Kindle?

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Monopoly Man with Hat and Moustache Community Chest Card parody

It sounds too good to be true, but some pundits are at least considering the possibility that in 9 months, Amazon will start giving away Kindles for free.

It started in October of 2009. Author John Walkenbach noted on his blog that the price of the Kindle dropped from $359 to $299 to $259 — and of course, it dropped again to $189 with the release of the Kindle 3. But Walkenbach also noticed that the Kindle’s price “was falling at a consistent rate,” observed another blog, “lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011.”

Free Amazon Kindle November 2011 Price Forecast

“In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, ‘Oh, you noticed that!’ And then smiled again.”

I’d laugh this off, if it weren’t for the impressive credentials of the blogger reporting on his conversation with Jeff Bezos — Kevin Kelly. He was the co-founder of Wired magazine, and has also written for some of the most-respected publications, including The Economist, Esquire, The New York Times, and Time magazine (as well as GQ). He even was a founding board member for The WELL, one of the first online communities in 1985, well before the dawn of the big commercial internet service providers. According to Wikipedia, even the producers of The Matrix required the movie’s stars to read Kelly’s 1995 book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.

Of course, there’s a few caveats. If you go back and read the original post, Walkenbach had actually said “If this price trend continues, it will be free by June, 2011.” (And not November.) Walkenbach had added “I’m actually serious about this. At some point, the Kindle will be free. It will probably be before June, 2011.” But Friday Kelly’s site had updated Walkenbach’s graph to include the most-recent price drop to $189, and then re-calculated the trend to conclude that the Kindle’s price would reach $0 by November.

And the other caveat is more serious. 13 months ago, the TechCrunch blog reported “Amazon wants to give a free Kindle to every Amazon Prime subscriber.” That’s not particularly far-fetched, since
the program (which offers discounts on shipping from Amazon) already costs $79 a year. Amazon would throw in the Kindle for just $60 more — presumably hoping that they’d earn back the cost of the discount when the recipients started ordering more ebooks from Amazon. The previous month Amazon had even tested a unique program where they’d ship Kindles to carefully-selected customers — and the customers didn’t even have to pay Amazon. “If you don’t love it, we’ll refund your money AND you can keep the Kindle,” Amazon’s offer explained.

This all seems to suggest that Amazon has been considering a free Kindle for a while, and has even test-marketed the program (presumably to see if it’s cost-effective). But Kevin Kelly misread the date on the
coverage of that limited program, and assumed it was from February of this year — just two weeks ago — instead of February of 2010. Then he’d concluded that “It brilliantly feeds into Bezo’s long-term strategy of nurturing extreme customer satisfaction… If the past is any indication of future events, expect an as-if-free Kindle this fall in time for the holidays. Brilliant indeed!”

It’s hard to think straight about this possibility — because it’d be so ridiculously exciting if Amazon suddenly started handing out free Kindles to everybody. It does make me think that Amazon probably will continue dropping the prices on a Kindle. After all, they’ve obviously calculated how much more money they’ll earn when each new Kindle owner starts purchasing all their ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle store. I’m not a stock analyst, but it’s worth noting that the people who’ve studied the technology industry are taking this possibility seriously.

“I don’t know if this is Amazon’s plan,” Kelly wrote on his blog, “but it should be!”

How Ebooks Conquered the World

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Little Shop of Horrors lost ending

Last May, a competitor emerged for the Kindle. It was called the Kobo, and it was available in Walmart stores, and also Borders. But today the news finally came down that Borders has now, officially, filed for bankruptcy. All their recent moves “failed to make up for sagging book sales in the face of competition from Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc,” Bloomberg News reported today.

It’s interesting that one of Borders’ last desperate moves was trying to sell a digital reader for ebooks. New York Magazine once interviewed the 69-year-old founder of Barnes and Noble, who conceded, they wrote, that “the superstores can serve as platforms for marketing their own replacement technology.” Today as soon as you walk into a Barnes and Noble store, you’re now greeted with a prominent counter dedicated to trying to sell you the Nook. Barnes and Nobles’ new CEO calls that counter “the shrine.”

But today I stumbled across an interesting statistic. An Australian newspaper interviewed the managing e-commerce director at RedGroup Retail, which owns all the Borders stores in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. He bragged that they’d sold out of Kobos when they first introduced them, but that over the next nine months, they’d only sold 50,000. That comes out to just 185 a day — for the entire continent of Australia, combined with sales in both Singapore and New Zealand. To put that in perspective, Amazon is estimated to have sold at least 6,000,000 Kindles in the last year. That is, for every Kobo that was sold in those three regions, Amazon sold 120 Kindles. It’s hard to make a dent in your competition when they’re outselling you 120 to 1…

Of course, Australia is only one part of the global market for digital readers — but they offer a unique perspective. “The best predictions are that Australia is probably likely to take up e-books faster than the US and the UK,” according to chief executive of the Australian Publishers’ Association, “but that’s simply because of the population size.” She predicts that within five years, 40% of the books that are sold in
Australia will be ebooks. And that can’t be good for booksellers like Borders…

If we’re seeing a major change, then it’ll eventually reach every part of the globe — and the experience of Australians might be a harbinger of things to come. It was interesting to read the comments that were
left on the newspaper’s web site. “Nothing can replace the tangible feeling of having a physical book in your hands,” wrote one reader who called themselves Bookworm. “However my eyes sadly are not what they used to be so like the surging numbers turning to e-readers I have embraced this new technology. With the size of the text adjustable, it is the perfect device for me to continue my love affair with books which started when I was but a wee lad.” And while Kindle owners are complaining that ebook prices have started rising, in Australia they’ve been complaining about the high cost of printed books! “Australia’s take up of eBooks has less to do with being ‘nimble’,” wrote a woman named Mary, “and more to do with Australians being sick to death of the price gouging by local retailers that sees us pay three times what the rest of the English speaking world pays for the same book. Finally we can fight back.”

But even with that perspective, ebooks still seemed too expensive, according to another comment from JG. “Two-thirds the cost of a physical book is of course still far to expensive for what is essentially a few megabytes of data at most. I am all for authors getting farily paid for their hard work, but since the only costs involved in digital distribution are editing/formatting and hosting services, should the artificially high prices for books we pay in Australia really be the benchmark for e-book prices?”

I was reading the news headlines late last night, so I ended up getting stories from around the globe. But it seems like no matter which country the news came from, there was somebody who was raving about ebooks and the Kindle. One British columnist even headlined his story: Three 3 New Reaons Why My Amazon Kindle Grows in My Esteem. Just like he’d the easy bookmarking, the ease of switching books, and the ability to change font sizes. “When I first got my Amazon Kindle USA,” he wrote, “I was half expecting that it would be a fad that would only last for a short while before I returned to my life-long habit of reading books…

“…but this is not proving to be the case!”

Barrons says Amazon “is Smoking”

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Amazon Kindle yearly sales figures by Barrons analyst

What do things look like for Amazon — both now, and in the future? Today two technology analysts delivered their verdict: “Amazon is Smoking with Kindle”. That’s the headline at Barrons.com, in their “Hot Research” column, highlighting a report by Stan Velikov and Sandeep Aggarwal. They’re predicting that the number of Kindles Amazon sells in 2012 will be more than double the number of Kindles that they sold just last year — and that for the next 12 months, Amazon’s Kindle sales will increase by more than 50%.

“In our view,” the two analysts write, “Kindle remains the best ebook reader in the market and competition is unable to dent its market share.” They predict that over the next year Amazon will spend more money on Kindle advertising — and they think it’s a good idea, arguing that Amazon is just “strengthening its competitive moats.” They’ve also upgraded their past estimates for Amazon’s sales of the Kindle. For last year they now believe that Amazon sold a whopping 6.1 million Kindles, earning them $3.31 billion in Kindle-related revenues. Yet for this year, Barrons estimates that Amazon will sell more than 50% more Kindles than last year — earning revenues of $5.53 billion by selling another 9.3 million Kindles by the end of the year!

