Fictionwise Hits the iPhone, E-Books Hit the Big Time

Along with today's release of Apple's 3G iPhone and the new iPhone application store, found in iTunes v. 7.7 and iPhone 2.0 software, Fictionwise has become the first major e-book retailer to offer free e-book software for Apple's iPhone.

We all know Fictionwise as the world's largest e-book retailer, and now they have their e-books ready for the world's most famous touchscreen device. Before today, you had to hack your iPhone to run unsupported e-book software that was both risky and limited. Also, there were no stores that promoted the use of such software for your purchased e-books. But now Fictionwise is set to conquer the iPhone with their eReader software, which lets you carry your Fictionwise library everywhere you take your phone.


The best part is that it's a free download through the iTunes application store. The next best thing is that all of E-Reads' Multiformat e-books at Fictionwise are supported by the application!

There are other ebook options and more coming soon for the iPhone. In the future, Adobe and Mobipocket will be hitting the iPhone in a powerful way and hopefully that will bring even more digital e-book content to the world's fingertips. Until then, Fictionwise is your best and safest bet for good reading on the iPhone.

- Michael

E-Reading Device Wars -- The Readius E-Scroll Step into the Ring

Polymer Vision of Netherlands literally rolled out its candidate for the hearts and minds of consumers who are not convinced that Amazon's Kindle or Sony's E-Reader are the end of the line for handheld reading devices. In an article by Anne Eisenberg in the July 6 2008 New York Times, Polymer previewed the Readius, a pocket-sized gadget that flips open to reveal a flexible screen that can be unfurled like a window shade -- or like the world's first portable reader, the papyrus -- to carry black and white text suitable not only for books but for e-texting as well.

The Readius is one of many devices in development aimed at breaking the glass ceiling: inflexible screens.
- Richard Curtis

Ebook Reading Device Momentum Picking up

Thanks to Publishers Lunch we have news of advances in handhelds:

Reminiscent of the proposal for the second-generation "one laptop per
child" concept, researchers at the University of Maryland and UC
Berkeley have developed an early prototype of an ereader with two sides
that emulate a natural page turning. In a demonstration video, they say
it will "better support the navigation tasks associated with the
reading."

New Scientist notes: "The two leaves can be opened and closed to
simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare
documents. When the two leaves are folded back, the device shows one
display on each side. Simply turning it over reveals a new page."
New Scientist
http://click.email-publisher.com/maalZusabIqtra4XB0NeaeQxXH/
Separately, the NYT has a brief look at miBook, a seven-inch e-reader
with a color screen. "Meant to work more like a media player than a real
e-book reader, the $130 device also displays multimedia content like
step-by-step recipe instructions, and can play back music through the
built-in speakers.... Add-on titles cost about $20, and some electronics
stores, like Circuit City, will offer models complete with one or two
books built in."
NYT
http://click.email-publisher.com/maalZusabIqtsa4XB0NeaeQxXH/

- Richard

Harlan Ellison Signs with E-Reads

E-Reads, a leading independent online publisher, has acquired 32 out of print works by Harlan Ellison, winner of eight and a half Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards plus the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award. Ellison is also the subject of the recently-released documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Among the classic titles involved in the deal are Shatterday, Strange Wine, Ellison Wonderland, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Deathbird Stories.

E-Reads will release all titles both in e-book format and trade paperback via print on demand through Amazon.com and other book retailers. The first eight titles will be released in the next month and the rest will follow within the year.

E-Reads carries over 800 previously published books in all popular genres. Among other distinguished fantasy and science fiction authors on the E-Reads list are Greg Bear, Dan Simmons, Dave Duncan, R. A. MacAvoy, Pamela Sargent, Fritz Leiber, John Norman, Robin Bailey, George Zebrowski, James Gunn, William C. Dietz, Susan Shwartz and Alan Dean Foster.

Watch this page for postings about available Harlan Ellison titles.

