Flash! The book is back on sale
Huh. I wonder if it the page was just overwhelmed or something when I searched for it earlier.
Interesting.
The sales rank is also greatly increased.
For me, though, a big issue is what this will mean in the Amazon store (and other online e-book sellers later).
I’ll keep an eye on what is happening with it.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Flash! That book appears to have been removed
If you don’t know which book, this earlier post may help…but I address the issue more generally.
People were saying they were going to boycott Amazon because it was carrying a specific book.
I don’t know if Amazon removed the book or if the publisher/author removed it.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Flash! New Kindle ad
I just saw a new Kindle ad…and it’s my favorite one so far!
They show the Kindle being used in real life.
It starts out with the Kindle being lifted off a stack of paperbooks. We see it in a jewelry drawer, on public transit…even being licked by a dog!
They also show it being stuck in a back jeans pocket. I have put my K3 in a pants pocket…but a front, loose one, and only when standing. I would be afraid of having it in a tight back pocket.
Anyway, it’s what I like in an ad…it shows the positives of your product. The text looks great, by the way.
http://www.youtube.com/user/kindle#p/a/u/0/DQKNxHo9bpA
Okay, okay…some advertising people would say the use of dogs and children is an easy way to go…but I like it. 🙂
Feel free to let me know what you think about it.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
What responsibility does Amazon have for independently published books?
There is a lot of concern being expressed in the Amazon Kindle community, and it’s gone beyond that group.
It has to do with an independently-published book for sale through Amazon.
I”m seeing many people saying they will not buy anything from Amazon until this book is removed.
I don’t want to make this about a particular book. Instead, I’m going to address the concept generally.
Free speech
There is no free speech issue here at all. That’s one of the things about which I commonly see a lot of confusion. Free speech has to do with what the government does…not with what the private sector does. A store has no obligation to carry specific materials or types of materials under the First Amendment right of free speech. A cookbook store does not have to carry mysteries, and vice versa. A store can choose to carry just books from one political party, if it wants. This also extends to your workplace (in a private company). They can tell you that you can’t talk about an election (regardless of your opinion) during your work time in front of customers. It’s the government that is restricted from doing that. So, whether Amazon carries a particular book or not has nothing do with free speech.
Promoting illegal acts
Now, this one is trickier. When I managed a bookstore, there was a book called the Anarchist Cookbook. It told you how to make bombs and such. Was that illegal? Well, again, it’s tricky. If a book tells you to use a bomb, that’s one thing. It it has the formula for gunpowder, that’s something else. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’m going to be vague. There was a science fiction series where the audience was told the components of gunpowder…it was key to the plot. Was that illegal? Talking about Amazon’s DTP (Digital Text Platform) specifically, there is this prohibition in their publicly available content guidelines:
Illegal Items
Titles sold through the Digital Text Platform Program must adhere to all applicable laws. Some Titles that may not be sold include any Titles which may lead to the production of an illegal item or illegal activity.
— DTP Content Guidelines
That use of “may lead to” is pretty broad. Let’s say a novel features underage drinking…one could argue that it “may lead to…illegal activity”. Is all fiction exempt? I’m guessing yes. There is an awful lot of fiction that tells you how to do illegal things…even glorifies illegal things.
What if it’s non-fiction and it suggest that something which is criminal should no longer be criminal? The suggestion isn’t a crime…but it “may lead” to people committing the crime…even if the author specifically says they shouldn’t until the activity is legal.
To me, this is a fuzzy, imprecise definition.
However, they don’t really need a definition. Amazon can stop selling anything at any time it wants, within the agreement it has with the publisher. It doesn’t need a reason. It is under no obligation to carry anything.
Does that mean Amazon could choose not to carry anything written by people of a particular religion? Sure.
If you don’t like that Amazon is or is not carrying something, you can let them know. They’ll make the decision based on business, I presume. Let’s say a book was going to sell 100 copies. However, they decide that carrying it will cost them 200 sales of an equivalently priced book. They would probably decide to stop carrying it.