But what’s even more interesting is that comes out to an average of more than $500 per Kindle! I’m not sure what to make of those numbers — even if you remember that the Kindle 2 cost $260 for the first half of 2010. They’re still predicting an even higher average revenue of $594 per Kindle in 2011, when most Kindles will be much cheaper. (The Kindle 3G costs just $189, and there’s also the cheaper $139 model). It seemed like they’re estimating that the average Kindle owner spends at least $300 a year purchasing ebooks — until I remembered remember that the larger Kindle DX costs $379. But even if half the Kindles purchased were the more expensive Kindle DX, Barrons is still estimating that the average Kindle owner spends a lot of money on ebooks — about $240 apiece. I guess that’s possible — that’s $20 a month, or about two $9.99 books every month. And of course, the price of ebooks is also rising, which seems to be reflected in their estimates for the future.

So what happens in 2012? Barrons predicts that 12.5 million Kindles will be sold! (That’s twice as many as in 2010, now earning Amazon another $7.96 billion in revenue.) And these predictions are especially significant, because Barrons is the official newspaper of Dow Jones & Company (which also publishes the Wall Street Journal). In fact, Clarence W. Barron, the man the newspaper is named after, is considered “the founder of modern financial journalism,” according to Wikipedia. Barrons is publishing research from an investment firm, so it’s not the official opinion of Barrons.com.

But it’s still an authoritative prediction that Amazon’s Kindle sales…are smoking!

Amazon yearly Kindle sales (estimate by Barrons)

The Last Hours of Borders Bookstores?

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Borders bookstore closing

I’ve been wondering if the Kindle will one day lead to the end of the printed book. But maybe first, we should be worrying about the future of the bookstore! The picture above shows a Borders bookstore that closed in September. But now the entire Borders Group chain “may file for protection from creditors”, Bloomberg News reported last Tuesday — citing three different people who were “familiar with the matter.”

The three sources predicted that the filing could come as soon as this week, and one of them added that as many as 30% of the chain’s bookstores could close! (There’s over 500 Borders bookstores across America…) Ironically, last month Borders bookstores appeared in an episode of NBC’s “The Office” — while in real life the chain was stopping (or “delaying”) their payments to the publishers of the books Borders sells! Borders itself seems to acknowledge big changes are coming, announcing two weeks ago they’d received over half a billion dollars in funding to “provide Borders with the financial flexibility and an appropriate level of liquidity to move forward…” But further down in the press release a disclaimer noted it was contingent on “Borders’ finalization of a store closure program” to identify under-performing stores “that will be closed as soon as practicable…”

Ironically, for Barnes and Noble, that’s good news, and their stock price actually jumped up 7.4% last Tuesday. But Friday Borders stock closed at 39 cents a share — and then Monday even dropped two cents lower, down to just 35 cents a share. (Though that two cents represented 5.3% of the stock’s total value.) In fact, Borders stock may be de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange, which has a rule that every stock must be worth at least $1.00 a share. If their stock price doesn’t improve within six months, it can’t be listed on the exchange.

In the middle of the meltdown The Washington Post actually tracked down Mr. Borders himself — Louis Borders, one of the two brothers who co-founded the chain back in 1971 — at his home in Silicon Valley. (“Louis Borders declined to discuss his namesake’s problems or even whatever fondness he may hold for what’s left of his first big idea. ‘I’ve been away from the company for a while, and I just don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, before quickly hanging up.”) But they also uncovered the real story behind the closure. “Whatever progress publishers and Borders make toward a temporary deal, analysts and industry observers say the larger problem is much more daunting: There are just too many big bookstores selling a product fewer and fewer people want, at least in printed form… For many in the industry – and for this group of Borders regulars – the question is not whether the chain will go under, but when.”

Inevitably the article points at least one finger towards the popularity of new digital reading devices like the Kindle. (In the same article, the founder of Barnes and Noble jokes, “Sometimes I want to shoot
myself in the morning.”) And though the bookstore refused to talk to the newspaper’s reporter, he still looks for a reason tries to understand why. The Post notes that now Borders “confronts the limitless, more efficient supply chain of Amazon’s online emporium.” But he also looks for an answer buried deep in the company’s history.

Ironically, the company was started in 1971 because the Borders brothers had developed a new technology for booksellers! Originally the two brothers planned to license a software that they’d developed which helped predict the best-selling titles. But when they couldn’t interest the bookstores, they opened new stores themselves, and along with Barnes and Noble, created the phenomenon of superstore book-selling. “Readers rushed in for the latest Oprah Book Club pick. John Grisham became very wealthy, with one bestseller and movie after another…”

But technology continued marching forward, the Post notes. (“As the two book mega-stores clobbered each other in their battle for market share, the chains, and especially Borders, missed the next big cultural shift, analysts say.”) In fact, Borders eventually had to partner with Amazon for their web presence! By the end of the story, Amazon had developed the Kindle, Barnes and Noble created the Nook, and Borders had…nothing. “These trends were not a secret,” explains a retail expert at the Harvard Business School.

“They should have seen them coming…”

Are eBooks Finally Outselling Printed Books?

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Kindle - white vs graphic (vs a stack of books)

Every once in a while, there’s a moment that reminds us of just how rich Amazon is.

Thursday afternoon, they announced that they’d earned $200 million more in 2010 than they had in the previous year. (“Net sales increased 36% to $12.95 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $9.52 billion in fourth quarter 2009.”) In fact, it was the first year that Amazon’s sales were more than $10 billion for a single three-month period. Amazon’s CEO said they’d sold “millions” of Kindles in those 13 weeks, and then he dropped an even more stunning peice of information.

“Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.”

Amazon had announced last July that they were selling more ebooks than hardcovers. But at the time, I’d complained that was misleading, since hardcovers make up a small percent of total book sales at any store. One analyst had calculated that there’s usually three paperback books sold for every one hardcover book. Combining that information with Amazon’s statistics, it seemed like in July Amazon’s ebook sales were only 54% of their paperback sales.

But not any more. In fact, Amazon explained today that for every 100 paperback books they’ve sold this January, they’re selling 115 ebooks. That’s another way of saying that ebook sales have risen to 115% of Amazon’s paperback sales — that is, nearly double what it was in July. That’s even more impressive than it seems, because paperback sales are actually increasing, according to Amazon’s announcement today. And they’ve sold “three times as many” Kindle ebooks as they have hardcover books, according to today’s announcement. If you graph it all on a pie chart, it looks like this.

Amazon Kindle ebook sales vs print book sales - both hardcover and paperback - pie chart graph

Of course, that still means that Amazon is selling fewer ebooks than they are printed books — if you combine the paperback and hardcover sales. But ebooks now represent more than 45% of all the books that Amazon is selling. If ebooks can just increase their share by 5%, Amazon will finally be able to announce that they’re selling more ebooks than all print books combined. And that day could come sooner than you’d expect. Amazon predicted last summer that ebooks wouldn’t start outselling paperbacks until at least April of this year. They beat their own prediction by at least three months!

Of course, it’s possible that this is a one-time spike. (After all, there were a lot of new Kindles that were activated on Christmas day.) It’d be interesting to see whether ebook sales actually drop below paperback sales again at some time during February or March. But Amazon’s figures are even more impressive when you realize that not every printed book has an ebook edition yet. And to achieve this milestone, Amazon didn’t even count any of the free ebooks that people are downloading, which is presumably an enormous number.

In fact, if just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions!

Who’s Giving Away Free Kindles?

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Microcosm Zine Store trades Kindles for books
(
Detail from an image by Rio Safari)

When I was young, banks would give you a new toaster if you opened up a bank account. But now, a bank in Oklahoma is offering customers something even more enticing.

MidFirst bank in Oklahoma has 52 branches across the state, and until the end of March they’re giving away a free Kindle if you open a new checking and savings account. (Limit: one per household.) The only restriction at MidFirst.com/Kindle appears to be the opening balances on both accounts – $500 for the savings account, and $100 for the checking account. Alternately, customers can instead choose to receive a $125 credit to their accounts – but getting a free Kindle seems much more exciting. And it even comes pre-loaded with a free ebook about personal finance.

But it turns out that this Oklahoma bank isn’t the only business that’s trying to lure new customers with a Kindle give-away. In Portland, an alternative book store is offering to let customers trade their Kindle for their equivalent value in books. “And make sure to bring a friend to help you carry all your loot,” they explained on their blog. Because they also sell used and “remaindered” books (along with zines and other independent small-press books), “most of the store’s books are priced in the $2 – $6 range so a $139 – $189 trade-in…you might be carrying your books out in a fleet of wheelbarrows!”