Publishers Finally Acknowledge the Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla in the Room

At Book Expo America, the publishing industry's annual trade fair and self-celebration, attention focused on the fact that one of the few areas that is growing at a double digit -- indeed, at an exponential -- rate is e-book sales on the Kindle. And, according to the New York Times, the publishers are genuinely nervous. The Times pointed out that "...excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller."


Worried they should be. Surprised they should not. They have had ten years to ponder the meaning of the soaring growth of e-book sales and spent half of that decade deriding the trend as a flash in the pan. Now they're rushing to put their backlists into e-book format even as they are haunted by the prospect that e-book sales undercut the profits they make from sales of traditional printed books. Publishing executives, the Times reports, "anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices."

But publishers are still missing the point, which is that profits from printed books are hamstrung by a wasteful retail system that takes back one copy for every two distributed. The beauty of e-books is minimal distribution costs and zero returns. Barnes & Noble CEO Stephen Riggio finally acknowledged the insanity of the system, but, as we pointed out here, it's just too late.

- Richard Curtis

Baen Press Release

March 6, 2008—Wake Forest, North Carolina: Baen Books is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural list of E-Reads, now available at www.webscription.net. Titles will be published monthly, and will be available both individually and as part of a separate E-Reads program.

“E-Reads has been publishing topnotch fiction in electronic format for nearly a decade, and we’re delighted to offer them the opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience,” said Toni Weisskopf, Publisher of Baen Books. “With the likes of Greg Bear, Bill Dietz, Jim Gunn, Fritz Leiber and a host of other authors, our webscription readers are going to be thrilled with the titles we’ll be making available every month.”

Richard Curtis, Publisher of E-Reads, added, “We're pleased to be distributing our titles with a fellow pioneer of electronic publishing, and look forward to a long and successful relationship.”

The inaugural list of titles includes:

• Galactic Bounty by William C. Dietz
• The Burning by James E. Gunn
• Byzantium’s Crown by Susan Shwartz

For further information about individual titles, please visit: www.webscription.net

E-Reads is an industry pioneer in the electronic book business. Since 1999, they have published hundreds of predominantly out-of-print works in e-book format. Their list includes popular genres as science fiction, fantasy, romance, thrillers, horror and westerns, as well as general fiction and non-fiction.

Baen Books has been at the forefront of the electronic book business from its earliest inception, offering a wide variety of titles in multiple e-book formats, with innovative marketing programs such as eARCs, multi-title bundling and webscriptions.

Fictionwise Buys eReader

One of the best-known and most successful ebook retailing sites, our friend Fictionwise, has just purchased the venerable eReader from its current owner, Motricity. We are very happy and excited that Fictionwise has stepped up to the plate and that they will be taking over operations of what used to be the original Palm ebook store. We wish them and the employees of eReader all the best with the transition!

E-Reads has been working with both Fictionwise and the Palm format since the very startups of our companies, back when Palm format books were sold by The Peanut Press (later acquired by Palm and then Motricity). Fictionwise however has had a unique and meaningful relationship to E-Reads, not only because they sell our books in non-DRM (open) format, but because they have been extremely supportive and helpful to us as a small press, giving us prime real estate on their front page for our new releases, right alongside frontlist titles from major publishers. You may have noticed that they even host our ebook download section of this very website! As the ebook industry has grown, it has been thrilling watching Fictiowise not only keep pace, but expand the market with remarkable support for all the divergent ebook formats.

We see some very interesting things going on with this acquisition.

For one thing, the relatively quite small sub-world of ebook publishing is undergoing the same sort of conglomerization and "growth by acquisition" that mainstream book publishing has been dealing with for decades now. Welcome to the big time, I guess you'd have to say. Some win. Some move too slowly and get eaten. The law of the jungle prevails and the fittest survive by ruthlessly absorbing the laggards and growing stronger.

