The vanishing vocabulary of brick-and-mortar bookstores

The vanishing vocabulary of brick-and-mortar bookstores

Language is used not only to bring us together but to set us apart.

Every group tends to develop its own slang and jargon. That way, you can tell who is “in with the in crowd”.

You can see this everywhere: in your work, in your play, in your family, and online.

When I managed a brick-and-mortar bookstore, there were terms that we all knew and used. If I asked an employee to “merchandise the end cap”, that was as clear as if I had said “drink the water”.

I was thinking about how much of it was based on the physical nature of the store. Paperbooks on shelves, and customers, employees, and other people coming to a building…those are all things that don’t apply to an online bookstore.

That doesn’t mean that some of the terms won’t survive. People still say they “dial” a phone number, for example, although many of them have never actually used a rotary phone.

Still, I thought I’d get my best Stuart Berg Flexner on, and share some of the terms we used to use…before they might vanish altogether.

I should point out here that I don’t actually know how widespread some of these terms were…it’s possible something might have only been used in my store (although I didn’t make up any of these, despite my penchant for neologisms). That’s the insular nature of jargon for you. 🙂 If you worked in a bookstore, feel free to let me know if you knew these are not…and some of them, of course, are used beyond bookstores. Oh, and it’s possible new bookstore terms have become common (it’s been more than a decade for me), and I’d be interested in hearing those.

Aisles

While aisles are technically passages between things, we used this sometimes to refer to a section or even a genre of books. For example, we might refer to the “Science Fiction aisle”, even if it took up more than one row of bookshelves.

End Cap

Typically, there are two islands of bookshelves, with the shelves facing each other. However, on the end of that island is another area where you can have shelves, facing perpendicular to the other shelves. Those are called “end caps”, and it is where you tended to put something that was being featured. There wasn’t enough space there to cover an average size topic (although you might see something like “Locally Published”) so it was more likely to be “Employees’ Picks” or maybe several books topically related to a popular movie or TV show.

Facing a book

When I look at my bookshelves at home, all I see are the “spines” (the back edge of the book with the title on it where the pages may be attached…not the front cover or the back cover). Despite the old saying, though, people definitely judge books by the cover. 😉 So, we would “face” some books on the shelves…put them with the front cover facing out where you could see them. That certainly took more room on the shelf, but could be worth it in terms of sales.

Merchandising

This was the act of making the books look good on the shelves by how they were arranged. Books naturally get messed up as people pick them up and don’t put them back carefully. Even just buying a single book can make the display of the other books look less attractive, perhaps less balanced. With the reduction in staff sizes, I’ve seen a concurrent lack of merchandising. Sometimes shelves are in great disarray, and that can be especially true of magazine racks.

Poacher Piles

Shoplifters would find expensive books (art books, quite often), and make a pile of maybe ten of them horizontally on a shelf. They were waiting for a moment when the front door wasn’t guarded, then they would just scoop them up and get out. We would find these “poacher piles” and know that someone was either in the store about to shoplift, or had been there and left.

Publishers’ Representatives (“reps”)

Even though  I knew a lot about the books that were upcoming, I couldn’t know it all. Publishers’ reps would come to the store, maybe once a week or so, and pull books off the shelves from their company that weren’t selling (saving us having to return them), and recommend new books. Sure, it was their jobs to get us to buy things, but the best of them were incredibly literate, educated, and could really help us. I had one in particular who had been a Jeopardy champion, and I looked forward to visits. Yes, we sometimes did little trivia things, and yes, I sometimes won. 🙂

Remainders

Unlike paperbacks, hardbacks often stay in pretty good shape from owner to owner. If we had gotten ten copies of a hardback (and that would be a lot) and couldn’t sell them, we could ship the whole hardback back (see “Strips” below for paperbacks) for a credit. The publisher, in turn, might mark those as a return in some way (cutting off a corner, drilling a hole through them, marking the bottom of the pages with a magic marker) and then resell them to use at a much lower price (which meant we then sold them at a low price to customers). They had to be so clear about the book being a “leftover” (it was what “remained” after the initial sales…a “remainder”) because it affected how authors got paid. If the author got 10% of the list price, the publisher couldn’t pay them $2 for a book that had been initially listed at $20, but was being sold for $1.99. Update: “remainder” was also a verb. While it wasn’t technically what we were doing, we might say that we were going to “remainder” a book if we marked down an unreturnable book and put it in the bargain book section.

Shrinkage

Shrinkage is a type of loss you can have in a bookstore, and it has three elements: damage, shoplifting, and employee theft. Damage was rare, but could happen…I always remember that somebody stomped on a ketchup package in an aisle (apparently deliberately), splattering several books on low shelves with red goo. Those books could not be sold at that point, so we had to take a loss on them. Shoplifting was extraordinarily common: at the time, my understanding was that bookstores were the most shoplifted stores (since it was easy to sell “used” books, compared to, say, a video camera). Employee theft, unfortunately, was also a risk…and I did experience that.

Strips

When we bought books from major publishers, we were guaranteed that we would sell them. If we didn’t, we could return them to the publisher for credit to buy more books. It wouldn’t make sense for us to have to ship mass market paperbacks back, though…that would be expensive. So (and this was a very hard thing for me to do), we were supposed to rip the covers off the front of the book and mail those back. You could probably get twenty of them in a manila envelope. The rest of the book, even though it was able to be read, couldn’t be sold or given away: that was what the cover was supposed to prove. I would sometimes find books in used bookstores that said specifically on them that if I was finding them with the cover off, they had been stolen and that I shouldn’t buy them.

Wells (or “Wishing Wells”)

Let’s say you had a hundred copies of very popular hardback to sell. You wouldn’t want to put all of them on a shelf (they would take up a whole aisle, and be very hard to keep merchandised), but you also didn’t want to have to keep running to the back to get a copy for someone. We would create sort of artistic piled spirals of them on the floor. You lay a level of them on the floor in a circle, then another level on top of that, but not aligned (wells typically had spiky edges), and so on…reducing the circumference with each level. I would tell my employees to always put one of them on top out of symmetry: if you didn’t do that, some customers didn’t want to break up the pretty structure by buying one of them. 🙂

Well, there are a few of them…that was a nice trip down the memory aisle! ; Now, I think I’ll read a Big 5 book on my EBR in portrait mode… 😉

—

Update: bonus deal

Today’s Kindle Daily Deals include five books in Terry Pratchett’s popular science fiction humor series, Discworld (start with the first one, The Color of Magic, 4.2 out of 5 stars, 353 reviews at the time of writing. Those are $1.99 each. They also fifteen romance novels for ninety-nine cents each.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #205: Best OCR, comics & KFHD on sale

Round up #205: Best OCR, comics & KFHD on sale

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later. 

Wanna buy a supervillain…cheap?

Right now, Amazon is having a

DC Comic Villains Sale

DC publishes Batman, Superman, and the Flash, among many others, and really has some of the coolest villains.

These are modern comics from current talents (Grant Morrison, Paul Dini, Gail Simone…).