Of course, they couldn’t announce the offer without taking a few digs at the Kindle on their blog. (“Do you want to trade in your soulless faux-literary technology for its worth in good old fashioned books? Well, friends, Microcosm Publishing’s got your back!”) They even quote a review of the Kindle from Amazon’s own web page, where one users gushes that the Kindle’s screen looks like an absolutely perfect page, without any of a print books grain or pulp. “Well, you know what, Jeremy? We love the and grain and pulp. Long live the grain and pulp! Long live the PAGE.”

It’s not a national trend – but I think it means something. For one thing, obviously, it shows that the Kindle is really popular — so popular that other businesses are using it to lure customers into their own store. But I think the Portland publisher should be cheering for the Kindle, since it’s giving them a new market for their independent authors — in ebooks! John Makinson, the CEO of the Penguin Group publishers, shared his enthusiasm for the future this weekend with an audience at a literary festival in India. “I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” he told the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival. More than 50,000 people attended, and in a panel discussion, the book-industry insider made it very clear that he’s still optimistic about the future. “The idea of the book
dying comes up all the time.

“It’s wrong.”

The Kindle, the iPad, and the future of ebooks!

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Globe of the Earth

Is the Kindle changing our world? That’s a question I ask myself every day. But someone’s actually contacted 6,250 frequent book buyers to find out exactly what’s going on. Their research generated some startling statistics – and led to a disturbing prediction about the future. Yes, it’s a picture of our world as it is today – but it already contains the seeds for the world of books tomorrow.

26% of adult book buyers are already reading digital ebooks, according to the survey, while 34% more said they’d be willing to try them. In fact, only 14% swore they would never, ever read an ebook. The biggest thing keeping people away from the Kindle was probably the price, according to their analysis. After Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle, it saw a surge in four different age brackets. The percentage who reported a Kindle doubled between June and November for people between the ages of 18 and 24 (from 3.2% to 6.5%). By November, 8.5% of the adults between the ages of 35 and 44 now reported they owned a Kindle — and 9.6% of the adults older than 65!

But how is that affecting the world of books and the way people buy them? First, how many iPads are there in the world? 15 million (according to Apple). That’s in only nine months, since it was released in April. But ironically, when people buy an ebook for their iPad, 40% of the ebooks are bought through Amazon’s Kindle store! Apple doesn’t have a deal in place with Random House, according to Publisher’s Weekly, which means Apple’s iBookstore can’t offer popular titles like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, John Grisham’s The Confession, or even former president Bush’s autobiography, Decision Points. In fact, iPad owners bought just 29% of their ebooks from Apple’s iBookstore, according to a November survey by a research firm called the Codex Group.

But those researchers discovered an even more amazing statistic. Before buying the Kindle, shoppers bought 14% of their books from Amazon — but after they bought a Kindle, that number jumped to 37%! “It’s the most amazing retail share growth strategy I’ve ever seen,” says Peter Hildick-Smith, the research firm’s president (who previously had developed retail growth strategies for Wal-Mart.) “The increase in market share came entirely from book buyers’ added purchase of e-books,” Publisher’s Weekly noted, and yet amazingly, Amazon barely lost any of its share of the print book market! “While e-book purchases do not appear to be cannibalizing print sales at Amazon, the Kindle store has to be taking sales away from somewhere, and Hildick-Smith believes it is from bricks-and-mortar stores.”

And then he makes a prediction. Currently the vast majority of people discover their next book through a bookstore. (I even know several people who’ve reported browsing through the books at a bookstore — before downloading a digital version to their Kindle or Nook!) But if the Kindle’s popularity continues, it’s going to hurt some local bookstores — and that’s going to make it harder for publishers to advertise their newest books. “What has Hildick-Smith really worried, however, is whether publishers have concrete plans to protect their bookstore base.

“If not, they need to quickly find an alternative primary source for the discovery of new books, especially for nonfiction, debut, and midlist fiction titles that, at present, sell in much fewer numbers as e-books than fiction does….”

The Kindle Comes to the Library

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A typical public library

Here’s another sign that there’s more Kindle owners and ebook readers in the world. A Chicago newspaper reports that the public libraries in western Cook County have been “deluged” with phone calls about ebooks. “The surge in interest in ebooks has library officials re-examining their policies regarding downloadable books and working to keep up with the demand for information about the newest publishing phenomenon.”

In fact, a survey was conducted last March of the whole North Suburban Library system (encompassing four different counties) — and nine different libraries reported they’d already purchased a Kindle for their patrons! Some were just making it available within the library, so people in the community could try the technology. But at the River Forest Public Library, for example, there’s even an Amazon Kindle with pre-loaded content that the patrons can check out (as well as a Sony Reader). And at the Glencoe Public Library, you can even request that the librarians download a specific ebook to the Kindle before you check it out!

It seems to be happening everywhere. In Groton, Massachusetts, the public library’s endowment purchased two Kindles (and two Nooks), which can be checked out for three weeks — and even renewed — “as long as no one else is waiting for them.” (There is, however, a special check-out agreement which warns users not to return the Kindle in the library’s book drop!) Their late fee is a hefty $5.00 a day, but it’s a sign that public libraries are already adapting to the world of digital ebooks. A quick Google search reveals that in nearby Wisconsin, there’s a River Falls public library which is doing the same thing, and has four pre-loaded Kindles. A copyright specialist at the American Library Association even predicts that someday, libraries will offer local reviews about the library’s ebooks and comments from the people who’ve checked it out!

It’s fun to compare the different policies that the libraries have for their Kindles. (At the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, you can check out a Kindle for one week, and the late fine is $1.00 a day, while at the Barrington Libary it’s a two-week checkout, but the Kindles can’t be renewed…) The Des Plaines Library loans their Kindles for two months, and reports that “we purposely have tried to interest patrons with visual impairment who would greatly benefit by the large type feature.”

It’s a very interesting development, because Amazon currently isn’t supporting the file formats which would allow customers to check out ebooks directly from the public library. I’d always wondered if that was going to leave Amazon at a competitive advantage, and I still think that Amazon will eventually adopt that capability. But it looks like in the mean time, the libraries have come up with the perfect work-around.

Instead of loaning you some ebooks, the libraries will loan you an entire Kindle!

Scenes from the eBook Revolution

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Chef Tom Douglas cooks in Seattle

“I got the Kindle WiFi for Christmas, and if I ever lose it, I will sell a kidney to get it back.”

That’s a real comment that Amazon just shared on the Kindle’s Facebook page. And what’s even more interesting is that new Kindle owner only had one kidney. He told Amazon that when it comes to his Kindle, “I love it that much…”

Christmas apparently created a lot of happy new Kindle owners — I’d estimate several million Kindles were given as gifts — and all around the world, they’re already making their presence felt. I was curious when USA Today reported that for the first week of 2011, ebooks were outselling printed books for more than a third of the titles on their best-seller list. But would it happen again the next week? It turns out the answer is yes!

Thursday USA Today announced that for 36% of the books on their best-seller list, the ebook version was still outselling the printed edition. (That’s 18 of the top 50 books!) It’s good news for companies that sell ebooks, but it probably also means that drastic changes are coming soon if a store’s survival depends on the sale of printed books. Ironically, I know of two employees at Borders bookstores who already secretly prefer reading ebooks. In September, my friend Mike even chatted with a Borders cashier who “started complaining about e-books and how they were killing off the bookstores… As I walked out, I noticed she went back to reading whatever book she was reading – on her Kobo!”

At a newspaper in Alabama, the book editor shared his own unique perspective. In an interesting editorial on Saturday, he reported that apparently people are reading more now that they own a digital reader. “No need to drive to the mall, browse crowded shelves or call a clerk – simply tap a few keys and in mere seconds you’ve got it.” And he also reported that Kindles are especially handy for travelers, as one man in his mid-60s explained. “All my friends swear by the Kindle for trips. One buddy and his wife went to Spain recently, and they were able to download a dozen guidebooks onto their Kindle. That’s a serious weight savings on an international flight.”