If you look at the history of eReader, though, there's plenty of room for optimism that this change will be good news for all ebook publishing. Palm devices have been a platform for ebook reading pretty much from the very beginning and the proprietary software, once owned by the Palm company itself before it bifurcated and mutated into multiple entities, is a highly functional and nicely compact program that has benefited from trafficking a fair amount of total ebook readership and sales over the years.

Unfortunately, when Palm sold it off to Motricity, a company whose website slogan is "reinventing mobile lifestyles" and that has a big footprint in handheld content delivery, it seems like it became an ugly stepchild for a big company whose focus was mainly elsewhere. Sadly, not a lot of care and attention was lavished on its development, just at a time when the recovery from the slump that started early in the new century was beginning to turn around in a big way. All along, despite bitter disappointment at the fact that ebooks did not become instantly huge, ebook sales have shown long-term healthy growth...and there's no end in sight. As the world's accelerating transition to a digital existence becomes ever more widespread and convincing as a major ongoing phenomenon, the opportunities for any technology that lives in the nerve-center of that transition can only expand and multiply.

At the same time, the brothers who founded and run Fictionwise have shown a broad-based vision of the possibilities for ebooks in the marketplace, coupled with an absolutely catholic commitment to serving the readership across all fronts by making available as many ebook formats as have come along. We venture to guess that more titles in more formats are available from Fictionwise than from any other active source. The fact that Fictionwise has long promoted a DRM-free approach to marketing (while always accommodating the more-paranoid concerns of the big publishers who control the product from most big-name writers) is also a very encouraging sign. Their selection is big and their service top-notch. The benefits of having a Fictionwise account that tracks and remembers all purchases and can replace lost or corrupted files for legitimate purchasers delivers the best possible combination of bookseller, library and display window. They've also worked hard at building community among their customers and it wouldn't be surprising to see them adding Social Networking aspects to their site. It's nice to know that you can trade up on your hardware and still have access to your library of purchases. [John says: "If I bought a Kindle, I'd have some serious concerns about what will happen when a machine running a totally locked-down system like that decides to die the natural death that all electronic products have built into them. I maybe like a lot of books and love some beyond all sense but that doesn't make me happy if I run into a situation where I have to start buying everything all over again. I'd rather have more control over my digital destiny than any one single proprietary format or device (however technologically cool it may be) is going to allow me."]

Imagine how much better things could become for fans and consumers of the .pdb format now that a company that has demonstrated long-term commitment to and an intensive single-minded focus on ebooks as a business growth opportunity is in charge. Since they also have a savvy sense of the marketplace, having them in control of the development destiny of a neat program that has an active potential installed-base of tens of millions of pocket-sized homes is very exciting. In a market that's showing continuing strong growth, the sky may really be the limit.

- John, Michael, and Richard

Man's Inhumanity To Women

Several years ago I read the manuscript of a stunning novel about the eighteenth century slave trade in Africa and the Americas. Although E-Reads' stock in trade is reissues of previously published books, not new and unpublished ones, this one was so absorbing that I was compelled to make an exception. That's how we came to publish our first original work of fiction, Ama by Ghanian author Manu Herbstein. The judges of the annual Commonwealth Prize concurred with my judgment and awarded it the prize for Best First Book of 2002.

It chronicles the life of Nandzi, who is given the name "Ama", a name strange to her tribal culture. Abducted with her little brother from her village, thrust into a foreign land and stripped of her identity, she is forced into a life of bondage, violence and brutality. Yet she never lets herself lose her core humanity. Her entrancing story of defiance starts from the day she is brutally seized and raped. But she is smart enough to learn the language of her captors, and it becomes her ticket to freedom. The courage and resilience of Ama's spirit engrossed me from the first page to the last, and I'm very proud to have played a part in bringing it into the world.

- Richard Curtis

Stealing Books - Easy!