It’s important to point out, though, that selection is one of Amazon’s things. They used to say that they wanted the Kindle to have “Every book ever published in any language.” That would include the book generating the controversy, of course…along with a lot of screeds and books that encouraged illegal action.
If you don’t like that Amazon is carrying a particular book, there are a lot of ways you can let them know. You can contact Customer Service. You can leave a review saying why you don’t like it (although that’s really a view rather than a review, if you haven’t read it). In the book under discussion, there are 672 1-star reviews at Amazon right now…out of 691. There have been more than 100 reviews posted while I wrote this piece. Amazon doesn’t stop carrying a book because of bad reviews, though.
You can also tag books: this was has been tagged 1338 times with “offensive”.
You can also go to the bottom of a book’s product page and notify Amazon that you think it is “inappropriate”. There’s also a link there to provide other feedback.
My guess is also that this author doesn’t care about the sales particularly, although the book is not priced as cheaply as it could be. It may be more about getting the ideas in the book out there.
Since the book went through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, is Amazon the publisher? It says specifically on the product page that it is published by someone else and sold by Amazon…just like the DTP books generally.
My guess is that Amazon will make the business decision not to carry the book. The publisher will have no recourse in that case, since Amazon has no legal obligation to carry the book. If the government were to forbid Amazon to sell it, that would be something different.
I see nothing wrong with customers telling Amazon that they are upset that Amazon is carrying a specific book. It’s good information for Amazon to have. I’m guessing some of you will think that Amazon should carry everything (legal), regardless, and let the public decide. The same tools that could be used against this book could be used against any book. However, just because one person thought a book was offensive, I don’t think Amazon would stop selling it (if it did, almost nothing would get sold). It’s the weight of public (specifically, customers’) opinion. Will they lose more sales than they’ll make? Is it bad PR to sell it…or to pull it?
Giving them your opinion will help them decide.
What do you think? Should Amazon pull books when people object to them? Should Amazon decide not to carry books in the first place if the company thinks there will be complaints? Feel free to let me know.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
More readers per purchase with e-books?
There’s an idea out there that e-books result in fewer readers per purchase, to the advantage of the publishers.
It basically goes like this: with a paperbook, you could loan it, give it, or sell it to somebody else. With a Kindle purchase (for example), you don’t get a physical object you can pass on. That means there are fewer readers of the book for each purchase.
A recent thread in the Amazon Kindle community got me thinking about that. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are on average more readers per purchase from the Kindle store than with a paperbook.
Why?
When you buy a book from the Kindle store you are buying simultaneous device licences. That’s the number of device (Kindles, iPad, iPhones, iPod touches, Android devices, Kindle for PC installations, Kindle for Mac installations, and/or Blackberrys…whew, I think I got them all) on which you can have the book simultaneously.
Simultaneously.
Unless it says otherwise, six people on your account could be reading the same hot new book at the same time.
How many people can read that hot new paperbook at the same time?
One.
Well, I suppose you could be reading the book out loud to your kid. Maybe you and your significant other snuggle up together in bed or on the couch and read it side by side. I doubt that happens very much, though. Hey, we don’t even read the online TV listings at the same speed! Hard to imagine reading the same book.
The other thing with two people reading the same paperbook is that you have to get that physical copy to the other person. You know…adult siblings have lunch together downtown to pass off that book, or mailing it somebody…that kind of thing. With the Kindle service, whether you are reading the book simultaneously or sequentially (one after the other), geography doesn’t matter much.
That sequentially element is important. You can have an infinite number of people on your account read the same book for one purchase price…they just can’t all read it at once, typically.
I can tell you that in our situation, more people are reading each book purchase in e-book than was true in p-book (paperbook).
I suspect that’s true in a lot of situations. Kindle Cooperatives (people who get an account together to share books) are, I think, going to be come increasingly common. The soon-to-be-implemented lending feature is going to increase that…because it will increase social interaction between Kindle owners who might then decide to get on the same account.
There are already websites and Facebook pages being set up for Kindle book sharers.
Paperbook sharing takes some serious time. Each person has to wait for the previous person to finish. What’s the turnaround on a book getting to a used bookstore…and then getting to another used bookstore? How many times do you borrow a book…and then lend it to someone else? Have you loaned the exact same copy of a book a number of times? I know these happen sometimes, but I wanted to ask you.