But that’s about to get even better, since Amazon just launched their own original ebook series of restaurant/tour guidebooks for travelers, starting with the city where Amazon has its headquarters: Seattle. Amazon’s Vice President of Kindle content said the ebook guides “allow for a little extra space in your bag for local specialties like coffee or wild salmon,” and for Chef Walks: Seattle they tapped the award-winning chef Tom Douglas (pictured above), who’s also a one-time winner on Iron Chef America! The book is already available in Amazon’s Kindle store, and one reviewer is already applauding the ebook for “A great idea, well executed, and hopefully the start of a great series of Kindle publications.”

But as the ebook revolution continues, there’s an even more interesting story in North Carolina. According to a local newspaper, the Rowan County Public Library has 12 Amazon Kindles now that it’s checking out to its patrons, just like books! “[A]ccording to librarian Betty Moore, demand has been exceptional, with 68 people on the waiting list late last week… The library’s devices contain about 80 titles, and if you want a specific book that is not already on the Kindle, you may request one book and the Library will purchase that title to put onto the e-reader.”

I keep asking if this is the year when we’ll see humankind take a leap to an entirely new way of reading. But apparently, that transition won’t happen without a few bumps! Back in Alabama, the book editor reported a funny conversation when his wife tried to help his elderly mother set up her new Kindle. They charged it, checked its instructions, registered it, and then downloaded a John Grisham book.

But then she complained that “I’m too exhausted now to read it!”

Has Amazon Sold Out of the Kindle?

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The Kindle is enjoying a huge spike in its popularity. And it’s gotten so popular, that now Amazon can’t even send you one! If you go to buy the 3G version of the Kindle, it’s still listed as “in stock”. But if you’re looking to buy a Wi-Fi only Kindle, its page at Amazon.com comes with a new warning. “Expected to ship in 8 to 9 days.”

That’s a 9-day wait before it even ships, before you can even start worrying about the additional days of waiting for the actual delivery to take place! Obviously Amazon would prefer to ship their 3G Kindles as soon as a customer orders them, so the fact that they’ve delayed their shipping date by nine days can mean only one thing: they’re out of those Kindles!

And there’s more evidence that the Kindle enjoyed a big holiday spike in its popularity. Today USA Today announced that ebooks outsold printed books on their best-seller list for the six titles at the top of the list — and for 13 more books in the top 50. “It’s the first time the top-50 list has had more than two titles in which the e-version outsold print,” the newspaper pointed out. But this week, ebooks outsold the printed books for a full 38% of the titles in the top 50.

USA Today tracked down the publisher for the top three titles — which were all written by Stieg Larsson — and the publisher revealed that in the last week they’d sold a total of 165,000 ebook versions, versus just 155,000 print versions. Interestingly, last year Amazon announced that Larsson had become the first author to sell one million ebooks in the Amazon store. It looks like he increased his ebook sales by quite a bit in just the last week!

But it averages out to sales of just 55,000 for each ebook in Larsson’s trilogy — and it may be a one-time fluke. I’d imagine that book sales are unusually low in that week after Christmas — while ebook sales would obviously experience a sudden spike, from all the people who received a Kindle as a Christmas present! “What’s most interesting is what happens next week or over the next month,” says the editor of a digital newsletter called Publishers Lunch. He pointed out to USA Today that “About 3 million to 5 million e-readers were activated last week. Will the people who got them keep downloading e-books, and at what rate?”

And the newspaper also interviewed another analyst who was even more skeptical of that spike in ebook sales. Kelly Gallagher (from the publishing research firm Bowker) told USA Today that the spike wasn’t a “sustainable trend.” Currently ebook sales account for just 9% of the total book market, if you believe the figures in this article, although Gallagher predicts that in 2011, ebook sales could still be twice as high as they were in 2010.

It’s going to be an interesting year!

Roger Ebert on the Kindle

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I’ve been fighting a cold this week — but it got me remembering some of my favorite blog posts of 2010. I’d been thinking about the way I viewed books not just 10 years ago, but 20 or 30. (Before what historians will eventually call “the digital revolution”.) I remembered being a teenager and watching an old black-and-white horror movie from the 1930s — I think it was The Invisible Man Returns — but what really impressed me was the elderly British inspector in the movie who had his own cozy den that was filled with shelves of books. I remember thinking that when I was a grown-up, I also wanted a luxuriously cozy study just like that — which would also be lined with my favorite books.

And I had the same thought when I saw Bilbo’s hobbit hole in The Fellowship of the Ring…

But now, instead, I have my Kindle, which can probably hold just as many books. And I have an extremely cozy armchair — so if you want to push the metaphor, I can claim that I’ve already realized my dream. But is the luxurious library itself going to become a think of the past? Maybe comfy homes of the future will have a sumptuous “library,” but containing just one single, but very elegant Kindle. It could have a special custom case — marble, maybe, or solid gold. Or maybe books will be still be collected, but as exotic antiquities from a bygone age…

Roger Ebert touched on this in the essay he wrote about how much he treasured the books that he’d loved — as reminders of his experiences while reading them! For example, he once lived at a place called University House.


“It had been built for troops during the war, and now housed graduate students. The water poured down the roof and collected in an exposed gutter which hurried it along somewhere downhill. I have long had this peculiar love of sitting very close to the rain and yet remaining protected — in a cafe, on a porch, next to a window, or there in that room, which had two iron-paned windows and a Dutch door. After a warning from our house mother, I’d gone to the OK Bazaar and purchased a small electric heater.”


I love reading on a rainy day, too, curled up in my cozy chair with a very good…ebook. It’s still a wonderful experience.

So maybe we don’t need the bookshelf-lined private study after all…

I once interviewed Roger Ebert back in 2001. (It happened via a brief e-mail exchange, but I remember him as exceedingly gracious, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since!) He thought a handheld PDA would be too frustrating to use as a newspaper columnist, because “A writer lives through a keyboard.” Now it was 2010, and I’d had to wonder: would Roger Ebert be enthusiastic about a handheld reading device? So I’d done a Google search to see if I could find a recent comment, and found that gloriously rambling essay written by Ebert himself (written just last year) — called Books Do Furnish a Life.

During the course of it, Ebert mentions one book after another that he’s cherished throughout his 67 years of life, and then admits that he still has a home library that’s filled with 3,000 different books. But soon I’d discovered a second link, where Roger Ebert finally shared his own personal feelings about the Kindle. It was in a fairly technical essay where Ebert explained why he prefers seeing films in celluloid prints (vs. newer digital projection systems), titled Why I’m So Conservative.


“In the earliest days of home video, I published an article in The Atlantic calling for a ‘wood-burning cinema.’ In recoil from the picture quality of early tapes, I called for the development of low-cost 16mm projectors for the home. No, this didn’t have the invisible quotation marks of satire around it. Seldom has a bright idea of mine been more excitingly insane…”


It’s hard to argue with his fondness, and the memories that go along with them. And it’s in the essay’s final sentence where he mentions the Kindle — and then brings all these themes together.


“I love silent films. I miss radio drama. In some matters, I feel almost like a reactionary. I love books, for example. Physical books with pages, bindings, tactile qualities and even smell. Once a year I take down my hardbound copy of the works of Ambrose Bierce, purchased for $1.99 by mail order when I was about 11, simply to inhale it. Still as curiously pungent as ever. I summarily reject any opportunity to read a book by digital means, no matter how fervently Andy Ihnatko praises his Kindle. Somehow a Kindle sounds like it would be useful for the wood-burning cinema.”



It’s an argument I’ve heard before, though I’ve never heard it expressed quite so eloquently. The wry resistance of my hero left me a little stunned, until I realized that the two of us also shared a tremendous common ground. After all, maybe Roger Ebert doesn’t love the Kindle. But he definitely loves reading!

And ironically, 11 of Roger Ebert’s books have already been published on the Kindle!

Who’s Using the Kindle?

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A crowd of happy people

About eight million people have apparently received a new Kindle this year. So who are these people?

Fortunately, Amazon’s shared some very interesting stories from Kindle owners on the Kindle’s Facebook page. And one of the most fascinating responses came from Eddie R., who apparently leads a very adventurous life. He’d written to tell Amazon that “I do Third World missionary work, and in the past I had taken anywhere from 25 to 40 pounds of regular books as resource material. That has now been reduced due to my Kindle.”

