Piling on

This post may seem to be a bit of a mish-mash but, trust me, there's a central point that should emerge by the time I'm done.

Having joined the fray and unloaded my first thoughts on the subject of Amazon's Kindle earlier this week, I thought I'd move on to newer ideas but "Just when I'm ready to get out, they pull me back in." Clearly, the blog world isn't ready to let go of this ready-made target for their rage, their opinionated attitudes, their endless need to keep on blathering until people are driven into a coma of indifference or simply stunned into immobility.

Publishers Marketplace, that indispensable, online source for publishing-related news, had links to two ebook-related items in today's issue.

One was from a U.K. Bookseller Association blogger and contained a news item that every sensible person has been possibly expecting but, at very least, hoping for since the first stories about EInk went public a couple of years ago. The company is working on developing a system that will allow them to operate in color rather than their initially established, high-contrast greyscale/black & white first generation technology. Despite some technical issues that make eink screens not the best choice for a number of dream applications, the idea of the technology being able to accommodate full color is inspiring and encouraging.

The other was a link to a new review of the Kindle by Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. Mossberg has been talking about tech for a long time, is widely respected, seen as objective and unbiased and, when he wants to be, which is most of the time, quite blunt and to the point. He had some good things to say about the Kindle but I'd have to say that on balance his review was not very positive. Since some of his opinions mirrored some of mine, I'm not much inclined to disagree with his overall conclusions which sum up for me as "Nice try. Give it another go and I'll look at it again to see if you get it right on the second try...but I'm not betting on it." By now, of course, Amazon has to be getting used to the chorus of critics and presumably they can console themselves by remembering that they very quickly sold out their initial inventory of $400 apiece items and will shortly start filling back orders and banking not inconsiderable additional cash. Just in case that link above ends up falling behind a registration curtain, the end of Mossberg's column has this helpful hint: "Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital website."

Then, a colleague here at E-Reads mentioned a site I'd heard of but hadn't previously visited--Buzzfeed. The object of this operation is to collect and organize what's going on out there in Blogland and neatly summarize it for our consumption/entertainment. You'll never guess what the title of one of their recent collations was: Kindle Backlash. Clearly, none of E-Reads' comments made the top of the list, but they neatly provided the top five hate-ons for the Kindle. I can't resist pointing you to some of them here.

Chip Kidd, famous book cover designer, contributes a comment that's well under the 200 word limit for the A Brief Message site. Almost 200 words under the limit, in fact, depending how you count.

Robert Scoble, famous blogger at Scobleizer, offers up a highly critical review after using the Kindle for a week.

Mobileread.com thinks that Amazon Kindle might be the worst thing that can happen to e-books. Among the hardest hits is: "Amazon has gone out of their way to make sure that you can only buy books from them, and can't use them anywhere else. When you buy a book, you use it on the Kindle or you're out of luck. We're talking about control of content, with format and DRM lock-in as the tool of power. We're on the verge of a future for content that makes you buy the same thing over and over every time you have a new technology." Now, just in case you haven't noticed, that's what the record business and the movie business have been moderately successful at doing for at least a couple of decades now so don't be too shocked if book publishers are showing the same sort of greedy thinking.

Cracked.com gets off a pretty funny spoof of a new piece of technology designed to supersede the Kindle.

And, finally, Amazon itself manages to collect a large number of negative comments about their own product. Here's a link to all the 1-Star reviews of the Kindle on the Amazon site. Isn't the internet wonderful? Isn't social networking a blast? Just FYI, by the way, when I clicked the link, there were a total of 790 reviews: 191 5-Star; 103 4-Star; 124 3-Star; 121 2-Star and 251 1-Star. Not a scorecard I'd like to see for something of mine, I have to say.