Here's another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com's brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies--music, movies and, yes, books, too--can be found if you're not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It's easy. It's quick. It's convenient. It's free. It's also completely illegal--but we haven't seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There's no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won't come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John

Mobile Writing

A couple of months ago, Richard blogged about Japanese writers creating novels on their cell phones. There's a more recent story that expands on the story and offers some startling information on how successful some of these writers are becoming.

I caught this story at TechCrunch, one of my personal go-to's for techie news with a business slant, and their source was a piece in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald. For a nice additional note of surreality, the date on the newspaper piece is December 3 and the TechCrunch coverage of that story is dated December 2. Gotta love the International Date Line and globe-spanning technology. This probably also means that from the point of view of all the nations in the Pacific Rim, us North Americans are perpetually living in the past, doesn't it? I'd never quite thought of it that way before. It may be more appropriate than we want to think about, too.

Anyway, not only are lots of people in Japan writing novels on their mobile phones, a goodly number of those writers are becoming bestsellers. The specific author interviewed in the story, 21-year-old Rin (a pseudonym for a nursery school teacher) initially posted the segments of her novel (Moshimo Kimiga--If You...) to a website as she was writing them but a publisher picked up the book, put it into print and has now sold 420,000 copies in just a few months. There's even a name for the phenonomon: keitai shousetsu (mobile phone novels) and one of the other stats quoted in the article is that a site set up seven years ago to help people write their mobile phone novels, Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), has accumulated almost one million of them.

An incidental side note of related interest is the mention in the story that a new translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has sold more than 300,000 copies so I suppose we shouldn't automatically despair for the collapse of classic literature, in Japan at least. I wish I thought there was even a slim likelihood of such sales occurring in this country in the same situation. Maybe if Brad Pitt and Keanu Reaves were to star in the movie...

In any case, smart and opportunistic Japanese publishers are jumping on the bandwagon and Miss Rin is not alone in her success. A book called Koizora (Love Sky) by "Mika" has sold 1.2 million copies since being put into print a little over a year ago. And, since we've been behind Japan on the mobile phone technology curve for years and years, maybe we should brace ourselves for the same thing to be happening here--around about 2011 or so.

- John

In Defense of the Kindle

My colleagues and I at E-Reads haven't been exactly effusive about the merits of Amazon's Kindle (though, compared to some blogs we've read, our comments will seem absolutely benign). However, I do want to say something positive, indeed something very, very positive.

For the past twenty years or so, since I first laid eyes on CD-ROMs, I and a host of cockeyed visionaries like me have been obsessed with the dream of a handheld book reader. Early in the 1990s I wrote for book trade publications about the possibilities and was so certain the day would come that by the mid-1990s I got tired of waiting for someone to invent one and spoke to some technical people about developing one myself. Luckily, the introduction of the Rocket Books in 1998 put an end to my quixotic and potentially bankrupting scheme. More significantly, it also called to arms the community of futurists who'd been doing more than sketching -- they'd been developing the hardware and programming the software and waiting for their moment. And now, in 1998, it was here.

The moment may have been there but the handheld book reader was not: the technology, business model, rights management, and culture were immature. And despite the Sony Reader and the Kindle, they still are.

So what's my defense of the Kindle? Simple. It brings us a gigantic step closer to the dream. Whatever you want to say against it, it combines three superpowerful forces: a flawed but demonstrably usable device, a blitzkrieg of a marketing campaign, and the limitless content of amazon.com. The public's perception of ebooks can never return to the flash-in-the-pan flop that scoffers have branded it.

Maybe the Kindle is the wrong product, but at least it's the wrong product at the right time. However limited the success of Amazon's gadget may be – hell, even if it's a total flop – there's no going back on ebooks now. A wave of technologists will be inspired by the Kindle to do the job right in the next generation of ebook technology. It may still take years but as far as I'm concerned the game is over and the cyberbooks dreamers have won.

Thank you, Kindle.

- Richard Curtis

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

Hands-Free eBooks?