Each one is ninety-nine cents. I’m guessing these would not be good for young kids, but I haven’t read any of these specific ones.

While I’m sure these would look better on a Kindle Fire (color can be important in comics), the “Only available on these devices” list is more robust than one might think:

• Kindle
• Kindle Touch
• Kindle Paperwhite
• Kindle Fire HD
• Kindle Cloud Reader
• Kindle Keyboard
• Kindle for iPad
• Kindle for Android
• Kindle Fire (may or may not include 1st generation Kindle Fire; please check deliver to dropdown)

The Paperwhite, the Touch, the Mindle, and the Kindle Keyboard are all capable of showing comics effectively. Unfortunately, the Kindle DX, which is one generation farther back than the Kindle Keyboard, doesn’t have good software for it…unfortunate, because I think the larger size might be more effective.

This is a limited time sale, and might end at any point. As always, check the price before you click that “Buy” button.

Kindle Fire HD 7″ on sale again for $159…same as non-HD

While it seems pretty likely that a new Kindle Fire is coming soon (there have been supposed leaked pictures and stats), this is a good deal:

Kindle Fire HD 7″, Dolby Audio, Dual-Band Wi-Fi, 16 GB – Includes Special Offers

It’s $159…the same as the non-HD.

I would consider this Amazon’s primary tablet right now…there are two larger versions (with and without 4G), and a less expensive one.

Basing it on reviews, it goes like this:

• This one: 17,952 at time of writing
• Non-HD: 10,839
• 8.9″ non-4G or with 4G: 8,679

By the way, looking at those numbers, you can see what a low percentage of people actually write reviews. There have probably been millions of these sold (although Amazon doesn’t release specific numbers).

Again, this could end at any time.

Jonathan Franzen says that Jeff Bezos is not the antichrist

Jeff: “Um…thanks?”

😉

Note…that’s not a real quotation from Jeff Bezos…I want to be careful to make that clear. 🙂

In this

article in The Guardian

Jonathan Franzen submits a different answer to my optimist/pessimist poll question…or at least, one can draw the conclusion that the author would. 😉

Lest you think that the assessment alluded to in the headline for this story is an endorsement, the full line is

“In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen.”

I’m going to recommend that you read the article, although you may want to be prepared to have it bring you down.

I think Franzen, as others have done, is seeing the world through the lens of the traditionally published author. While the opportunity to have someone else pay you significant money to license it so they can publish it may be diminishing (and I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case), the opportunity for authors to make money is considerably greater than it was before electronic distribution.

Many, many authors are, I’m sure, making more money than they would have in the old curated system. My intuition is that many more authors are making a living as authors, but I don’t have the stats to back that up.

To me, the world looks like it is getting better for authors.

One of the challenges will be for readers to find “better” books to read, of course, but for authors, the picture looks good…in my opinion, of course.

The best OCR I’ve ever used

I’ve been saying I want to get better OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and a better scanner. That’s so I can digitize public domain works I have.

Well, I’ve found one, and it’s astonishingly good!

What is it?

My new Galaxy S4 phone.

It comes with an app called Optical Reader.

You take a picture of text, and it can convert it for you.

Here is part of the results of a page I did from The Maybe Monsters, a book I believe to be in the public domain:

“tracks
of the two kinds of bears were not the right size, and,
besides, bears leave claw marks that do not appear in the
snowman’s tracks. Furthermore, bears usually remain down
in the valleys.
That left the langur. “The great black-faced monkey of
the Himalayan slopes,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it,
in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” in The Case Book
<)/ Sherlock Holmes. “Biggest and most human of climbing
monkeys.’
Again, there was the question of size of the prints. Ship-
ton answered this one:
The tracks measured rather more than 12 inches, which
would suggest that they had been made by a creature
much larger than any langur known to science.
I understand that langur monkeys are vegetarians. Now
while a carnivorous creature might feed upon marmots
and tailless Tibetan rats which inhabit the lower reaches
of these glaciers . . . a vegetarian, other than a grazing
animal, would in these parts be very far from adequate
food supplies.
What in any case is a monkey doing wandering about
in these regions of permanent snow?
Still another argument against the langur is that the langur
travels in groups. The snowman, from his tracks,
walks alone.”

Is it perfect? No, but it’s much better than what I have used before.

From the time I opened the page to the time I had it e-mailed to me? I would guess it was maybe fifteen seconds. I’ll have to time it to be sure, but that’s pretty quick.

Obviously, it’s not recognizing the line spacing between the paragraphs, but that wouldn’t be hard to fix.

The bottom of the page did not come out as well, and I presume the page was a bit bent there or not lit as well. I just did this very spontaneously…just held it up and snapped.

The negative would be having different images for each page, but I may be able to work with that.

I’ll experiment a bit more and let you know, but this is promising. It might work especially well for magazines.

What do you think? Are you interested in unconfirmed stats and images of upcoming hardware? Unless it suggests something radical, I usually prefer to wait to get the official (radical can be a fun idea, even if it doesn’t come to fruition). Do you read comics currently? Did you read them in the past, but stopped? If you could OCR your p-books, what would you do with the p-books afterwards? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

Poll Party #4

Poll Party #4

My regular readers know that I really like to hear your opinion. I often ask for it at the end of posts (and I try to give you conversation starters), and I love reading (and responding to) the comments.

I know not everybody wants to, or has the time and energy to, write something like that.

That’s one reason I love the polls we do here. It gives people another way to be heard. Even though we certainly aren’t a scientific sample of the mainstream, I find it interesting to see what we are saying. I suspect we might even be predictive as a group, as far as e-books are concerned, but I don’t really know that.

Kindle MatchBook

Amazon recently announced Kindle MatchBook, a service (starting in October) that will allow you to buy an e-book at a reduced price if you have bought the p-book (paperbook) from Amazon. Not all books will be eligible, but eligible purchases will go back to the beginning of Amazon.

There has been some interesting responses to this, in particular, I’ve seen articles that question whether or not this is even something people will want.

Idle Kindles

I recently wrote about the many kinds of Kindleers, and it was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me.

I tend to keep all my Kindles, partially to have them as reference for questions.

However, I can honestly say I haven’t tried to turn on my Kindle 1 (the kind released in 2007) in over a year.

That got me thinking…there must by now be a lot of Kindles sitting unused in drawers and such.

Amazon’s Publishing Efforts

A lot is riding on Amazon’s publishing efforts, both as a traditional publisher and as a publishing platform (Kindle Direct Publishing).

In the past, pretty much every time Amazon has gone up against the publishers, they’ve lost (text-to-speech, the Agency Model…the latter wasn’t fixed until the Department of Justice intervened). It’s pretty simple: in terms of books, Amazon has needed the tradpubs (traditional publishers).

As Amazon continues to produce their own books, though, they need the publisher less…potentially shifting that balance.

