Round up #27: Browse, Audiobooks
Free enough for you?
I am quite happy not to be just listing more free books for you this time. 🙂 Not that I’m not pleased as punch to connect you with free books…that’s one of my favorite things to do! For a bookaholic like me, it’s an amazing thing, and one of the best things about e-books!
I recently listed over 50 titles in a couple of days, and I’ll list more soon (but not from that big batch…I’m done with those).
There are 220 free promotional (not public domain) items in the Kindle store right now. That’s the most since I’ve been tracking it (if you don’t count the Amazon Breakthrough nominees we had for a while).
I had noticed that at least one of the books came from SmashWords. I was wondering if maybe Amazon had set books that were free at SmashWords to be free in the Kindle store.
If they were published independently in the Kindle store through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, that’s costing Amazon money. They pay the royalty to the publisher based on the digital list price…at least, that’s they way it used to be. I’d have to look at the 70% royalty contract more carefully…but if it isn’t public, I couldn’t really talk about it anyway.
One of the authors, Don Capone (The Chambliss Tapes), was nice enough to let me know that Amazon had dropped the price on their own…and that the book was free at SmashWords. So, I checked five or six others…one of them wasn’t free. That one could have been raised after Amazon dropped it in the Kindle store.
My guess? Amazon dropped some prices to match SmashWords. I’m thinking this an experiment, and they’ll see if it gets them “inspired sales”…that is, if offering the book free ups the sales of other books in that series or by that author.
If this does work, might they let indies using the DTP offer books free for a limited time? Maybe…
Using the Web Kit Browser
Okay, I’ve had the Kindle 3 for a while now…well, three Kindle 3s, actually. 🙂 One of the differences between the 2 and the 3 is the new web browser, and I’ve had a chance to check that out.
First, it’s better…it’s a little weird to see scrolling text on a Kindle, but the web browser is fast enough for that.
I’ve actually sent an AOL e-mail from it…and it wasn’t too much work. That was a serious challenge on the K2. (Okay, there will be a pause for anti-AOL snickers…I just lost serious cool points, right?) 😉
I like the way the fill-in fields select so much more easily. You just have to get to them (you know, if you are putting in a zip code at Fandango), rather than get there and click on it.
The device is recognized by Amazon like a computer, rather than like a mobile phone, when using the wi-fi. That means people can click on a link in my blog when on the Kindle, and then actually buy something! That’s a plus. The first time, you do have to enter your e-mail and password, but it should remember that unless you delete your “cookies”. Cookies are small programs that websites place on your computer so the website can recognize it again. It wouldn’t surprise me if the cookies disappeared on a restart sometimes.
Here is a major (but easy to implement, I think) change I would like. When a website first opens up on the Kindle, it is tiny. I always have to increase the size (using the Aa button) to 150% or 200%. Then, when I go to another page on the same website, I have to do that again.
I’d very much like that setting to persist, just like it does when we change the text size. I realize that might make websites slower to load (maybe), but I don’t care if it loads quickly if I can’t read it. That one little change would make using the browser so much nicer. Since I’m often using it on wi-fi, it should be okay with Amazon if I use it more. 🙂
Definitely also try switching to landscape: on some websites, that can make a big difference.
Random House book with text-to-speech enabled
This has been interesting. Stephen Hawking’s latest book is published by Bantam, which is part of Random House. RH led the blocking of text-to-speech access in e-books. Their FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) say:
“…all of our eBooks have the text-to-speech feature disabled.”
RH FAQs
I’ve written to them to ask if this signals change in policy, which I would really, really, really like. I’ve bought many books from Random House (especially some of their imprints) in the past. I would love to go back to being a loyal customer of theirs, but I’ve made the personal choice not to buy books from companies that block text-to-speech access.
I could see this having been a special request. Autoturn (having the Kindle “turn pages” for you) is a boon to people with debilitating conditions, and I would think Stephen Hawking would particularly see the value of that. Unfortunately, on the Kindles (since the Kindle 1), blocking text-to-speech access also stops autoturn. That’s a big accessibility improvement Amazon could make: allow autoturn without starting text-to-speech and turning down the volume. I think that would be fairly simple.
What I’d like, of course, is that the publishers just stop blocking text-to-speech. I think that would be the best business decision for them.
I know that one of the publishers’ concerns has been that text-to-speech would hurt the audiobook business. I’ve been saying all along that I think it could actually help audiobook sales, by accustoming people to listening to books.
Well, downloaded audiobook sales were up 35.3% year to date through July compared to the previous year. Yes, physical audiobook sales were down .06 percent, but that’s not much. In July 2010, audio downloads were 6.6 million: physical audiobooks were 8.7 million. That makes downloads a heck of a lot more than .06 of the physical, showing a big increase overall.
Adult hardcovers are up 10.2 percent for the year…and mass market paperbacks are down 13.1 percent for the year. I think e-books are going to seriously hurt mass market paperback sales…and a lot in the next few years. Mass markets have been positioned as cheaper, more convenient alternatives to hardbacks…and e-books do both of those better. Also, you don’t have wait a year. 🙂
If e-book sales go up enough, I’m sure publishers wouldn’t mind cutting way back on mass markets. They wouldn’t have to pay for two waves of publicity…and they’d never have to lower the e-book prices (as they usually do now when the paperback is released). That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t, but they could base the price on the demand, not on an arbitrary timetable.
American Association of Publishers Sales through July 2010
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
I Love My Kindle 