Smashwords, the e-book self-publisher services company, is for real. The company has won a series of distribution deals, including through Barnes & Noble, Sony and Shortcovers e-book stores. Today they added Kindle distribution, paying authors 42.5 percent of the sale list price of their Kindle books.
As an author services play, Smashwords has sped to the front of the pack for e-book authors. Congrats to Mark Coker and team.
Based on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ comments on the third quarter results for the company, Kindle sales are accelerating. Bezos is quoted: “Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.com. It’s also the most wished for and the most gifted.”
Working from my previous estimate, 783,000 as of July 1, and building in unit volume growth of 60 percent—sales revenue gains in electronics in the U.S., $217 million higher in the first three quarters of 2009 than in 2008, seems to be driven heavily by Kindle sales—I estimate Amazon has sold 1,072,000 Kindles as of Sept. 30, 2009. That would be 289,000 Kindles sold during Q3.
Platform expansion is the logical counter to new competition at the device level. Amazon, facing the introduction of BN.com’s Nook and other e-readers this week, has announced it will support reading of Kindle books on Windows 7, Vista and XP Service Pack 2 PCs in November.
The application offers a few enhancements compared to the Kindle device, including a larger number of font sizes and the ability to adjust the number of words per line and zoom capabilities on Windows 7 PCs, as well as supporting cross-device synchronization of last page read, bookmarks, notes and highlights.
Customers can sign up for an email alert that the software has been released at the Kindle for PC page. I’ve been predicting this for a while, and am not at all surprised to see it come two days after the Nook announcement. It will not be surprising, either, when Kindle books are available on the Mac.
It’s all about making the customer library accessible across devices, so that Amazon—and BN.com, etc.—can keep a customer over the long term.
All in a week’s brutal competition.
In addition to this posting, please visit this clarifications posting to get the whole picture.
It would be nice to say, as Matt Miller has, that the e-book and e-reader market was revolutionized today. It simply got more interesting. A careful reading of the $259 Nook’s features, and the comparison offered by B&N to the $259 Amazon Kindle 2, reveals that, while it packs a lot of new ideas, Nook is a combination of innovation and the extraordinarily conventional.
Highlights:
There is much I like about this device, but I am not at the announcement today, where I would be asking a lot of questions I have not seen answered in any coverage, so far. Here, with the apparent downsides first and foremost, is what is known to me at this moment.
An e-reader designed to get you into the physical Barnes & Noble store. This, and the question of how to get non-BN content onto the Nook, represent the most backward features of the Nook. When you visit a B&N retail store, you’ll receive offers and, soon, the ability to read some e-books in their entirety while in the store. Everything deleted below, while part of this critique has been clarified and extended in this posting.
There, however, is the rub.
I’d pointed out before that wireless services for browsing the 500,000+ titles available for free through Google Books, a notable feature of the Nook, probably wouldn’t be supported over the built-in 3G wireless service. It isn’t. You’ll need to download and synch the Nook with your PC, via a USB connection, to move any content not sold by BN.com onto the device. From there, it gets bizarre.
According to The New York Times’s Motoko Rich, the built-in Wi-Fi networking works only inside Barnes & Noble retail stores:
With the market for electronic readers and digital books heating up by the day, Barnes & Noble sought to differentiate itself with the wireless feature that consumers can access in any of the chain’s 1,300 stores. Outside of the stores, customers can download books on AT&T’s 3G cellular phone network. (emphasis added)
A review of the BN.com tech specs for Nook adds the caveat that free wireless service is available “from Barnes & Noble via AT&T.” Note that they are saying you get free wireless service when buying or browsing Barnes & Noble, not when accessing other sites or services. Put this and the quote from the Times together and you get: Free 3G service anywhere, when buying from BN.com. Free Wi-Fi in Barnes & Noble stores, but no Wi-Fi connectivity outside, where you can shop wirelessly on BN.com.