That only really works if we buy the books, though…

I realize many people may not know (or care) who published their books, so here are some links to the options in the poll, in case you want to check:

• Kindle Singles
• Kindle Worlds
• Kindle Serials
• Kindle Indie Books
• Thomas & Mercer (516 titles)
• AmazonEncore (597 titles)
• 47North (261 titles)
• Montlake (859 titles)
• Grand Harbor Press (7 titles)
• Little A (56 titles, but some false positives)
• Jet City (7 titles)
• Two Lions (383 titles)
• Skyscape (81 titles)

Your Reading Profile

I’m just curious about this one…I always assume the readers of this blog tend to be “serious readers”, but I like to get more data.

Comfort Level with Your E-reading Device

When I started this blog over four years ago, I was doing a lot of basic “how tos” and tips and tricks.

Over time, my sense has been that the devices have gotten easier to use, and people come into them knowing more about them. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go back to the basics…I know that you always should do that in every endeavor, and that you are far more likely to overestimate people’s knowledge of a topic you know than underestimate it in most cases.

So, I’ll ask…

Used to Uses

Bookstore sales continue to drop this year (down 6.3% in July, according to this Publishers Weekly article). That’s leading some people to say that p-books are going away. I don’t think that myself, although I do think that how they are going to be used may change dramatically. For example, I’ve been suggesting that we may see $50 as a common price for a hardback novel by a brand name author (with better materials and manufacturing, and more of a luxury feel).

Another factor that got made me want to do this poll was that it is the 50th anniversary of the audiocassette (depending on how you measure it, of course). I remember when something came up with my now adult kid about an audiocassette, and my kid had no idea what they were…despite having frequently used an audiocassette player at maybe five years old (and something like ten years before the question about them).

That doesn’t mean they aren’t still around…somewhere…but they seem to be not much in the public consciousness of New Millenials.

I was also amused to a reference recently to an animal having a “…nose like Jimmy Durante“. I wondered how many people reading that story online got anything out of that line!

Glass Check

I’m often described as an optimist, and I wouldn’t argue with that. It sometimes suggests that I’m living in a fantasy world and am deluded about reality…I might want to refute that point. 😉

How about you?

I certainly expect the fewest answers on that last question, because most people aren’t gong to want to define themselves that completely…they are going to see themselves as a mix, or undefined. We’ll see, though. 😉

Polls are certainly just one way to express your opinion. I know some of you will have more to say on these, and may question my wording and options (which is fine, of course). Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

I’ll be interested to see what results we get!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

The many kinds of Kindleers

The many kinds of Kindleers

We were one.

That didn’t last, though.

Starting in November of 2007, and continuing until February of 2009, there was pretty much one kind of Kindleer. That’s how long it was from the release of the first Kindle until the release of the Kindle 2…when the fragmentation began.

Oh, I remember the demands to keep the two forums on Amazon separate. The Kindle 2 was a very different device, introducing text-to-speech to the line, for one. However, it was also seen as a step backward in two big regards: no user-replaceable battery, and no SD card slot.

The two camps faced off: those rugged pioneers who insisted that having a Kindle without an SD card was like going into the rain forest without a machete, and those who thought the Kindle 1 was as boxy as a 1950s RCA TV set.

In some households, they got along with each other. After all, they probably shared 80% of their functionality.

However, March 4th introduced a brand new faction: the Kindleless Kindleer. That’s when Kindle for the iPhone was released.

“Eww!” said the E-Inkers, “You are going to read on a tiny backlit screen? It hurts my eyes just to think about it.”

“Dude,” said the iKindleers. “iPhone.”

The big Kindle DX entered the scene in May, with a promise of great textbook integration. The DX lovers weren’t many, but they were (and are) enthusiastic.

On October 22, the Kindle for PC app was released.

E-Inkers: “Reading on a computer? You’re kidding me!”

iKindleers: “Dude. iPhone.”

PCers: “I can get forty bestsellers for what you paid for that tiny status gadget with its data plan or that doorstop…which one of loves books more?”

At least, the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2 folks had bonded over their love of an unlit screen…until the Kindle 2 started to getting things the Kindle 1 didn’t.

Native pdf support.

Landscape.

International models.

And then, the mighty wedge…on August 3, 2010, the Kindle 2 got active content. Two games, Shuffled Row and Every Word…and the Kindle 1ers said that was the end of the literate exclusivity of the Kindle…the Kindle 2ers were evicted from the “Garden of Readin'” by the temptation of the app(le), and the Kindle 1ers were done with them.

On July 28th of 2010, Amazon had introduced the Kindle 3…and, well, everybody was okay with that. 😉 Pretty much…let’s say it was mostly seen as an improvement over the Kindle 2.

On April 11, 2011, another huge split was dropped, deus ex marketing, on the community…ad-supported Kindles! “Ads on my Kindle? No way!” “Um…you don’t watch network TV? It’s kind of the same thing…and the ads aren’t in the books. Cheaper Kindles…what’s wrong with that?”

September 28, 2011, brought the next horror/wonder…a touchscreen Kindle.

A Kindle without keys? That was the best/worst thing so far!

That’s also when they introduced the “Mindle”…the first Kindle without sound. No audiobooks, no music, no text-to-speech.

The keyboardless kindle and “I have no mouth and I must scream” models weren’t the most head-spinning things that day, though.

Fire.

Kindle Fire.

A backlit tablet that did video…and yet, called itself a Kindle.

That was the biggest rift ever…and one that still hasn’t healed.

Some of the E Inkers felt betrayed.

It was as if your e-mail provider sent you their annual report on paper, or your compostable tableware arrived in a non-biodegradable bag.

They wouldn’t sit with those tablet toters at lunch, that’s for darn tootin’!

I think, though, we’ll most people will eventually accept that we are really all bound together by one thing: our love of reading.

Whether it’s backlit, frontlit, candlelight, or a flashlight under the covers, we are  all connecting with other human beings through the amazing power of literature. You can read it with your eyes, hear it with your ears, or feel it with your fingers…a book is a book is a book.

While it may be true that, as Edmund Wilson said, “No two persons ever read the same book,” that doesn’t mean that we don’t all read them…and does it really matter so much how we do it?

Books aren’t upset about how you read them…they welcome every reader. That’s how I feel about it, too. 🙂

This post by Bufo Calvin first appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #204: Over 100 WSV audiobooks for $0.99 each, Amazon won’t phone home

Round up #204: Over 100 WSV audiobooks for $0.99 each, Amazon won’t phone home

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later. 

“How Google Fights Piracy”

I believe that most people generally want to behave in a way that doesn’t harm others.

I remember talking to my (now adult) kid years ago, explaining why “The good guys always win.” What I said was that the average person wants to help the good guy (oh, I should mention, “guy” has always been a gender neutral term for me). So, if the bad guy is running down the street, the crowd will tend to want to help the good guy intervene or not lose track. If the good guy is running away from the bad guy, the crowd will tend to help the good guy get away.

So, it’s a numbers thing. 😉

There are a lot of things you can say philosophically, of course, and come up with different reasons why good guys tend to come out on top, or give me examples of when that hasn’t happened…but for a little kid, it made sense.