My guess is that the used book market is large enough right now that there may be more readers per purchase for paperbooks…but is that true for current books?
The other thing to thing about is how many sales are lost…that’s the thing you think would concern the publishers. Since it takes such a relatively long amount of time for a paperbook to go through, say, six readers, that book is no longer in its initial sales cycle. By the time you get to six, many books wouldn’t even be in the brick and mortar bookstores. Those may not be lost sales. I have bought a lot of used books in my life…but not instead of buying it new in a bookstore, generally. By that I mean that I didn’t see a book for sale new in a store, and then go to see if I could get a used copy. The books I bought were often not still in print, or I’d never heard of them before I saw it in the used bookstore.
So, some questions:
I have to say, it occurs to me that some people might manipulate the answer here to make it look like there are fewer readers per purchase with e-books…so we don’t lose the sweet deal we have now. 😉
There are two other big factors…well, maybe three.
1. Some people do the “Reg/Dereg Dance”…they register a Kindle to an account, download books from the archive, deregister it, and then read the local copies on their Kindles. That may be okay…but I’ve never been able to get Amazon to say something one way or another on it. It’s clearly against the Terms of Service to sell or giveaway a Kindle with Kindle content on it, but the R/DD? Don’t know…and I don’t know how big a factor that is
2. You can’t share Kindle books with other dedicated EBRs (E-Book Readers). You can’t share them with a NOOK or a Sony. You can share them with an iPad, but that’s not a dedicated device. You can share a paperbook with pretty much anybody (excluding language and print disabilities). If you bought a book and could read it on any type of device registered to your account, would that increase the readers per purchase for e-books?
3. Piracy, at least in the US, is probably a bigger issue with e-books than p-books. We don’t see a lot of counterfeit paperbooks in the US. There are countries where that happens…but the torrent sites probably move a lot more unauthorized e-books than unauthorized paper copies get sold (although I’m just presuming that). Does that increase the number of readers per purchase for e-books? Well, I think that more of the torrent books come from people buying a paperbook and scanning it than from people breaking the DRM (Digital Rights Management) on e-books. In other words, I don’t think very many people buy an e-book, hack the DRM, and then distribute it. There isn’t as much demand for an unauthorized copy of an e-book which is legitimately available, in my opinion.
What do you think? Do e-books mean more readers per purchase or fewer? Feel free to let me know.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Flash! E-books outsell paper at Amazon on Grisham’s latest
Interesting
WSJ (Wall Street Journal) article
from Jeffrey Trachtenberg, one of the writers who does seem to understand the e-book world.
The thrust of the article is that e-book sales have significantly helped the sales on John Grisham’s latest*.
In a rarity, an actual number of sales is listed…70,000 e-book sales for the first week. That compares to 160,000 hardbacks, according to Nielsen. I don’t want to take away too much from the article…I recommend you read it. I will point out that the previous book sold 223,000 hardbacks in the first week. 160,000 + 70,000 = 230,000. While it is hard to do a 1-1 comparison (every book is different), it suggests that total sales were enhanced by the e-book sales. It isn’t just that everyone who bought an e-book would have bought a hardback…7,000 more copies were sold.
Grisham was one of the notorious hold-outs on e-books…he now appears to have embraced them.
Oh, and my headline is based on Amazon saying that the Kindle version outsold the hardback for the first week at their site. That’s been happening there for popular books…but 30% e-book share for all of the markets (not just Amazon) is impressive. 🙂
* I’m not naming the book because the publisher’s policy is to block text-to-speech. However, TTS is not blocked on this book, and that has been happening with Random House lately. I would love for them to give me a statement that they’ve changed their position on it, and I have asked, but their FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) still says that they block it on all of their books.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Flash! eReaderIQ adds international support
I’ve always loved one particular line from Yul Brynner. I’m going to paraphrase from memory here, but when he was asked what he would like to have his tombstone say, he said (approximately):
“I would like it to say, ‘I have arrived,” because when you believe you’ve arrived, you’re dead.”