When it comes to technology that disappoints, visor optic systems have pretty much failed to live up to their promised potential for many years now. The vision for the technology has traditionally been that just by putting on a pair of stereo goggles you can immerse yourself in virtual environment. There have been virtual reality helmets, 3D displays, and more recently (and far more affordable) tiny LCD screens mounted in glasses that come alive like a 50" television screen in front of your eyes.

When the first iPod Video came out a few years ago, a number of small companies began capitalizing on the Personal Media Player (or PMP, for short) trend by marketing these "Wearable Video Display" LCD glasses that allowed you to watch the video output from your device. Of course, the limitations of resolution and what content your media device can deliver through video output make everything tricky and somewhat annoying (see an example of what it's like to wear them here).

Picture of the MyVu, reviewed at iLounge.

Another drawback, besides that every one wearing these things looks like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is that it's definitely not the same experience as a home theater like they advertise. The screen appears recessed and is only "large" if you consider yourself to be many feet away in perspective. Yet one of the weirder offshoots from these visors is that it suddenly became possible to not just see your video files inside your glasses, but text, too. And that's one feature that I think Geordi would have enjoyed.

The latest gadget that's shipping this Christmas is the $400 Qingbar GP300 (pictured at the top of this post). It's a completely self-contained set of glasses with a built-in PMP that can read SD cards for your files. And it can display basic .TXT files, just like the ones you can download from Project Gutenberg. (For more examples of wearable video displays, look at the $200 Myvu, and other models from Vuzix, EZVision, and YellowMosquito.) And all this begs the question, do we even need a "book" device to read text? Audio books have long been a part of that answer. And it seems like stereo-displays may be another part, too.

With a view of a virtual page in front of your eyes, with nothing for your hands to hold, the idea of a book as a container is fully exploded. Imagine that to change a page you do a "hard blink" or twitch your index finger. Imagine that the page endlessly unfurls its scroll as your eyes scan: there are no more pages. Whether it's retinal implants or super-contact lenses, science fiction has been way ahead of this game of getting visual information in front of our eyes seamlessly. But we're slowly catching up.

- Michael

Amazon Kindle: Right Questions, Wrong Answer?

What is an ebook? Who sells them? Who buys them? Why do they buy them? How many ebooks does a typical buyer purchase? How do we motivate a reader to buy ebooks? How do we motivate a reader to buy more ebooks? What price makes sense? What do ebook readers use to read ebooks? Is snazzy technology the driver for ebook sales?

Sure, we all want to make money at what we do, don't we? Still, you'd think that a company full of smart people, a company with a reputation for valuing customer service as a highest priority, would have asked the right questions about ebooks and come up with a better answer than the Kindle appears to be.

Last Monday was the day a lot of people had been waiting for, ever since rumors that Amazon was planning to take on the whole challenge of ebook hardware began to buzz. Monday was announcement day, which means the day before that was leak day as early reports started popping up with details, comments, opinions but no new pictures. No great loss, of course, since the Kindle turns out to look like something designed by desperate engineers who needed a box in a hurry and weren't much worried about aesthetics or style. It works, it holds everything inside it where the pieces need to stay but the phrase ugly duckling keeps running through my mind.

See, from some perspectives, the Kindle is a very good thing but from a lot of others it's not at all good. From Amazon's viewpoint, they're getting a nice price for a single-task piece of handheld hardware. $399 a pop. I don't know many rich people but even if I knew thousands of millionaires and billionaires, I very much doubt I'd know many people at all who would want to spend $400 (Allow me my round-off, please. And don't forget taxes, shipping and whatever else might come along to shove the price over the threshold) to be able to carry a lot of books to read. And magazines. And newspapers. Particularly if they figure out, sooner or later, that Amazon is getting them to pay for some things that they could easily get elsewhere at no cost if they were to invest just a little bit of effort and time. Charging for public domain ebooks? The Gutenberg Project has lots of books available and there's no charge (and no rights issues, either). Making you pay for newspaper downloads? It's simple enough to bookmark some newspaper websites and click around a bit. Making you pay to download blogs? Making you pay to email/convert your own files to be readable on the Kindle? Who are they kidding?