I’ve said here before that the best way to combat piracy (in this case, the distribution of unauthorized copies of a copyrighted book) is to have a legitimate copy of it easily available at a reasonable price.

I’m sure the average Kindle owner looks on Amazon first. If they don’t find the book there, they may Google it…and that’s when they run into pirate copies (perhaps not even realizing that they are pirated).

Well, it’s nice to see that Google agrees with me on that. 🙂

In this

Google PDF

they explain how Google fights piracy.

In their first point, they say

“The best way to battle piracy is with better, more convenient, legitimate alternatives to piracy…”

You may be interested in the rest of the “paper”…including how they work to keep pirate sites out of the top results, and how they “…process copyright removal requests for search results at the rate of four million requests per week with an average turnaround time of less than six hours”

Get audiobooks for use with Whispersync for Voice for ninety-nine cents

Update: Thanks to reader and frequent commenter Tom Semple for pointing out that the below promotion has ended (which happened after I wrote the post…some of my readers were able to take advantage of it).

Amazon’s been really, really promoting audio books lately…which might seem a bit counter-intuitive, since the newly announced Kindle Paperwhite 2 (KP2) doesn’t even have audio capability (so it can’t play them). That’s one reason I think there is an audio-enabled frontlit device coming at some point.

They’ve combined the p-book (paperbook) and audiobook sections at Amazon .com, and added audio samples to the books’ product pages.

Now, they are pushing Whispersync for Voice, which enables you to sight read part of a book, switch to an audiobook and pick up where you left off, then switch back. For more on that, see http://www.amazon.com/wsv.

This promotion includes this page:

Buy a Kindle Book, Then Upgrade with Narration for Just $0.99

You buy an e-book, say, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. Then, you can buy an audiobook at a typically greatly reduced price. In this case, Amazon’s price for the audiobook is $15.95, so it’s quite a savings.

Do I do this?

No, not really…I prefer text-to-speech to audiobooks, unless I’ve read the book already (I don’t like the narrator interpreting the characters for me…TTS is software, not a recording). I haven’t tested it recently, but when I had gotten an audiobook to use with WSV (Whispersync for Voice) it appeared to prevent me from using TTS.

I think most people prefer audiobooks to TTS, though, so I did want to let you know about this deal.

This offer is for a limited time, and may not apply in your country.

No Amazon phone this year

Thanks to a reader who sent me a heads-up to this

Bloomberg article by Brad Stone (and it’s been covered other places as well).

I’ve been referring to statements from Amazon’s Director of Communications, Drew Herdener, for about four years.

Herdener says there won’t be an Amazon phone this year…and that when there is one, it won’t be free.

Take that, internet rumor mill! 😉

I have a Collections follower

No, that doesn’t mean a collection agency is after me…darn these multiple-meaning words! 😉

While Amazon hasn’t announced it yet, I do think this has a lot of potential to be a “big thing”.

I’m having some fun just getting started (things have been super busy lately). I have three Collections there right now: A Fortean Education; Seventies Social Sci-Fi; and 1939: The Best Pop Culture Year Ever.

The trick to making this work for me was installing Amazon’s Collect button in Chrome (it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer). That lets me easily add any item to a Collection.

I would have a lot of fun putting together a Collection at the suggestion of a reader, so feel free to do that.

Don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to let this take up too much of my time. 🙂 You come first…

If you have your own Collections there and would like me to follow you, please let me know.

One thing that has been taking some of my time is getting used to my new Galaxy S4. It has some great capabilities! I love that I can just say, “Text [a name] I’m on my way home,” and it does it (with an okay from me). You do have to get its attention, and you can choose your “wake up” phrase for that. I’m using, “Old man in the cave.” I’m guessing some of you know why. 😉

Frank Schaeffer: “Why I’m Risking My New Book by Self-Publishing Even Though I’m a Bestselling Author”

Okay, a lot of this

Huffington Post article

by Frank Schaeffer is plugging a new book, but it does have some good insight on why someone who had been successfully traditionally published would go the indie route. I think you can guess most of them, but one interesting statement is that tradpubs (traditional publishers) are holding on to book rights by keeping the book in print…by making it available in “print on demand”.

In other words, when the author license the rights for a book, the publisher can hold on to those rights (if that’s the deal that was signed) for as long as they keep the book in print (there might be other limitations).

However, it’s expensive to stock a slow selling book, in case a store wants it.

According to this, the work-around is to make it available by “print on demand”. You don’t print the book until somebody wants it.

I suspect literary agents are going to get a clarification on that in future negotiations…but in the meanwhile, other authors will see the same attractions that Schaeffer did to controlling the process, and switch over. I mean, they can sign up with Amazon and do print on demand themselves, if they want.

That doesn’t mean that big brand name authors are going to immediately go indie. I’m sure a lot of them feel loyal to their editors and publishers, and they can get nice advances and significant promotion.

Still, some of those midlist authors are going to become brand names…and will they sign with tradpubs then?

What do you think? Do you want to hear news about phones? I do that partially because for some people, that’s where they read e-books. Why do midlist authors need tradpubs at this point? Do you like audiobooks? If you do, who do you like to have read them? The author? A famous actor? A voice professional? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

Update: thanks to regular reader and commenter Zebras for helping me make this post clearer.

This post by Bufo Calvin first appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Wow, your car is Prime!

Wow, your car is Prime!

Kris: “Hey, Pat, okay if I carpool with you to the meeting?”

Pat: “No problem, I’m parked right over here.”

Kris: “Did you get a new car?”

Pat: “Sure did…and it only cost me five thousand bucks.”

Kris: “What, is it used?”

Pat: “Nope, that’s what it costs. It’s a Kindle car…from Amazon.”

Kris: “Amazon makes cars?”

Pat: “They do now.”

Kris: “That seems weird. Why did you get a car from Amazon?”

Pat: “I mentioned the price, right?”

Kris: “Yeah, and I’m guessing you might mention it a few more times…”

Pat: “Right you are. Well, I wouldn’t have thought about it, but I have a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kindle watch and a Kindle phone. I was thinking about going into a regular dealer for a test drive, but an ad showed up on my homescreen with a deal on this car. I figured I’d try it…I can return it in thirty days if I don’t like it.”

Kris: “Well, do you like it?”

Pat: “Pretty much…so far, anyway.”

Kris: “Let’s get going…unlock my side.”

Pat: “Just a second…I have to log in.”

Kris: “Log in?”

Pat: “Yep…no keys, I just log in on my Fire. There you go.”

Kris: “What happens if you don’t have your Fire?”

Pat: “The universe explodes? I always have my Fire. I can also log in on my Kindle Phone or Kindle Watch.”

Kris: “Okay, okay. This seems pretty roomy.”

Pat: “It’s exactly the industry standard in size.”

Kris: “Can we put on some music? I’m in the mood for some old time rock-and-roll.”

Pat: “Sure…although I probably don’t have any of that senior citizen stuff in my cloud. I can buy it, though.”