But Eddie’s adventures with his Kindle were just beginning, since he also told Amazon that “I recently climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. I took my Kindle with me, reading it all the way to the top, which was equal to carrying 100 books up the mountain with a very different weight factor. One of the real benefits is the length of time the battery stays charged 10-12 hours (without wifi) which enabled me to read every night (with a mountain climbing head lamp on), over a seven-day period. I am a very satisfied user!”

Of course, you don’t have to go to Africa to appreciate the Kindle. Barbie G. has a new baby, and she shared with Amazon that “In the first year with my 2nd Generation Kindle, I read 66 books. That was with two kids and a full-time job. It’s great to be able to read while feeding my baby her bottle…!” And a woman named Deborah A. loved how easy it is to turn pages with her Kindle. “The other day I was on the train and was knitting and reading… With a book I usually have to put down the knitting, turn the page, put something on the book to keep it open, then resume my knitting…and all of that I’d have to do for every couple of pages. The Kindle’s page turn bars/buttons on each side are perfect!”

But one of the most fascinating stories came from Vaughn R, who’d actually been part of one of the major news stories of 2010. “As a ‘survivor’ of the Carnival Splendor ‘cruise to nowhere’ I’d like to thank you for making the Kindle, which really helped turn my'”nightmare’ trip into a pleasure.” On its first day the California cruise ship had experienced a fire in its engine room, leaving the 3,299 passengers stranded on board 55 miles from the coastline without any electricity, air conditioning, or hot water, according to one news report. “While other passengers were haplessly ‘dead in the water’ due to the dead batteries on their iPads, my Kindle easily lasted the entire trip even though I used it nearly all day, every day.

“I was able to relax comfortably topside, reading in the bright sun, and enjoy my unexpected extended stay in the middle of the Pacific ocean while reading a large ‘stack’ of books which were loaded on my ultra-thin and light Kindle…”

Vaughn’s story got me wondering if anyone’s reading their Kindle while they’re stuck at an airport — and it turns out the answer is a big yes. “I was on that plane stuck for 12 hours on the tarmac at JFK yesterday,” one Kindle owner posted this afternoon in Amazon’s Kindle forum. “Thank goodness I had my Kindle!” And it turns out it’s a fairly common experience. “Recently, while waiting for my flight at the airport, a voice on a loudspeaker informed the passengers that our plane was delayed because of bad weather,” remembered Sandy B. on the Kindle’s Facebook page, “and it might be two hours before our flight departed.

“Two blissful hours of reading my Kindle sounded like a delicious escape from work, laundry, dishes and bookkeeping.” Instead of being upset about the delay, she wrote Amazon to tell them that she was actually happy about it. “Waiting is WONDERFUL with my Kindle!”

Probably my favorite comment came from a woman named Mary L., who e-mailed Amazon with the ultimate compliment about her Kindle: “It has literally ‘re-kindled’ my love of reading.” But another user thought the name had an even spicier origin. “I was on a ferry ride recently and watched with great amusement as a young man used his Kindle, as ‘chick-bait’. He sat near a group of attractive young women and began reading. It didn’t take more than a few seconds before one of them approached him to ask for a closer look. A man with a Kindle is far more interesting than a man with the latest cologne or the flashiest car… No wonder you called it ‘Kindle'”

This Monday Amazon’s CEO finally shared a story of his own, making the point that the Kindle doesn’t necessarily compete with the iPad. “We’re seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet. Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions.” Amazon isn’t feeling threatened by Apple’s products, and even bragged in their announcement about a customer who ordered an Apple Mac Mini on Christmas Eve — Friday, December 24, at 1:41 p.m. — and actually received in the same day, less than seven hours later in Woodinville, Washington. But Amazon is still beating Apple in the war of the ebooks, according to another detail in the announcement. Amazon’s three most popular ebooks over the last five weeks were John Grisham’s The Confession, Decision Points by George Bush, and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand — all books which are unavailable in Apple’s iBookstore. And Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos still had one more story to tell, with a very happy ending.

“On Christmas Day, more people turned on new Kindles for the first time, downloaded more Kindle Buy Once, Read Everywhere apps, and purchased more Kindle books than on any other day in history!”

Amazon Mistakenly Reveals Kindle Sales Figures?

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Cover Illustration of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I think I’ve finally figured out how many Kindles Amazon has sold. It’s been a closely-guarded secret for years — but it’s possible to calculate a good estimate using the new information Amazon released yesterday.

Monday Amazon announced the Kindle 3 had become the best-selling product ever in Amazon history. That’s even more impressive when you consider that the Kindle 3 has been available for just four months. And two weeks ago, Amazon bragged that they’d already sold “millions” of Kindle 3’s in just the first 73 days since September 1. (That’s pretty much the entire life of the Kindle 3, since it was released just four days earlier, on Saturday, August 27.)

Obviously that confirms that Amazon has sold at least two million Kindles. But you’d think they’d find a way to confirm an even higher number — if in fact they’d actually sold more. And then Monday Amazon’s CEO provided another crucial data point for comparision. He announced coyly that Amazon had sold more Kindle 3’s than they’d sold of the final book in the Harry Potter series.

Interestingly, Amazon once claimed that it didn’t earn any money on the sales of that Harry Potter book. Amazon sold Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at a 50% discount to attract new customers — for just $7.99 — and three years later, it’s still listed on Amazon at that same low price. That book had been the previous best-selling item in Amazon’s history, but ironically, the popular book about the young sorcerer now holds the key to another grand mystery. If we knew how many copies Amazon sold, we’d also know their secret sales figure for the Kindle 3!

But we do know how many copies Amazon sold — at least, judging by a 2007 press release. Amazon announced they’d sold 2.5 million copies of the Harry Potter book in its first 10 weeks of release, according to The New York Times.. But more than 1.6 million copies were pre-ordered, according to an Amazon press release — making the announcement a full 19 days before the book was released. They’d sell just 900,000 more copies over the next 12 weeks, if you combine the information in the two sales figures.

And meanwhile, the book was selling like magic in offline bookstores around the world. In fact, 15 million copies were sold on its first day, according to Forbes magazine. More than a year later, they announced that 44 million copies had finally been sold. Is it possible to calculate Amazon’s share of those sales, thus revealing their sales figures for the Kindle 3?

Note that the sales figures over a year later were just triple the sales figures from the very first day. Applying the same formula to Amazon, you’d expect Amazon to sell 7.5 million copies of the book by the end of 2008. And there’s another way to guess Amazon’s sales figure, which results in a nearly identical number. A business analyst once reported calculations that Amazon sells 19% of all printed books. Using that as a rough guideline, Amazon would’ve sold 9 million copies of the Harry Potter book by the end of 2008.

Of course, they’ve probably sold even more copies since then — especially since last month saw the opening of a movie based on the book. But what’s interesting is this estimate is pretty close to the leaked sales figures that Bloomberg News reported last week. Amazon was expecting to sale 8 million Kindles in 2010, according to “two people who are aware of the company’s sales projections.”

No matter how you estimate it, you seem to come up with the same number – so I feel confident in saying that Amazon has sold close to 8 million Kindle 3 devices in just the last year. Of course, there’s also lots of people who own a Kindle 2 (and even the original Kindle 1), so the number of Kindles in the world is probably much higher. Still, it’s another milestone along the road to the ebook revolution. And Amazon revealed in another interesting piece of trivia from their Monday press release. Saturday more people purchased more Kindle ebooks than on any other day in history.

Ironically, there was one book they weren’t buying: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is still only available in its print edition!

8 Million New Kindle Owners after Christmas?

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Picture of the new smaller, black $139 Amazon Wi-Fi Kindle

I’d been expecting there was going to be a lot of new Kindle owners after Christmas, but now a business news service is backing me up. By the end of the year, Amazon will have sold more than 8 million Kindles, according to new statistics from Bloomberg. And it’s not just a prediction. They’re reporting that number came from “two people who are aware of the company’s sales projections.”