Comments from riffraffy in TalkBack point to this section of the Nook FAQ, which I read but still find very vague, since they refer only to travel and Wi-Fi:
Q. Can I use my nook while traveling abroad?
A.Yes, when you travel abroad, you can read any files that are already on your nook. You can connect to Wi-Fi hotspots that do not use proxy security settings, such those commonly used in hotels, and download eBooks and subscriptions already in your online digital library. You cannot, however, purchase additional eBooks and subscriptions.
Q. Will new issues of eNewspapers and eMagazines be downloaded to my nook while I’m traveling?
A. Yes, if you are traveling in the United States, or if you are abroad but connected to a supported Wi-Fi hotspot, new issues are delivered to your online digital library in both cases. When travelling abroad without Wi-Fi access, new issues are not downloaded to your nook (automatically or manually).
Two things:
In the first answer, they specifically say that you cannot purchase eBooks or subscriptions over an international Wi-Fi connection. That suggests it is not a fully functioning Wi-Fi connection. Maybe because you are connecting from overseas, maybe not. If you had full Wi-Fi access and a valid BN.com account, what should stop you?
What is a “supported hotspot” in the second answer? If they mean an AT&T hotspot, my concern remains.
I wrote that I hoped I was wrong. I think the language here and in the announcement is strangely vague (having seen a lot of strangely vague FAQs turn out to bear bad news) and would have liked to be present at the announcement to ask.
UPDATE: Paul Biba, who attended the event, added this to his report, which seems to answer clearly the question whether the Nook provides ad hoc Wi-Fi access:
Wifi can only be used in store for events and in store content. Plan to open up later on.
B&N should enable ad hoc Wi-Fi access at launch, or disclose more clearly that it will not be available in order to avoid disappointing all the people who are expecting to be able to use Wi-Fi at home or elsewhere not served by an AT&T Hotspot. To do otherwise would be doing damage to the credibility of a very impressive piece of engineering.
The rest of the content you want to put on the Nook will have to be downloaded via a PC and synched to the Nook. That’s a step back from what the promise of built-in Wi-Fi would lead a buyer to expect—particularly because Nook is advertised as providing access to 500,000 Google Books titles that, in fact, aren’t accessible through the device, but must be synched.
I hope I am reading this wrong or, that if this is correct, B&N changes the Nook to support ad hoc Wi-Fi access to Google Books. It would be a blunder, forcing readers into retail stores when we want to get away from them, into virtual stores with much broader inventories.
UPDATE: Google Books, per the updated posting here, can be downloaded free of charge over 3G and Wi-Fi connections.
Synching is cumbersome and, frankly, what keeps most people, the non-early adopting masses, from using dedicated e-readers. The popularity of smartphone e-reader
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Barnes & Noble e-reader, photos of which were leaked last week, will be called “Nook” and be priced at $259, the same price as Amazon’s Kindle 2. The New York Times has roughly the same details here. Both articles are based in part on ads placed in tomorrow’s edition of the newspapers.
Most interesting is the Nook’s ability to “lend” books to other readers via wireless connection. No details on how permissive the loan capability will be—presumably the owner of the book will not be able to access a loaned title.
There’s also no information about the cost of wireless service, which is expected to be bundled with books sold through the BN.com store, similar to Kindle. But unlike Kindle, the Nook promises access to the Google Books library, which are free; will users have to pay for wireless service to get that access?
We’ll know more tomorrow.
For now, we can only wonder about the naming process that produced “Nook.” Cute, but its rhyming with “book” will confuse people about whether they want a device called a “Nook” or to buy a “nook” version of a book. For digital natives it will be pretty clear. Think about the concept your grandmother would have to wrestle when asking for an e-book at a Barnes & Noble retail store.
Amazon today lowered the price of its U.S. Kindle 2 to $259. It also announced an international version of the Kindle 2 for $279—globe-trotting customers are paying more for a more capable radio, but it’s still $20 less than Kindle 2 was yesterday. The price of e-reader hardware is definitely trending downward. If you imagine the profits from an ever-less expensive Kindle converging with the rising costs of selling Kindle bestsellers below cost, the model makes no sense, unless the purpose of the business is to create digital libraries.