Kris: “Wait, can’t you just put on a radio station?”

Pat: “I guess so, but the sound system is really set up to work with my music.”

Kris: “Never mind. It’s got a nice, smooth ride…feels solid. I wonder how they make it so cheap?”

Pat: “Well, you do have to be an Amazon Prime member. It also doesn’t drive on all the roads…just ones where Amazon has a deal with them.”

Kris: “What if you want to go somewhere else?”

Pat: “That hasn’t happened yet…the other roads just lead to shopping malls, and I haven’t been in one of those for years. Then, of course, there is the Kindelivery Share thing.”

Kris: “What’s that?”

Pat: “If I leave the car idle for a couple of hours, it goes off on its own and makes deliveries for Amazon.”

Kris: “By itself?”

Pat: “Yes…it’s autonomous. How did you think Amazon was able to do that same day delivery thing?”

Kris: “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Pat: “Nobody does.”

Kris: “You are okay with other people driving your car?”

Pat: “Nobody else drives it…it drives itself.”

Kris: “What if the car is away when you want to go home?”

Pat: “I can tell Amazon how long I need it, and they don’t take it. If my car isn’t available for some reason, another car picks me up.”

Kris: “Oh, so other people are in your car sometimes?”

Pat: “Maybe…they might have special cars for that.”

Kris: “Can’t you tell the cars apart?”

Pat: “They only come in one color, and you can’t personalize them…no hanging stuff from the rearview mirror, that kind of thing”

Kris: “How do they enforce that?”

Pat: “It voids the warranty…and they could drop you as an Amazon customer, and then what would I do?”

Kris: “Forage in the woods for berries?”

Pat: “Ha, ha. Whoops! The car wants to pull over.”

Kris: “What’s happening?”

Pat: “It’s probably updating the software. Just relax for a few minutes. Do you want to read something? It has a Kindle screen built into the dashboard.”

Kris: “No thanks.”

Pat: “Watch a movie? Play a game?”

Kris: “Nah. I’m really too hungry to concentrate on anything…I didn’t get a chance to get lunch after the conference call.”

Pat: “I’m an Amazon Fresh member, too…I can have them deliver something.”

Kris: “To the car?”

Pat: “You bet…should be under ten minutes.”

Kris: “No, we’ve got to get to this meeting…they should have something there.”

Pat; “Okay. Oh, hey, I might have to leave early. I have a doctor’s appointment.”

Kris: “That’s okay, I can get a ride back with somebody else. Hope it’s nothing serious.”

Pat: “Just carpal tunnel surgery. I’m having it done at home, and it’s only going to cost me $25. You see, I’m a member of Kindle Health too…”

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #203: DoJ v. AGs, textbooks too much?

Round up #203: DoJ v. AGs, textbooks too much?

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later. 

Science fiction Grandmaster Frederik Pohl reported dead

I wouldn’t try to introduce someone to science by having them read Frederik Pohl. Pohl’s books were intended for fans of the genre…even if they weren’t designed to play into their expectations.

Beyond such influential works as Jem, The Space Merchants, and the Heechee saga, Pohl affected science fiction in many other ways.

As an agent, Pohl not only sold Isaac Asimov’s first novel, Pebble in the Sky to Doubleday, but helped issue in the New Wave in the 1970s, by convincing Bantam to take chances with experimental/groundbreaking works like The Female Man and Dhalgren.

As an editor, Pohl guided Astonishing Stories, Super Science Stories, Galaxy, and if (sic).

Pohl also collaborated with several authors, including notably: Cyril M. Konbluth; Jack Williamson; and Arthur C. Clarke.

I was sorry to hear of Frederik Pohl’s passing, and hope to see more of the author’s works available for the Kindle in the future.

New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas

I also want to note the passing of A.C. Crispin, the author of a number of important novels expanding well-known universes, including the original Star Trek, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Additionally, Crispin was a founder of the Writer Beware blog of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).

I bought a new phone

Regular readers may know that I’ve had a Samsung Captivate phone for some time, and I have liked it (yes, it has the Kindle app on it, although I don’t use that very much).

Well, when I was in Boston recently, it suddenly became pretty unreliable. My adult kid thought it might be the humidity, but it didn’t recover when we got home. I’ve had it a couple of years, so I figured it was time to get a new phone.

I was going to wait to see if Amazon introduced a “Kindle phone” (I hope that they wouldn’t name one that, but expect that they would)…but in thinking about it, my guess is that Amazon will do something low end and cheap. They can’t step in and compete with the top of the lines easily, but I do think people might be interested in an inexpensive, less featured phone that tied into Amazon.

I could have waited until Tuesday to see what Apple is announcing (sounds like it might be a new iPhone with fingerprint detection). However, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from what they did to the e-book market when they were introducing the iPad. They’ve now been found guilty (they will appeal) in a price-fixing conspiracy. It didn’t feel to me (subjectively, of course), like they were doing to make more money for themselves. It felt to me like they didn’t care if anybody bought any books ever again, as long as that hurt Amazon. No, I don’t think that’s what the evidence clearly shows…there are people at Apple who love books, but I think we can say they were okay with them becoming more difficult to get (by raising the prices).

I went with the Galaxy S4.

It’s a considerable step up from the Captivate, and has some cutting edge features I wanted to try. It does quite a bit with voice input, it has gestural input (I can wave my hand over some things and scroll without touching the screen), and facial recognition for “eye gestures” (it can tell when I’m looking at the screen).

I haven’t done much with it yet…still exploring. Yes, I put the Kindle app on this one, too. 🙂

I can tell right away that it’s easier for some things, and that’s the way EBRs (E-Book Readers) will also evolve. It took a few steps on my Captivate to navigate…tap Maps, enter the address, ask for directions,..a bit clunky. Now, I can literally say, “Hi, Galaxy. Navigate to 1313 Mockingbird Lane” (or wherever) and that starts it.

I was figuring on paying about $200 for it, plus accessories, but I bought it yesterday because I was at Costco and it was $130, including a bunch of accessories…hard to resist (even though I’m pretty good at resisting purchases).

I’ll probably buy a book about the Galaxy S4…if you have any suggestions, I’d appreciate that. I want a book like that to get into the tips and tricks and unusual stuff…I can handle the basics. 🙂

Oh, and I’ll reinforce that I like the Maxthon browser, which I use on my Kindle Fire, my PC, and my phone. I just downloaded it, signed in…and in seconds, had all my bookmarks back and ready to go. Nice! It’s not the most stable browser out there, but I like the easy to use Cloud/syncing features. Silk won’t become my main browser until I can use it on more devices and sync easily.

A textbook case of consumer price inflation

Thanks to Joe Wikert for the heads-up on this amazing

Bloomberg Chart of the Day

by Michelle Jamrisko & Ilan Kolet.

It shows the price changes (as a percentage) for textbooks and “recreational books” since December 2001…as well as the general consumer price index.