I have to wonder if this is a deliberate leak by Amazon. Amazon’s never shared their sales figures before, until Monday, when they finally revealed they’d sold “millions” of Kindles — just in the previous 73 days! It must’ve been hard keeping that secret, while Apple continued bragging about how fast their were selling their iPads. But in fact, Apple only sold 4.19 million iPads between July and September, and for the rest of the year, Bloomberg’s analyst has predicted that Apple will sell only 5 million more…

I’d like to give a big welcome to all the new Kindle owners. (In a few days, I’ll be publishing a few of my best new tricks for the Kindle!) And if you’re wondering if you should’ve bought an iPad instead — don’t. The selection of books is much smaller in Apple’s store, according to Publisher’s Weekly. “Want an e-book version of the nation’s bestselling nonfiction hardcovers? Don’t bother looking on the iBookstore. Apple still hasn’t struck a deal with Random House, publisher of current hits like George W. Bush’s Decision Points and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken. For now, iPad users who want to get any of Random House’s bestsellers — which also include John Grisham’s The Confession and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — need to visit Apple’s App Store and download the free application for the Kindle or the Nook.”

Publisher’s Weekly notes that Apple offers just 130,000 books in its iBookstore, vs. the 300,000 applications in its app store — and you can’t even access Apple’s iBookstore from your computer, but only from a mobile device!

Maybe there’s a “stealth revolution” underway, and the Kindle’s popularity is Amazon’s own delicious secret. But if that’s true, then it’s got me curious. What kind of Kindles are people actually buying? I decided to ask a friend who publishes a popular technology site, and they agreed to anonymously share the break-down of their own sales for the last 30 days. They’d sold 90 Kindles — more than $13,000 worth — but eighteen of them were 2nd-generation Kindles. (Which is exactly 20%…) Almost two-thirds of their sales were for the new, cheaper WiFi Kindle — but that’s probably because Wi-Fi Kindles were specifically mentioned in Amazon’s ads. (“The All-New Kindle. Built-in Wi-Fi. Only $139…”) Since they’re only available in the new black color, this suggests we may start seeing fewer people in 2011 who are still carrying around the old-fashioned white Kindles.

Although maybe not. My friend’s web site also sold 15 of the new Kindle model that ships with both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity — and only three buyers requested the graphite-colored Kindle. With this model there’s a choice of colors, and given a choice, 80% of the shoppers apparently went with a traditional white Kindle. And if you’re a new Kindle owner, remember. If you wrap your Kindle in a rubber “skin” you can change it to other colors, like blue or pink!

Pink Kindle skin gift cover

If I could send one message to all the new Kindle owners, it would be this: that owning a Kindle is a lot of fun. And remember that the Kindle is surprisingly flexible. Besides ebooks there’s also a great selection of games for the Kindle, and you can even use it to read your favorite newspapers and magazines. (Not to mention some great Kindle blogs!) So to all the new Kindle owners: happy holidays

And happy Kindle-ing!

Still More Millions of eReaders

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Celebrate millions with the number 2,000,000
I’ve been waiting for digital readers to reach “a tipping point”. Is this the week that it finally happens? Last week Amazon announced they’d sold millions of Kindles in just the last 73 days. And now Sony just announced they’ve also sold millions of their digital reading devices, too. In fact, they predict it’ll be sold out within just a few days (“before the holidays”), and their more-expensive model is actually outselling the cheaper one.

But I think ebooks reached another important milestone on Sunday. The second-biggest newspaper in America is the Los Angeles Times, and yesterday in its Sunday edition — which is read by over one million people — their book critic had an announcement for the world. “The great debate of the last several years — whether readers would read book-length material onscreen — appears to have been settled with a resounding ‘yes’.” Elsewhere in the newspaper, he published his list of his favorite books this year. But he’d prefaced it by noting the popularity of the Kindle and iPad (plus the launch of Google’s own ebook store), saying each development “points to significant shifts in how we read.”

In his last column of 2010, David L. Ulin wrote that ebooks were “the story in publishing this year,” and admits that even he now owns a Kindle. (Although he seems a little ambivalent about it, writing “I have a Kindle but I rarely use it, and I don’t have an iPad, although I covet one…”) But surprisingly, he’s not worried about a threat to the printed book, and he argues instead that “none of these media are in competition. They are complementary.” The book, after all, is just a medium for something more important. “The issue is not what we read on, just as the issue is not what we read. The issue is that we read, that we continue to interact with long-form writing…”

And maybe there’s another secret hint about the future that’s hidden in his list of favorite books. I know at least one of the authors also owns a Kindle: Elif Batuman. “The Kindle is wonderful for drunk people…” she wrote in a British newspaper in October. “Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn’t usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol… Because I am a writer, people sometimes ask me how ebooks have changed the literary landscape. The short answer, for me, is that I have developed a compulsion to drunk-dial Agatha Christie several times a week.”

She’s a book-lover with a sense of humor, and she called her 2010 memoir The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Yes, it’s available on the Kindle, offering a semi-serious personal inquiry into the act of reading itself. It just seems to me like everyone’s using Kindles — even the people who write books, about reading books, and the book critics who then criticize those books.

In fact, even that critic’s newspaper — The Los Angeles Times — is available on the Kindle. And the circle doesn’t end there, since tonight my girlfriend will be reading this blog post about that Kindle-using book critic…on her own Kindle!

Kindles are everywhere…

The Birth of the Kindle

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The original Amazon Kindle
There’s a fascinating article today about how Amazon created the Kindle using an international team of developers. “Amazon’s Kindle was largely developed in the heart of Israel’s high-tech center in the Herzliya Industrial Zone on the central coast,” notes a nonprofit news organization, which tracked down the programmers who helped build it!

Sun Microsystems had a special team in Israel devoted to writing the computer code for handheld devices besides cellphones, and developer Lilach Zipory remembers that four years ago, “Amazon contacted Sun in California and said they wanted a small device that could be used to read e-books.” The first thing the team noticed was the Kindle’s greyscale screen (which was a big switch from the color screens used by most other devices.) They ultimately spent several years working with Amazon until eventually they’d developed the perfect device.

Amazon ordered 100,000 of them, remembers Eran Vanounou, the group’s development director, “and we were frankly skeptical they would sell all of them. But when they sold out a couple of months later, we realized what we were involved with.” Lilach admits that she was equally surprised. “I would never have expected an e-book reader to take off like the Kindle did.”

Though they’ve built many devices, “the Kindle is different, because it’s such a phenomenon,” Vanounou says. Now when he flies on an airplane, he sees other passengers reading a Kindle, and knows it’s a device that they helped to create. Once Vanounou ended up talking to a passenger, who apparently raved about how much she enjoyed using her Kindle. “I didn’t let on how much we in Oracle Herzliya were a part of her experience,” he told the reporters. But finally she told him point blank, “I love my Kindle,” he remembers.

“I could have sworn I felt a tear in my eye.”

Kindle vs Nook: More Surprising Sales Statistics

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Barnes and Noble Nook
Amazon made a stunning announcement Tuesday morning. “In just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles..”

Kindle owners were the first to get the news, since Amazon quietly posted it online in a forum for Kindle owners. “Thank you, Kindle customers…” the announcement began, adding that “in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009.” Their post was just six sentences long, but it seemed bigger in scope — and big on gratitude. Amazon’s Kindle Team said they were “energized” (and grateful) for “the overwhelming customer response,” and the message ended with the words “Thank you for being a Kindle customer.”

It’s fun watching the reactions from skeptical technology sites. “It’s raining Kindles,” wrote The Motley Fool. They’ve complained in the past Amazon never revealed the actual number of Kindles sold, saying it’s “like having a discussion with a kindergartner or a politician. They all tell you what they think you want to hear…but lack the details you really need to know before drawing your own conclusion.”

Even then, Amazon’s announcement Tuesday didn’t completely satisfy the site. “Amazon.com still isn’t coming clean with how many Kindle e-book readers it’s selling, but at least now we know that it will be in the ‘millions’ this holiday quarter alone.” The Motley Fool called Amazon’s sales figure “impressive,” and attributed it to the better deals available. “[I]t really wasn’t until this year’s price war — driving the price of the Kindle to as low as $139 — that it all began coming together. Book lovers that figured it would take several dozens of e-book purchases to cover the cost of the $399 model can now justify the lower break-even point on a $139 reader.”