Yes, Amazon has done some things right, designing a machine that will pull together books, magazines, newspapers and even blogs onto a single device conceived solely for the purpose of providing a platform for reading. The big problem from my perspective is that comparable (and often superior) platforms already exist but they also do an almost uncountable number of other things. They're called desktop computers, laptop computers, ultra portable computers, handheld computers, smartphones and probably a few other things that I should have added to the list. In a world where you can now buy a laptop for only a couple of hundred dollars more than you would spend on a Kindle, the question I can't get away from is, "Why buy a Kindle?"

Maybe we don't buy those other devices "just" to read books but I read a lot of books and I read a lot of them on screen on one device or another and I'm certainly conscious of that particular use for any device I consider buying. A Palm Treo 700p may not be the ideal model for a portable reading device but there's software you can buy or download for free that makes it a pretty handy tool for what remains, essentially, a pretty basic function, not to mention all the many other functions that the Treo (or any other smartphone or portable computer) fulfills quite handily for no additional cost.

Sony, another company with a long-term rep for finding large customer bases by hitting the sweet spot in terms of market needs has, despite two iterations over a period of time and despite pricing their hardware $100 lower than the Kindle, apparently not found many people who feel compelled to read books on their device with its proprietary, locked-format files. This despite the fact that Borders, which did a trial of selling the reader in 270 stores, expanded the offering to about 500 stores a few months back and has also arranged to launch a dedicated site for selling Sony Reader formatted titles. When the reader launched, books were available only through Sony’s Connect online store.

And, if you look farther back, less than a decade but a long way in Internet time, to the early days of ebook optimism, there is a small string of dedicated-hardware failures: the SoftBook, the RocketBook, and some others I'm not remembering.

Does a pattern begin to emerge?

I can only think of one company that has proven over time that they are capable of being all things to all people in terms of delivering both brilliant software and impressive hardware. Palm actually managed it for a few years but then they lost their way. Apple seems able to do it consistently.

Amazon, even though most of what they've sold up until now is hard goods, is, to my perception at least, a software company at heart. The programming behind their website is excellent, near flawless in fact, and does many different things relating to handling products in a way that satisfies millions of customers very consistently. They're taking a big leap here in trying to wrap their own software in a marketable piece of hardware. Despite a very attention-grabbing launch, and reports that their initial inventory is sold out already (how big was that inventory and how quickly will they be able to re-stock?), there's no guarantee that their marketing might is going to overcome the many hurdles in the way of creating a breakthrough product that will truly make ebooks a ubiquitous commodity that captures the mindshare of the public at large, or even the (much smaller) reading public at large. I wish them great success, since such success would, among other things, presumably sell lots of E-Reads titles and make lots of money for us all, but I don't expect to support their efforts with my money and I have grave doubts that a whole lot of other people will either. There is a substantial but nonetheless relatively small number of gadget freaks out there who have to have the new, new thing right away but once they've skimmed the cream off that market, I don't know how much more deeply the Kindle is going to dig into the masses of what we might call the great unsold. Or should that be "unbuying?"
-- John

Star-Crossed Lovers in the Holy Land

E-Reads has published very few original books, but we just couldn't pass up Friend of My Enemy by Benjamin Eric Hill and we thought that the season of good will was the right time to feature a love story between a cold-blooded Israeli Mossad agent and a beautiful but proud Palestinian woman fighting to keep above pressure by terrorists. Though written a few years ago, nothing has really changed since then. Will love conquer the brutality of an age-old enmity? Read this white-knuckle thriller and find out.