During that time, recreational book prices fell 1.2%. If you look at the chart, you can see that those prices went up a bit after the Kindle was introduced, but have been coming down since about 2011.

Textbooks?

They’ve more than doubled in price.

Doubled.

Something is going to happen with that, one way or another…or the textbook industry will see people abandoning them for other alternatives.

The DoJ didn’t arrange the money you may be getting from Amazon

There is a lot of confusion in this

Amazon Kindle forum thread

even by people I see who are typically well-informed and comment clearly and intelligently.

Thanks, American legal system! 😉

There are two separate legal things happening regarding the publishers (and Apple, in one case) and the Agency Model.

They are quite different, actually, but people are confusing the two of them…and dragging in other unrelated things as well.

Let me break it down, and see if I can help clear it up a bit.

The state Attorneys General settlement

Most of the states in the USA pooled their resources, and their Attorneys General went after publishers for hurting consumers by raising e-book prices.

The AGs got a settlement…the publishers agreed to terms.

Those terms include that consumers who purchased certain types of books will get money back.

Those are the payments.

Apple wasn’t involved with that suit.

Amazon wasn’t found accused of anything, but they know who bought the books, so they are distributing the money.

For more information on that one, see

https://ilmk.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/amazon-makes-an-announcement-about-e-book-settlement-pay-outs/

Comments about that really show people’s cynicism. One commenter thought that we consumers wouldn’t see any money for a while, because this would be appealed.

It won’t be. That’s the whole thing with a settlement. You avoid going to court and getting a judgement against you (which you could appeal), by agreeing to terms. Assuming the judge approves the deal you worked out with the other side, that’s the end of it.

The other cynical thing was several people talking about how it’s the lawyers that are making all the money.

Um…these are Attorneys General, not private sector lawyers. They get their salaries. 🙂 They might get bonuses, and those salaries might not be small, but this isn’t a case of some firm racking up millions in legal fees and getting their client pennies.

See? The world is a better place than you thought…I’m just going to assume that you are happy now, and move on. 😉

This case? It’s about compensation.

The Department of Justice versus Apple

This one is something entirely different. It was the Federal Department of Justice going after five publishers and Apple for having committed a crime. This isn’t about compensation: it is about a conviction and punishment (or at least, remedying the situation).

In this one, the publishers also all settled, but the settlements (in which they do not have to admit wrong-doing…that’s part of what corporations want. They may in part have to do with matters of insurance, but I’m not sure about that) change the way they do business to prevent the sort of conspiracy from happening again.

Apple did not settle: they fought the accusation in court…and lost.

The Department of Justice then proposed a number of remedies. One was that Apple would not have been able to prevent Amazon (and other companies) from having a “Buy” button on apps sold through Apple’s Appstore (at least, preventing it if Apple doesn’t get a cut).

Judge Cote rejected that proposal…which makes sense to me. That limitation is really unconnected to the price-fixing conspiracy.

We won’t end up with something out of this one that results in consumers getting money back.

Hope that helps…

Boston Volunteers

My adult kid works with the Boston Volunteers…so consider this a brief plug. 🙂 I think it’s worth checking out their Facebook page…

https://www.facebook.com/BostonVolunteers

My Amazon Collections

I recently wrote about a new “social marketing” feature at Amazon, where customers can create their own “Collections” for things at Amazon, somewhat like the Lists you can create at (Amazon owned) IMDb.com for movies and TV related things.

I expect Amazon to announce this before long, and I do think it might be a big thing. For me, it’s a fun idea. I’ve started to do just a bit with it, and I think I might add more as time goes on.

If you’d like to “follow” my lists, you can do that at

My collections on Amazon.com

Hmm…that’s not going to be a high priority for me (family comes first , followed by my day job and writing), but if you want to ask me to create a Collection, that might be fun!

This is a key element: as far as I’ve seen, Kindle books don’t have the “Add to Collection” button. However, in Chrome (not in Internet Explorer), you can add an Amazon “Collect” button to the favorites bar…they you can collect anything on any page.

Bonus bargains: bundles search

One way to get a lot of reading for a little money is to buy “bundles”, which means that there is more than one book put together in a single file. In other words, you are buying what we would have called an “omnibus” when I ran a brick-and-mortar store. They can be a bit tough to find, but I think this search may help you:

search for Complete Collection

You might be able to find several books together for ninety-nine cents. Some bundles cost more than that, of course, but they often are still a bargain when you break it out by book.

What do you think? Is there an Amazon Collection you’d like me to make? It doesn’t have to be just books, of course. Do you have a favorite Frederik Pohl book? Ar you, like a lot of people, champing at the bit to see how much money you get from the AG’s settlement…or is it no big deal? What is going to be the future of textbook publishing…will teachers just use other free web materials (including YouTube) to teach? Want to convince me that I should consider an iPhone next time around? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

100 Kindle books for $3.99 or less each: September 2013

100 Kindle books for $3.99 or less each: September 2013

Amazon does the Kindle Daily Deal, which discounts (usually) four books a day (often general fiction, a romance, a science fiction/fantasy book, and a kids’ book). That used to often be to $0.99, but I’ve noticed lately it’s more likely to be $1.99…or higher.

They’ve also been doing 100 Kindles books for $3.99 or less each every month.

Those prices only apply to the USA, and one weird thing is that some of the books seem to sell out at that price sometimes (or become unavailable for some other reason).

It’s also interesting…about 48% of the books in the USA Kindle store are $3.99 or less (1,016,951 of 2,129,224). Still, these are on sale, and that’s worth something. 

I’m going to list some of the $3.99 or lower ones that caught my eye…I’m not necessarily recommending them, but I do think they are interesting.

The ones I list also don’t block text-to-speech access*…but I think blocking it is becoming rarer.

Oh, and at time of writing, there are 209 books, not 100…nice!

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book
by Guy Kawasaki
4.8 stars out of 5, 585 reviews

So, you want to be an author? This very well-reviewed book would definitely help you out. I’ve read it, and I do think it will give you a better perspective on what’s actually involved if you want to write and publish (which just means to make it available to the public) for free. I didn’t use it personally when doing my own books (I hadn’t read it at that point), but so many people are jumping into this with their eyes closed that’s it’s nice to have something out there to at least lay out a path.

Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1949
by William L. Shirer
4.6, 166 reviews

You may be familiar with Shirer’s other work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but this one is Shirer’s own, inside Germany accounting. We often hear people suggest that another situation like Nazi Germany is arising somewhere in the world…or wonder how it could possibly have happened. This book will take you out of academic, hindsight hypotheses and give you what was actually happening then.

2001: A Space Odyssey
by Arthur C. Clarke
4.5, 363 reviews

First Clarke wrote a short story, and then as I understand it, Clarke and Kubrick consulted with each on the screenplay and the novel. This one, with its cosmic scope, may make it on to my 100 dollars, 100 books: science fiction list…at $1.99, it almost certainly would, but it may not be at that price when I get there…

Networking Is Dead: Making Connections That Matter
by Melissa G. Wilson, Larry Mohl
4.9, 26 reviews

Having a friend on Facebook isn’t the same as knowing someone who can help you in life. It’s great to have both kinds of friends…but one may be simply an endorsing statistic, while another may lift you up when you’ve fallen, help set you on the right path, or just listen when you need it**. Making “friends” is now easy…making meaningful connections may actually have become more difficult. This book works to address that issue.