Now, I'm just enough of a contrarian to think that when this many people have something bad to say about anything that I should be looking for a way to put something on the other side of the ledger but, for the moment, I can't think what that might be since most of my reactions to the Kindle were well onto the negative side of the scale. Still, Amazon has taken a big position in a game where I've committed to play and whatever else they've done, they've galvanized the attentions of the world at large, both within the tech field and within the publishing field, and it seems to me like they may also be causing a fair number of people who never think about books at all to give at least a passing thought to the subject of e-books and that can't be all bad, can it? Maybe, as seems too often to be the case, we're a small circle of zealots sitting here raving at each other but I don't really think that's true this time. Let's all ask someone we know who doesn't seem to read much if they know what a Kindle is.

In the meantime, of course, we can dream about how Amazon is going to get it exactly right (for everybody) with Kindle 2.0.

- John

Major Publisher's Major Commitment to Ebooks

We’re always on the look-out for interesting, preferably positive, news stories related to ebook publishing and there was a small item done by Publishers Weekly late last week that definitely fits the bill.

The meat of the story is that Harlequin, one of the major publishers of romance and women’s fiction (120 titles per month), has just announced that, starting immediately, all the new books they publish in their extensive programs will be simultaneously released in print and as ebooks in all of the usual formats (Adobe, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, Palm and Sony), with the ebooks priced slightly lower than their print books. Harlequin has long had a major web presence with a strong focus on customer appeal and direct selling, including ebooks, see here, but the real key to the story, I think, is that this is pretty compelling evidence that the old assumption about ebooks: that they are just for techies, early adopters and SF readers, is pretty comprehensively dispensed with. If this big an operation thinks it’s worth investing in ebook publishing in this major a way, they expect that they’ll be in it for the long haul and that they’ll be reaching customers they might not otherwise have access to via the traditional formats and approaches and the demographic they’re targeting is very largely female.

From the Press Release:

“Harlequin entered the eBook marketplace in October 2005 and has experienced unqualified success since that time. Romance novels have proven to be one of the most popular categories of digital publishing, and Harlequin titles regularly top eBook bestseller lists.

“Harlequin has further embraced the digital revolution by expanding its catalog to include original editorial by New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling authors offered exclusively in the eBook format—Harlequin Mini and Spice Briefs eBooks—as well as releasing digital eBook bundles not available in print.

“"Women have embraced eBooks," says Malle Vallik, Director Digital Content & Interactivity. "They demand portability, immediacy, availability, depth, breadth and convenience and, by making our entire front list and exclusive digital editorial available to them, we are meeting that challenge. We are meeting the needs of our current audience and reaching a new and diverse base of readers. Seeking innovative new ways to serve our audience continues to be a Harlequin tradition."”

If you're wondering about ebooks in general, I think this is a pretty powerful message that there's a very bright future ahead.

- John

Can Apple's iPhone be an ebook Trojan Horse?

What is the most successfully secretive public company you can think of? My vote would go to Apple. Just take a look at the huge frenzy of interest and speculation they managed to create around the development and release of a new mobile phone model. Admittedly, the iPhone from Apple is something quite special in its way but any one of a dozen other companies would give up a lot to be able to attract half as much attention as they did for a new product release. How many other new phone models have already been announced this year and how excited did you get about any or all of them?

Apple doesn’t like us to know what they’re doing until they’ve done it and are ready to put it on the market the day they announce it. Can ebooks on the iPhone be far away? The device is, among many other things, a masterly handler of files and ebooks are nothing but a special form of file. PDF files are natively handled by the iPhone already and that’s established as one of the preferred formats for ebooks. Maybe all that talk about needing the perfect convergence device for an explosion in ebook interest and readership will become moot when one day soon, a million people discover that they’re already carrying that mythical wonder-device in their pocket and use it dozens of times a day for everything from browsing the web, handling email and listening to music to answering the phone.

Which is why HarperCollins is wooing iPhone users. Here’s the Boston Herald story and here’s what Mac News Network (MacNN) has to say. I could give you plenty more links but you can just Google “HarperCollins and iPhone” and see what several dozen media outlets have to say about the one major publisher with a commitment to ebook publishing to those iPhone owners who might think about checking out how interesting an ebook might be.

- John