In other words, you should never think of your journey as over. You should always look for ways to improve yourself. That doesn’t mean you aren’t satisfied with yourself, that you are wracked with self-doubt. Hey, when you look for a way to improve yourself, you might not find one. 😉
I think that’s especially true of companies. Amazon does it. The Kindle service keeps evolving.
eReaderIQ (formerly known as KindleIQ, and brought to you by the folks who bring you Jungle-Search) does that.
I’m impressed with the ways they keep making this site more useful. When they added the “Kindle Price Drops” and “New to Kindle” notification services, I thought that was great.
The new enhancement they’ve done is allow you to choose your region, providing international support.
You can select one of nine regions:
When you do that, you’ll see different titles on the site.
That means you can see books that are free in the Middle East or in the United States…and those two lists aren’t the same.
When I switched to the Middle East to check recently Kindleized, for example, there were no results…although there were many for the United States.
There were a few things that seemed a bit odd. The search results from the main page seemed to be the same, even if I had a different country showing. Regardless of the region I chose, the number of total books in the Kindle store was the same.
I couldn’t choose Middle East when I was on the New to Kindle page. I could choose it on the main search and it did affect the New to Kindle page.
Still, this is very useful. If you get their free Kindle books notification, it now indicates the region:
Available for free in the following regions: United States, Africa*, Australia, Canada, India*, Latin Am. & Caribbean*, Middle East*
* Surcharges may apply to marked regions. Books are free prior to surcharges being applied.
There are two different Kindle stores: Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (which is the rest of the world). However, when you shop at Amazon.com, the country in your
http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle
impacts what you see. This is due to licensing issues…a publisher may not have the rights to sell an e-book in your jurisdiction.
This has the potential to be a very useful improvement. Searching regions other than your own has not been easy at Amazon. I asked them if I could go into my Manage Your Kindle and change my country just for research purposes. If you change it in order to purchase books outside your region, you can get in trouble for that. I didn’t get an okay. However, doing it on eReaderIQ should be fine, since you aren’t saying you live somewhere else.
The first time you set your region, you’ll see a dropdown on your right side of the screen. To change it later on, you’ll see Current Region and a red change link on your left side of the screen.
I’m not connected to eReaderIQ except as a user, by the way. We do have some correspondence (I asked them about this change, for example), and they have linked to this blog…but that’s it. 🙂
I do recommend eReaderIQ, and I personally use it regularly.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Flash! US Amazon store breaks 750,000 titles
The Kindle store has been growing very quickly…on the average, the US store has been adding about 1000 titles a day.
When it first opened, there were fewer than 100,000 titles. Now, just a few years later, it is at three-quarters of a million titles (750,814).
The number does vary for other regions…I don’t know that any have more than the US, and I do know that some have fewer.
Of course, you can also get books for your Kindle from other sources…2.5 million text titles roughly from http://www.archive.org , for example.
Still, it’s an exciting milestone to pass. If we have to wait 250 days to hit a million, that will obviously be next year.
Kindle store title count
Forum thread called “homophobic campaign”
People say stuff.
They may say stuff with which you disagree.
That seems to be okay to me.
However, there are rules as to how it can be said…that is, on a commercially-provided forum.
Amazon is a commercial enterprise. They provide forums that anyone can read, and on which people who have a free Amazon account can post.
They don’t moderate the comments before they are posted. Oh, there is some software moderation. If you try to post certain words (or links), the software may stop you. I thought one of the funniest was that it apparently wouldn’t let me use William Shatner’s nickname of “The Shat” (I presume because it thought it was a past tense)…and it once objected to something I tried to post in Esperanto!
This means that people post things that other people may find objectionable…or unjustified. They certainly let things like “Amazon sucks!” stand. I’ve seen people post just flat-out inaccuracies about the Kindle. Those stand.
There are posting guidelines, and I think they are pretty good. If you violate the guidelines, they may delete your post. They may warn you not to do it again…they can revoke your posting privileges.
There was recently a thread wherein someone complained about the novel Fifth Avenue.