Lord of Publishing: A Memoir
by Sterling Lord
4.8, 15 reviews

It used to be a risky, expensive proposition to publish a book. In the days of paper, publishers had to take what could be company-killing chances.

Imagine that you were given the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac to read in unpublished form. It didn’t look like other books (it didn’t even have paragraph breaks). The topic was not part of the mainstream…in fact, it was sympathetic to people and things that were, shall we say, out of favor. The author was an unknown.

You are an agent: you are going to make money when you can convince a publisher to buy the rights and publish your client’s work.

Would you have taken on this book? Would you have seen it for what it would become?

Sterling Lord did…and represented many other big names.

Now that publishing a book is so much easier, will we see literary agents like this in the future?

Lines and Shadows
by Joseph Wambaugh
4.6, 20 reviews

Crime non-fiction…and although not Wambaugh’s best-known work, well reviewed. This one also deals with the American-Mexican border…and that’s still an issue that affects us today (and this might interest fans of the FX series, The Bridge).

Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
4.4, 136 reviews

I often mention the idea of giving these sale books as a gifts (since you can delay the delivery date), and here is a great one for that. It’s an imaginary dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. You can probably think of someone you know who is a bit, oh, intellectual, and loves the idea of literary experimentation and non-traditional works…while simultaneously valuing good writing. This book might be a good gift for that person…

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
by Fay Weldon
4.2, 40 reviews

On the other hand, you might know someone who likes dark, twisted, sardonic works…don’t judge this one by the Meryl Streep/Roseanne Barr movie. You know people who would throw this book against the wall (or more likely, set it down firmly on the glass and marble end table and walk slowly away, never to touch it again), but others who would embrace it, and make sure they were reading it in the presence of that other “proper” individual. 😉

Well, those are some I noticed…there are baseball books, Kurt Vonnegut, children’s books, and more. If you’d like to recommend any of them to me and my readers, feel free to comment on this post.

* A Kindle with text-to-speech can read any text downloaded to it…unless that access is blocked by the publisher inserting code into the file to prevent it. That’s why you can have the device read personal documents to you (I’ve done that). I believe that this sort of access blocking disproportionately disadvantages the disabled, although I also believe it is legal (provided that there is at least one accessible version of each e-book available, however, that one can require a certification of disability). For that reason, I don’t deliberately link to books which block TTS access here (although it may happen accidentally, particularly if the access is blocked after I’ve linked it). I do believe this is a personal decision, and there  are legitimate arguments for purchasing those books. 

** If you want to see a great video that addresses the value of listening to someone as opposed to trying to solve their problems, try It’s Not About The Nail…

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Suggestion: Amazon Kindleizer service

Suggestion: Amazon Kindleizer service

This was inspired by a recent comment by Edward Boyhan, a regular reader of and commenter on this blog.

Point 1: Amazon clearly wants to have exclusive content. Some rightsholders seem to be getting comfortable with making such exclusive deals (see, for example, Kindle Worlds: Amazon mainstreams fanfic).

Point 2: Digitizing a book isn’t easy. I’ve done it myself. There are several techniques:

• Scan the book, then run it through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software
• Have someone retype the book (this tends to be more accurate than OCR, at least when I do it)
• Have someone read the book into speech-to-text software…again, this tends to be less accurate for me than “brute force” retyping it, although it’s gotten better. It is relatively slow…

However, it can be made easier with better equipment (both scanners and software), and skilled users.

So, how about this?

Amazon offers a service where they will digitize a paperbook (p-book) for the rightsholder.

In exchange for that, Amazon gets exclusive distribution of it…that could even be limited to a year.

I think a lot of publishers might jump on that for the “long tail”, for books that are not new and might not even be in print, but are still under copyright and still licensed to someone.

Amazon would be paid for it in part by the attractiveness of the exclusivity. The publisher benefits because it would cost them a lot of time and effort to digitize some of these books…and Amazon could do it well, adding Active Table of Contents (where you can click on a chapter title, for example, and jump right to that chapter).

Certainly, people would complain that Amazon is “controlling the world’s literature”, but the book would still be available in paper (if it was).

This would not fall into the same murky legal issues that Google did with its scanning project (the legal discussion of that has been going on for about eight years, I think). The rightsholder would be licensing it (which is another parallel with Kindle Worlds).

Of course, the rightsholder might not have the e-book rights from the author or the author’s estate. If this was available, though, I think those might be more easily negotiated.

If the rights have reverted to the author, I’m not sure that they could allow Amazon to scan the p-book…the publisher of the p-book might have control over some elements of that. However, Amazon could also do this with paper manuscripts the authors might have.

Perfect system? Nope, but I think this could greatly accelerate the conversion rate, and grow Amazon’s prominence even more.

Of course, Apple would have the resources to counter it…and I might not be happy if there were Apple e-book exclusives of books I’d like to read. 🙂 I live with that possibility now, though…it’s happened with Barnes & Noble, for example. That’s why putting a year-long limit on it might be worth it for Amazon…just for the public relations. Hm…could they continue to get a cut of the book when it was distributed by other e-book retailers, if they had initially digitized it? Fascinating possibility…

This is all just off the top of my head, so I’d be interested in your feedback on it. I also hope I’m setting some mental wheels turning at Amazon…

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #202: Amazon’s new social marketing, Paperwhite update

Round up #202: Amazon’s new social marketing, Paperwhite update

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later. 

1st generation Kindle Paperwhite updated…but not with gen 2 features (yet?)

I recently wrote about Amazon’s announcement of a second generation Kindle Paperwhite. It appears to be kind of what I was expecting this year: incremental increases in hardware, and significant updates to the software and services.

I did order one: I think it will be different enough from my current Paperwhite to want to have one to write about for you.

However, there is an obvious question: if the changes are mostly software, will those be given to the 1st gen Paperwhites through an update?

That can’t always happen…there were things that the first generation Kindle (from 2007) just couldn’t do, due to hardware limitations, that later gens got. I don’t think that’s the case here, though…the new Paperwhite has a better light and a better screen and a faster processor, but that shouldn’t be enough to prevent many of the features being made available to the KP1 (Kindle Paperwhite 1).

So, I’ll admit that my hopes were raised when I saw that a new update had been released for the Kindle Paperwhite yesterday:

Kindle Paperwhite Software Updates

This is release 5.3.8…and it does add some features, but none of the new ones announced for the KP2, from what I can see.

I went ahead and updated it manually (instructions are at the above link), although it would hypothetically have done it itself eventually.