Information Week supplied some crucial context for Amazon’s announcement. Just last week, Barnes and Noble revealed it was selling its color Nooks at a rate of 18,000 a day. Publisher’s Weekly had declared the company’s CEO as their person of the year, and in a profile, he’d revealed that every four or five days, Barnes and Noble loaded up another 747 aircraft just to fly in more Nooks from China. That would come out to 1,314,000 Nooks if it lasted for 73 days — two Nooks for every three Kindles sold — but the Nook Color has only been available for less than 7 weeks.

It’s been 47 days since its release on October 28, which works out to just 846,000 color Nooks sold so far (assuming their sales rate remained constant). “All this vague one-upmanship, doesn’t answer the question on most analysts’ minds,” complains Information Week, “which is how well the Kindle is selling compared to the Apple iPad.” But at least now we have a number to work with for the number of Kindle owners in the world. We now know that there are at least two million new Kindles firing up out there in the wild.

The devil is in the details, and C|Net found something even more important that I’d missed. Amazon’s CEO is predicting that ebooks won’t start outselling all printed books for a while — saying ebooks won’t even surpass the sales of paperback books until the summer of 2011. And as far as ebooks outselling all printed books, he’s predicting it will finally happen “by 2012.”

A Spy at the Bookstore?

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Spy vs Spy comic - top secret

I felt guilty. At the back of my local bookstore, the owner’s wife holds a monthly book group. But tonight, as she introduced our next book, I was already planning to purchase it as an ebook. And then the woman next to me revealed the same guilty secret. “Can we read this as an ebook?” she asked the bookstore owner’s wife.

I’d learn many interesting thing in the minutes that followed, as a fierce conversation broke out instantly around the table. In fact, everyone in the room had more to say about ebooks than we’d had about that month’s book selection! There was excitement about Kindles and Nooks – even from the people who didn’t own one. So the first thing I learned is that it’s a very hot topic. But the second thing I learned is you’re much less enthusiastic if you own a bookstore..

I tried to be sympathetic, pointing out that bookstores were cut out when people bought their books as ebooks. But unfortunately, I made the mistake of mentioning that bookstores obviously get a piece of the book’s sales price — prompting another comment about how ebooks are much cheaper than printed books. This made the bookstore owner’s wife look very, very uncomfortable. She pointed out that ebook prices get heavily subsidized — that she believed Amazon was even taking a loss on some ebooks.

“Maybe it’s all a conspiracy, to drive the local bookstores out of business,” someone said. “Amazon has invented a device which only lets you read books you buy from Amazon, and never from your local bookstore, so they can drive all of their competition out of business. Then in the future, if you want a book, you’ll have to buy them all from a single store in Seattle!”

“Or two stores,” the Nook owner said proudly. “You could also buy books from the Barnes and Noble chain.”

But then we got some surprising news from the bookstore owner’s wife. She’s already planning to sell ebooks from the new Google Bookstore. Apparently there’s a way to integrate Google’s ebooks into the web sites of local bookstores. There’s some configuration issues, she’d said, which still have to be worked out, but it gives her customers a way to give some money to their local bookseller.
Unless you own a Kindle, someone pointed out quickly. Because the Google bookstore hasn’t been able to work out a deal with Amazon. Yet…

I felt like I was watching an enormous change as it was happening around the world. Those were the main points of the discussion, but it was fascinating to hear each person’s individual perspective. One 80-year-old woman said most of her reading now was just cheap, used paperback books — and that she could buy hundreds of them for the cost of an Amazon Kindle. And another woman said she liked the tactile feel of a book — and the chance to start a conversation if someone recognizes the cover of your book.

But then someone argued that could also be a disadvantage. After all, one of most popular ebook categories is romance novels — because finally, nobody has to know that you’re reading them! I added that maybe some people buy a book because they secretly want people to see them reading it. In fact, Stephen King buys print copies of books that he’s already read as an ebook — just so he can have it as a conversation piece on his shelf!

Of course, he can afford to do that, because he has more income than most folks, I was thinking. But I was already getting a dirty look from the bookstore owner’s wife. The book group was probably started solely as a way to get people to purchase the store’s books. And to be fair, that’s one of the most unappreciated functions of a local bookstore. It becomes a kind of local support group for actually purchasing and then reading new releases.

The fact that we were having this discussion shows what a bookstore can do for a community. So I’m glad to know that some bookstores may be evolving into re-sellers of digital ebooks. Maybe someday our book group will meet, and no one will have a printed copy of the book.

Because every single one of us will be reading the book on a Kindle.

Kindles Helping Children in Africa

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Girl in Ghana Africa with WorldReader Amazon Kindle
in 2008, a man took his family on a tour of the world. While visiting an orphanage in South America, he asked what was behind the padlocked doors of a tin building. The answer was disturbing: it was books. In fact, it was the local library. The materials had become outdated, and the library fell into disuse.

And then he had an idea. Throughout the trip his own daughters had been reading ebooks on their digital reader. He got the idea of starting a charity with one simple goal: to use ebook technology to “put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet”. He named it World Reader.org — and today on Facebook, Amazon posted pictures of their successful mission in Africa.

Two boys in Ghana Africa with WorldReader Amazon Kindle

Someday the group hopes to reach out to the entire world, but they’re starting in Africa where they feel they can have the most impact.


If someone asks you to go hand out 440 e-readers, you might think that after, say 100, it could start to feel mundane. On the contrary, every single time we handed a student an e-reader, it was as if we were handing someone raw power…

The 440 Kindles were filled with books of local interest and literary classics, and the workers seem to be filled with new hope. They’d seen how cellphones overcame the need for land lines in the developing world, according to their web page, and now firmly believe that digital readers “will become the easiest, least expensive, and most reliable way to deliver books to under-served areas and under-privileged peoples.” They chose Amazon’s Kindle as the best device for their project (partly because it has global connectivity to a wireless network). And now even children in a remote village in Africa can join in that big global conversation which passes from generation to generation.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, Amazon posted an announcement about it on their Facebook page, and in Georgia, one of the first people to see it posted a response. “Maybe a silly question, but I’m going to ask it anyway — do they have electricity so they can charge them?” But on the internet, the charity workers are already offering up answers on their web page about Africa. “Mobile phones have helped pave the way for electricity even in remote locations, and, happily, e-readers consume relatively little power…”

And where there wasn’t electricity — for example, in a pilot program in Ghana — they’d partner with other organizations to install a solar cell, plus a satellite for internet access. Back on Facebook, another woman in Rhode Island added, “Hope they don’t make it to the black market.” But theft hasn’t been a problem, the web page explains. And the optimism continues.

I love the way that distance starts becoming irrelevant thanks to some simple, everyday technology. The group is thrilled that they can eliminate the cost of shipping these books — and that ebooks are often cheaper than printed books. And back in America, nearly a thousand people clicked Facebook’s “like” icon for the news of their mission, while another 140 left supportive comments.

Amazon Secrets: The War of the Booksellers

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Amazon office building in Seattle

Last week I asked what happens when Amazon acquires the same massive negotiating power as the major chain bookstores? But it turns out we may already know the answer.

I just took a closer look at Boston Review‘s 4,500-word article about “Books after Amazon.” It’s got insider interviews, honest statistics, and the real details of a war that’s been going on for decades. It begins with estimates that 75% of America’s online book purchases now happen through Amazon.com — but then reports that for some publishers, Amazon is actually responsible for more than half of all their sales. “Amazon is indisputably the king of books,” the article notes, before citing an independent book publisher asking a very important question: “what kind of king they’re going to be…”

Kindle owners may be the ones most affected by Amazon’s success — and this article apparently reveals two of Amazon’s dirtiest secrets. “Most customers aren’t aware that the personalized book recommendations they receive are a result of paid promotions, not just purchase-derived data.” And behind-the-scenes, while you’re watching Amazon.com — Amazon’s price tags are also watching you! “Individual customers may get different discounts on the same book depending on their purchase history…”

But there’s also a fascinating discussion about how the prices of books are set. As Amazon grew, it pushed up the chain bookstores’ standard discount to 52–55 percent, “with some as high as 60 percent.” This sounds like a good thing, but there may also be a dark side. The article cites a 2004 article in Publisher’s Weekly that accused Amazon of demanding high discounts from book publishers with the threat of, among other things, making their books less likely to appear in customer searches.