I read the first few posts (I do that for almost every thread on the Amazon Kindle community). The complaint was that the person was surprised by a sex scene. As I recall, they thought there should have been a content warning.
Complicating that is that the sex scene was between two men.
As I recall it, it wasn’t just that it was a same-sex sex scene…it’s that it was unexpected and involved…I’m going to say non-traditional practices. They weren’t graphically described in the post.
Apparently, it went on from there, where people might have posted anti-gay comments. Since that wasn’t a thread where I had much to add, I stopped reading it after a few posts. It wasn’t a technical question I could answer, and it seemed to be largely opinion. I’ll comment on opinion questions that have to do with copyright, with pricing…things about which I have some particular knowledge.
The thread was eventually deleted by Amazon. That happens, too.
Two of the guidelines under “What shouldn’t I post?” are:
I assume this moved into one of those categories.
Now, Amazon doesn’t have a heavy hand on enforcement. Typically, I think, people have to complain before they take action.
So, my take on that: somebody posted an opinion that they didn’t like encountering a sex scene unexpectedly. Since it happened to be a same-sex sex scene, the thread devolved into possibly homophobic comments. Amazon took action and removed it.
That seems to me very different from journalist Maryann Yin’s interview with Christopher Smith, the author of the book:
This an article by a journalist, as opposed to a post by a member of the public. It uses very charged terminology. The questions include the terms “smear campaign” and “slander”.
I need to re-emphasize that I didn’t read the vast majority of the posts in the thread. What I did read didn’t seem slanderous or a campaign. It seemed like one person posted something which I would guess from what I’ve read was not wholly inaccurate. Perhaps a campaign was started later in the thread to post lies, maybe as reviews of the book? That would be a smear campaign.
The forum is generally not homophobic. We see questions from time to time about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) fiction and non-fiction. Some posters have identified their sexuality (both straight and gay), and I don’t recall anybody complaining about that.
The issue about whether or not gay sex scenes are held to a different standard than straight sex scenes is one thing. Slander and a smear campaign (which by definition is organized falsehoods with the intent of damaging someone’s reputation) is another thing. Part of what is interesting to me here is the apparent equation of a forum thread with a smear campaign. It says to me that we are beginning to consider all writings to be of the same weight: FaceBook with network news, blogs with newspapers…forum posts with smear campaigns.
What do you think of Galleycat covering this event in this way? If you read the entire original thread, were there things in there that justify the use of “slander” (we can ignore the difference between slander and libel for now) and “smear campaign”? Feel free to leave a comment. I do moderate the comments here, by the way. Not usually for the opinion, but I don’t post them if they are just ads in my opinion, and I do edit them for language (although I don’t re-write content…I’ll indicate what the original language was through the use of asterisks, that kind of thing).
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
Freebie flash! People, Save, Profitable, Brains, and more
As usual, I don’t vouch for these books, and they come from companies that are not (to my knowledge) blocking text-to-speech. As promotional titles, they may not be free for long. Note: these books are free in the USA: prices in other countries may vary.
John Wooden’s Winning Ways (Insights From Great Business Minds)
by New Word City
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
Dwight Eisenhower’s Leadership Lessons
by New Word City
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
Strength for Service to God and Country
by Norman E. Nygaard, Evan Hunsberger
published by Abingdon Press (a faith-based publisher)
The Profitable Road to (Business) Harmony
by Jim Champy
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
15 Successful Communications Lessons (Collection)
by FT Press Delivers
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
Brains: How They Work and What that Tells Us About Who We Are
by Dale Purves
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
Can I Be Sure I’m Saved? (Crucial Questions Series)
by R. C. Sproul
published by Reformation Trust Publishing (a faith-based publisher)
Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called ”Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A”
by Ken Blanchard, Garry Ridge
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
The Rules of Life: A Personal code for Living a Better, Happier, More Successful Life Reader
by Richard Templar
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
A Simple Amish Christmas
by Vanetta Chapman
published by Abingdon Press (a faith-based publisher)
The Truth About Securing Your Retirement with IRAs: The Essential Truths in 20 Minutes
by Steve Weisman
published by FT Press (a business publisher)
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
I Love My Kindle 