It adds three things, according to the announcement:

• When you search in a book, the search word is highlighted in the results
• If you have more than one dictionary on your Kindle, you can choose the dictionary to use when you look up a word
• Homonyms are displayed in lookup results

For me, these are somewhat minor changes, and they do work as advertised. Having the word highlighted is fine, although I didn’t have any problems finding them before (I think I scan text quickly).

The dictionary option thing? Might be useful if you have dictionaries for different languages, I suppose. On my test, I had the Oxford Dictionary of English or The New Oxford American Dictionary as choices. I suppose being able to see what a “jumper” was in England might have helped with Harry Potter, and understanding that a “trolley” might be a public conveyance in American or a “shopping cart” in England might clear up what might otherwise be a confusing mental image. 😉

While I know the difference, I mistakenly thought at first that it was going to show me homophones, not homonyms, which I think would have been more useful. I’m a bit surprised, and I may need to test it on another device, that the look-up didn’t always show homonyms (which are words which are spelled the same way, but mean different things…I think, technically, they also have to be pronounced the same way ((one which are just spelled the same way, but pronounced differently, like “a bow on a package” and the “bow of a boat” are homographs))). I think homophones (which sound the same, but are spell different…”they’re going to where their there is”) would have been useful, but harder to do.

I do think the KP1 is likely to get some of the same software features as the KP2 in an update…but it wouldn’t surprise me if they waited until after the KP2’s release at the end of the month.

My intuition, based in part on the amount of discussion I’m seeing, is that the KP2 is going to do very well.

By the way, I’m always interested to see the number of people who think that hardware features (a GPS chip, wi-fi versus 3G capability, audio) can be added with a software update. I’m guessing they think that any piece of technology can do pretty much anything, and you just choose what you want.

That just shows how much Arthur C. Clarke was right, about smoothly functioning technology appearing to be magic.

New features on Amazon’s book product pages

There have been some interesting things added to at least some Amazon book product pages recently.

One weird thing I was seeing yesterday, which I’m not seeing today, is that the book would appear to rotate…it would flip around so you would see the back of the book, then the front cover, then the back. However, it apparently wasn’t working correctly…because the text on the back of the book looked like you were seeing it in a mirror! That was a bit disconcerting: it was like you had \S/uperman’s x-ray vision and were looking through the book. I think that will come back in a corrected version.

More valuable right now is a “Listen” button below the book cover. These are on the p-book (paperbook) pages, by the way, not on the Kindle pages, from what I’ve seen. That lets you hear an excerpt from the audiobook (I presume it only appears if there is an audiobook): sort of like “Look Inside”, but for audio. Amazon now seems to be really linking audiobooks and p-books. “Shop by Department” (your top left corner of the page when shopping at Amazon.com) now lists “Books & Audible” as one category. They have also broken out “Kindle E-readers” and “Kindle Fire Tablets” into two categories.

This next feature may be a biggie…Collections.

Of course, naming it “Collections” makes me roll my eyes. When I taught people database design, one of the things I would tell them is to never name two objects that do different things with the same name. For example, I didn’t want them to have two “Accept” buttons on the same screen that had different consequences (that’s very confusing).

Amazon is terrible at that concept. One could example is “Cloud”. “Cloud” could refer to your “Cloud Player”, the “Cloud Drive”, your e-book archives…all at Amazon, all different.

In this case, calling it “Collections” when that is in use for an organizational tool (sort of the loose equivalent of folders) on your Kindles, which are only visible to your account, when this is a public grouping of things visible to everybody…sigh. I wonder how much that sort of confusion costs Amazon in Customer Service costs? “I put a book in a Collection on my Kindle, but it doesn’t appear to other people on Amazon. How do I fix that?” “If I put laundry detergent into a Collection on the Amazon website, will it appear on my Kindle and hurt my device?”

</rant> 😉 Oh, sorry…that’s an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) joke. See, you use that sort of structure to tell a webpage to stop doing something…like </b> would mark the end of a bold section and…never mind. 😉 I was just saying I was done with that rant about naming things.

Anywho…

You can now add Amazon items to Collections that other people can see.  The Collections will appear on the page…which sounds similar to the lists that they have at the Amazon owned site IMDb.com. That’s something which I recently suggested Amazon should add. 🙂

I’d tell you more about it…but now, that feature isn’t working for me! The button is on the page in Maxthon (my preferred browser), but won’t launch…which it did ten minutes ago. It doesn’t appear for me in Internet Explorer.

I would say, expect a press release about this in the next few days. This is an important social marketing development, depending on the implementation of it.

I like these features better than the ads we are now seeing on Amazon product pages, although I am tolerant of those.

Update: I think it might not have been displaying because I already had a display page open. Here’s a place to get more information:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/ssx/learn_more_popup?selected_tab=learn-more-1&window=true&navigated_from=Collect+Dialog

Oh, and here’s the page where you can see other people’s Collections:

Welcome to Amazon Collections

They appear to have started to be posted there about four hours ago…

I’m going to explore this more..stay tuned.

Oyster, a “Netflix for e-books”, launches

People have asked about this sort of thing from the beginning of the Kindle: $9.95 a month for unlimited access to e-books…and ones that are well-known.

It’s launched:

Oyster Books

You won’t own the books, and it sounds like a good idea…but it is only for iPhone at this point. They say they’ll do an iPad version later this year, but have no plans for Android. If they did one for the Kindle Fire, I do think Amazon would approve it for the Amazon Appstore (they include a lot of competitors to Amazon content, like Netflix).

Here is a Google search with stories about it:

https://www.google.com/search?client=aff-maxthon-maxthon4&channel=t2&q=stories…#channel=t2&q=oyster+e-books

I expect to write more on this later.

Update: I should mention right now that HarperCollins is participating in this…I mentioned recently that I think they tend to be front runners in consumer-friendly e-book features.

Dualume is here

Gosh, I don’t know how long ago I was writing about the possibilities of devices that do both backlighting and non-backlighting. I called that “Dualume”, for “two types of illumination”. A non-Fire Kindle is “illuminated” by the light in the room, or by a frontlight in the case of the Paperwhites.

Now, PocketBook has made a cover that goes on a Galaxy S4…and gives it a non-backlit screen.

Google search

It’s a prototype, being introduced at IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin…a big consumer trade show in Germany)…here is the company’s product page on it:

http://www.pocketbook-int.com/us/news/ifa-2013-pocketbook-cover-reader

Honestly, it seems a bit clunky, but wow, would I love a non-backlit screen for my SmartPhone! Imagine being able to see everything clearly in sunlight…even looking up numbers can be a challenge. I think that a SmartPhone with an E Ink screen is something Amazon might do…but reflective screens just haven’t been fast enough and haven’t been able to do color effectively in the market…and many people want to play Angry Birds. 😉

They’ll get there, though…I think full animation, full color, non-backlit screens are inevitable in the next few years.

What do you think? Would you want a non-backlit screen for your phone? How about for your tablet? Will you share Collections on Amazon’s website? Will you be interested in other people’s Collections? Do you want to own your e-books, or would the ability to read them be enough? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.