Two publishers even reported that their books did, in fact, disappear altogether from Amazon.com, simply because they’d refused to offer extra discounts when Amazon sold the books! One publisher actually remembers that when he’d told Amazon he couldn’t afford to participate, Amazon’s employees told him he “couldn’t afford not to.” The second publisher’s books eventually returned without agreeing to the discounts — after he threatened to contact The New York Times. “Nonetheless, cases of disappearance continue,” Boston Review reports.

In some cases, a book’s “Buy” button apparently disappears from its web pages at Amazon.com! “In 2008 two huge British publishers — Bloomsbury and Hachette — had their buttons pulled,” the article notes. “That same year, Amazon also removed buy buttons from any print-on-demand publisher that didn’t use Amazon’s on demand printer…a move that led to an antitrust lawsuit in which Amazon agreed to pay a settlement to a competitor, though it admitted no wrongdoing.” And the article also cites an incident last year where Amazon’s ranking system stopped including “hundreds of gay- and lesbian-themed books”.

But the article finally works its way around to the million-dollar question: how is Amazon setting the prices of ebooks? Amazon initially demanded that all publishers price their books at $9.99 — without
consulting them first, choosing simply to “absorb the loss, paying publishers for the price of the equivalent printed book in order to make the deal more appealing. ” But to this day, “Amazon remains in control, using its algorithms to set the price of e-books.” The article also notes the tense negotiation over control of the pricing of Macmillan books, with Amazon temporarily de-listing every Macmillan book from its store. “It and a handful of other large publishers have taken over pricing of their own e-books,” Boston Review points out, “But smaller houses have not been so lucky.”

There’s also a prophetic description of a 2009 price war between Amazon, Walmart, and Target, in which hardcover best-sellers — generally sold for between $25 and $35 — were sold for less than $9.00 Eventually the U.S. Department of Justice received an angry letter from the American Bookseller’s Association over “illegal predatory pricing,” and it included a dire warning from author John Grisham’s agent. “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over.” But the Justice Department never issued a formal reply.

Coincidentally, $10 is now Amazon’s standard price for a new ebook. But one San Francisco book publisher tells Boston Review that Amazon can’t continue to sell these ebooks at a loss, warning “Eventually, they’re going to change their minds on this…” And at that point, it may not be Kindle owners who take a hit — but the publishers who are trying to sell their books at Amazon.com

“They’re going to keep that e-book price where it is. They’re going to turn around and say to the publishers, ‘Tough’.”

Are Writers Being Hurt By Technology?

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Digital Publishing vs. the Gutenberg press

I remember a fascinating article. Three years ago, a legendary magazine editor tracked down 10 professional authors, and asked them a simple question: “Is the net good for writers?”

“Over a billion people can deliver their text to a very broad public,” he wrote at the time — but how does it affect those people who actually sell their writing for a living? “Writing as a special talent became obsolete in the 19th century,” one writer had told him in 2002. “The bottleneck was publishing…”

With the popularity of the Kindle, it’s an even better question, since writers are not just competing with the internet, but with the self-published ebooks of amateurs. Author Erik Davis (also a writer for Wired, Bookforum, and The Village Voice) had remembered that in the mid-90s, “I got paid pretty good for a youngster — generally much better than I get paid now, when my career sometimes looks more and more like a hobby…” But he also noted that his career is “less driven by external measures of what a ‘successful’ writing career looks like,” and he’d enjoyed spending his time writing about off-beat topics like mystical and counter-cultural threads in both technology and the media.

But he also thinks technology is changing the kinds of things we end up reading, creating a bigger demand for smaller articles — and a much bigger market for “opinion”. And author Mark Dery, author of Cyberculture at the End of the Century, also seemed to agree about the shorter article sizes, complaining that today, “information overload and time famine encourage a sort of flat, depthless style, indebted to online blurblets, that’s spreading like kudzu across the landscape of American prose.” Yes, things are more democratic now, Dery believes, but that’s brought good changes as well as bad.

“Skimming reader comments on Amazon, I never cease to be amazed by the arcane expertise lurking in the crowd; somebody, somewhere, knows everything about something, no matter how mind-twistingly obscure. But this sea change — and it’s an extraordinary one — is counterbalanced by the unhappy fact that off-the-shelf blogware and the comment thread make everyone a critic or, more accurately, make everyone think they’re a critic, to a minus effect.

We’re drowning in yak, and it’s getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter’s Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.”

Dery’s ultimate conclusion? In these complicated and chaotic times, “the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain.” And some of his thoughts were echoed by Adam Parfrey, the publisher at Feral House books (and the author of Apocalypse Culture). “I like the internet and computers for their ability to make writers of nearly everyone,” Parfrey writes. “I don’t like the internet and computers for their ability to make sloppy and thoughtless writers of nearly everyone.”

But at the end of the day, Parfrey seems to reach a more positive view. “Overall, it’s an exciting world,” he writes. “I’m glad to be alive at this time.”

If I could, I’d print out the article and send it in a time capsule to the year 2110 — since each author had an interesting but subtly different perspective. Douglas Rushkoff wrote that “The book industry isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t blame that on the internet. It’s really the fault of media conglomeration. Authors are no longer respected in the same way, books are treated more like magazines with firm expiration dates, and writers who simply write really well don’t get deals as quickly as disgraced celebrities or get-rich-quick gurus…”

And John Shirley, author of The Eclipse Trilogy, noted that in today’s book publishing industry, “Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.”

But Shirley also added that “in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.” And he wasn’t the only author who had unkind thoughts for technology itself. Michael Simmons, a former editor for The National Lampoon, wrote “We’re a planet of marks getting our bank accounts skimmed by Bill Gates and Steven Jobs… Furthermore, I get nauseous thinking of the days, weeks, months I’ve spent on the phone with tech support.”

It’s one of the meatiest articles I’ve ever read about writing, publishing, and the state of the modern author. But having said that, I still thought that Edward Champion had perhaps the ultimate comeback.

“If the internet was committing some kind of cultural genocide for any piece of writing that was over twenty pages, why then has the number of books published increased over the past fifteen years?”

Is Target Editing Amazon's Books?

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Target store logo

Want to know the dirty secrets of the book publishing industry? Boston Review just published a shocking but very well-researched article that seems to finally lay it all out.

The article starts with some disturbing bookstore history. During the 1970s and the 1980s, new independent bookstores continued appearing, but “this trend came to a halt when chain superstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders began taking over in the late ’80s.” Over the next 20 years, the number of independent bookstores dropped from 6,000 to 2,200, which the author blames on their ability to negotiate bigger discounts from book publishers. In a fight for the future of the bookstore, the American Bookseller’s Association even filed two lawsuits — one in 1994 and a second one in 1997.

“In 2001 this lawsuit, too, was settled, on the condition that a large amount of the evidence the ABA had collected against the chain stores be destroyed,” the article reports. It seems a little ironic that the chain stores beat the local stores by drastically discounting their books — only to face the threat of even cheaper competition today from the ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle store. But this episode reveals another big way that chain bookstores changed the book industry. Now publishers earmark about 4% of their net revenue to pay for special promotions within chain bookstores, including special price discounts and prime placement at the front of the bookstore (which apparently retails for $20,000 for a two-week display).

Smaller publishers are hurt, since they can’t compete with large promotional budgets — and that’s only the beginning, according to the article. Now large retailers “weigh in on everything from book covers to sample chapters of manuscripts,” and “In some cases, retailers even demand changes.” Am I reading that right? Is Target calling the shots in what’s appearing in our books? The article cites information from an editor at “a major publishing house, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of employer sanctions.” And he reveals that yes, frequently there’s representatives from Target, Borders, and Barnes and Noble when potential books are discussed.

“Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book,” the article reports. “Ideas that excite [independent book stores] might be scrapped if they don’t get a chain’s stamp of approval.” What’s disturbing about this is that’s ultimately also affecting shoppers at Amazon.com. Amazon can only sell printed books after print publishers make them available. But if Target gets a veto on which books are printed, then Amazon will never get a chance to sell them.

At first it seems like we should be cheering for Amazon’s Kindle Store. Anyone can self-publish an ebook — so isn’t that a positive development? Yes, in the sense that unlike a bookstore, Amazon stocks every book that a publisher sells. The only question now is: what happens when Amazon acquires the same massive negotiating power as the major chain bookstores?

Will they ultimately use their newfound power for good, or for evil?