- Richard Curtis

Kindle: Not Ready To Burn My Books Just Yet

The launch of the Kindle is the stuff of technology pundits' nightmares. It's not that Amazon has done anything too aggravating with their initial marketing, because they pretty much went by the defacto protocol for glitzy new devices (summoning up every media outlet, declaring a watershed milestone has been achieved for humanity, celebrities delivering tearful thanks for such a perfect device, etc.) and it was more or less a success. Mind you, Steve Jobs is legendary for creating these kinds of reality distortion fields that permeate every aspect of his Apple launches with an overwhelming perfume of delicious mystery and lust. But at the Kindle event Jeff Bezos was less Mesmero! and more like a self-praising high school valedictorian. There wasn't enough magic, or rejoicing fanboys, to mask the concern a lot of us are feeling.

Before Bezos had an opportunity to work his charm and share his vision, I was already wary. My first gut response was that it won't be too long until someone has hacked the Kindle to use the EVDO service for other purposes, stealing the "free" data service from Sprint. It was also another E-Ink based device without a backlight. And the fact that the Kindle has a keyboard seems less interesting once you factor in that E-Ink conserves its battery life by screen refresh limitations that don't coopertae well with keyboard usage: slow page refreshes for every keystroke (typing a 200 word email on the Kindle would probably take more patience and battery power than you'd like).

Jeff Bezos at the launch of Kindle

Then the air went out of the balloon as soon as all the hidden-cost caveats were revealed.

The Kindle is actually an ebook and RSS pay-for-content service that's only available for the Kindle. And if it were a service offered for other devices, like the iPhone, I still don't think it's what consumers want. But like it or not, this is how the road forward is being paved.

The logic, like most digital media sales, continues to be dumbfounding. Other than recently-published books, most of the content you can get for the Kindle is arguably text you can either read for free or get cheaper through other channels. And any content you buy for Kindle can't be read on anything but the Kindle. So, let me ask you to forget about the device for a moment and to consider just the service: Are you the type of person who likes to pay for every document you want to read, regardless of whether it was offered to you free or even that you wrote it yourself?

Because it's unable to support the common document formats of .doc, .rtf, and pdf, you'll need to email any of those files to Amazon's Kindle service to have them converted to a proprietary format at 10¢ a pop. Let me say that again in more simple terms. You have to pay to read your own stuff on the Kindle. The Sony Reader doesn't have that mentality, neither does the Blackberry or the iPhone. Second, if you want to subscribe to certain websites' RSS feeds, or one of Kindle's many pre-formatted newspapers and magazines, you'll have to pay a monthly fee.

The Kindle is a DRM experiment created as the test-tube baby from the DNA of intellectual property laws and the success of the iTunes Music Store. Most of us have been getting used to paying for content that we can't share anymore, but eventually the ramifications of those restrictions are going to be more severe. The DRM world of the future is a place where parents won't have music collections or home libraries they can easily share with their own kids without paying for them again and again. What happens to lending books to friends and the flow of cultural learning when every document and every format requires a service fee?

The Kindle formula seems predicated on the logic that if you're the type of person who wants to read on the Kindle, you're probably the kind of person who can afford the pay for content service. In contrast, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer is being designed for people who can afford neither. It's been designed for children so that it can foster learning and sharing information in a humanitarian world that most science fiction readers are familiar with. It's that world where we build new devices to help each other, not to siphon off nickels and dimes. What we've talked about in this office is how cool the XO computer would be as the real "iPod of reading," and it could be. It's the sort of device that could actually get kids back into pleasure reading if there was a socially conscious book service for it.

Unlike Richard, who invoked King Gillette earlier, I don't feel Amazon is going about things the wrong way by pricing the device too high and the books too low. Books should always be made as affordable as possible. In my mind, pricing books too high is one of the reasons there's a pandemic of youth and young adults preferring console gaming and the internet to reading. It's actually less expensive to buy a Harry Potter XBox game than it is to buy the hardcover book. Based on the successful model of selling an expensive console that you buy new games for, it's not out to lunch to assume there are millions of people out there who will invest in a platform if attractive content is there for it. On the surface, the Kindle costs $2,000 less than an iPhone after you factor in the iPhone's nearly mandatory contract for 2 year's worth of monthly AT&T data and phone service, so, relatively speaking, it's a moderately affordable platform. And for the Kindle's $399, you're buying a platform for which Amazon seems very committed to consistently delivering a wide selection of new and backlist content.

So, the Kindle does have a good chance of success, as long as Amazon is willing to keep tweaking their formula the way that Apple did for the iPod. Remember, the iPod's success wasn't overnight. When it was first released, it was not a huge seller. There was no Windows compatibility. The touch surface was still a physical wheel. There was no iTunes Music Store. But under the cloak of Steve's reality distortion field, Apple kept refreshing the product with new ideas for 2 full years until they got it right and it took off as a phenomenon for the history books.

The Kindle has a lot going for it because of Amazon's weight in the retail marketplace, but it has to be ready to evolve quickly based on user response. They need to open the platform up for free content. It needs to be ready for user generated .Pub files. They need to make the EVDO service more useful. They need a more polished, premium design that looks less like a snowspeeder. They need to get E-Ink's latest color screens. And I think Amazon is probably already planning for that. Even though they took their sweet time getting all their ducks in a row for the launch, I think that they're not going to shrink back from this vision even if the device sells like a stinker this Christmas (it won't: it's already sold out its initial inventory). The Kindle is going to be with us for a while.

- Michael

King Gillette and the Kindle

E-Reads is second to none in rooting for the success of Amazon's Kindle. Not only does it represent the realization of a dream we have cherished for two decades, but, just to be selfish about it, our books are carried on it and we want to make money. That said, we have a real queasy feeling in the pits of our stomachs that the Kindle is on a path to the same resting place as the Rocket eBook.

Above: Amazon's Kindle.

My technical colleagues have their own reasons for thinking so, but I'd like to stress a couple of my own. The first is that the man and woman in the street does not want or need a dedicated reading device. We have come to rely on our ubiquitous cell phone to carry every electronic and digital application we need, from video to music to games to text to telephone communications. With some clever engineering it can serve as a reader, and in particular the iPhone is only a few warranty-killing tweaks away from adding book reading to its repertoire. What does it take to convince appliance manufacturers that most of us don't really want to carry two or three dedicated devices in our pockets or purses, even ones that weigh only ten or eleven ounces. We're happy with one gadget that satisfies all needs.

There's an important exception to the above, and that is college students, who have no choice but to carry a computer to classrooms in addition to their cell phone. College students are ripe for a better dedicated reading device than the laptop, and it's been sitting under our noses for years in the form of the tablet. Tablet computers perform the same functions as laptops but their streamlined design enables users to read the way college students read textbooks, assignments, or books for pleasure -- that is, in an armchair or sofa or in bed. The first manufacturer to realize this and successfully pitch laptops at colleges will make a well deserved fortune, perform a priceless service, and bring the digital revolution closer to what we all visualized when we pledged our hearts and souls to the service of the Internet.

The other thing that bedevils me is the price of the Kindle, as well as that of the Sony Reader. Forgotten is one of the wisest maxims ever coined by an American businessman and usually attributed to King Gillette, the inventor of disposable razor blades: "Give away the razor and sell them the blades," Gillette pronounced. Amazon has it all bassackwards, making the price of the device high and the price of the content low. It's already been pretty well demonstrated that the public is willing to pay relatively high prices for online books, but it is far from proven that the public will pay a high price for a reading device.

If Amazon wants to give away the Kindle (or at least sell it at a loss for that magical price point of $99.95) it might bring us closer to the tipping point. Amazon has tons of money to lose on a loss leader, but aside from the usual early adopters we may very well see the public respond to the Kindle with less