With 45+ dedicated e-reader devices on the market, Amazon absolutely must lower its prices aggressively over the the next year to maintain its market share. But, here’s the question: To what end is Amazon driving e-reader pricing downward? Kindle still delivers a much better buying and reading experience than any of the currently shipping e-readers. Sony’s Daily Reader will be comparable, but it will not be out for another month or more. Next year, Plastic Logic, among others will have a Kindle challenger with built-in wireless purchasing features, too.
Remember that Amazon is still losing money on every bestselling book sold through its store. The company pays publishers about $3.60 more than the list price for a bestseller when sales costs are factored into the expense. If each Kindle accounts for just two bestseller sales, the cost of supporting 3 million Kindles in the market rockets past $20 million (see chart, right, which looked better in Excel. The scale should be 50,000 to 3 million, though this logarithmic curve makes the point that every Kindle sold adds to Amazon’s bestseller costs at $3.60 per title sold).
The goal, at this point, is to get more people invested in a Kindle, or, more precisely, a digital library. It’s more than format lock-in,
Early evidence, in the form sales figures from The Lost Symbol publisher Doubleday, reported by Silicon Alley Insider, suggests that e-book sales, while explosive on the first day after the book was released, remain relatively small overall. Doubleday says that 100,000 of the two million copies sold so far are e-books. That’s five percent, which means people did not buy e-readers to buy the book, and that smartphone applications weren’t an extraordinary contributor to sales.
So, of the approximately 1.6 million dedicated e-book readers in the market, plus the approximately 3.1 million smartphones with e-reader applications, Dan Brown’s new book sold to two percent of the installed base. That may simply mean that the book isn’t the major hit that was expected. I still think that over time more e-copies will be sold than hardbacks, but paperbacks are the editions that will earn any profits Doubleday finally collects.
As I develop the coverage here at BooksAhead, I have decided that trying to break news stories about e-reader devices doesn’t add a lot of value for the reader, especially when there are few differentiating features or functionality. Way back in the early 90s, when a new Ethernet interface card for the Mac—I was networking editor at MacWEEK—it became clear that an occasional summary article covering all the recent releases would be more useful than many individual articles announcing yet another Ethernet card.
However, sometimes a real breakthrough would come along, and that would get an individual article. The most important change in the early networking card market was something subtle and largely unheralded: The addition to writable ROM chips to cards eliminated the need to return a card when its software was defective. Yet, for several years, Ethernet card developers hesitated to include EPROMs in their products. Once they did, new features proliferated, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), because cards could be updated in response to changing technology rather than having to be replaced. It sounds trivial, yet it made a huge difference.
The e-reader device market is looking a lot like the Ethernet card business back then: It’s a developing commodity market. Price is becoming the only differentiator, but the functionality is still very limited compared both to books and what e-books could be. The action will soon turn squarely on format and networking of documents, just as the Web became relevant when the browser changed hyperlinks from navigating between documents to navigating within parts of many documents. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson designed a bookstand for reading several titles to accommodate the limitations of books (the idea is older, but Jefferson’s is one of the most elegant solutions to the problem). Readers want to use books and the knowledge and enjoyment they contain, not just consume them.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this issue since I wrote about the ePub standards maintenance process beginning a couple weeks back. There are huge business opportunities in the
During its previously scheduled product launch of the Sony Reader Pocket ($199) and Touch ($299) Editions today, Sony dropped its would-be Kindle-killer on the market, a $399 AT&T 3G-enabled Reader called “Daily Edition” that will ship in time for Christmas, if an e-book reader is on your last-minute shopping list. This Christmas, it may very well be.
Does 7-inch Daily Edition, which sells for $100 more than the 6-inch Kindle 2, bring enough oomph to the market to make it a must-have for the holidays? The answer will depend entirely upon whether Sony’s move to ePub format and close embrace of Google Books, which can be downloaded free through its online bookstore, will tip the buyer’s decision in favor of Sony. While it is a 3G-enabled reader, comparable to the Kindle and its WhisperNet service provided by Sprint, the Sony Daily Edition will not allow Web browsing, which the Kindle does, according to various sources, notably Publishers Weekly.
The Sony press release suggests that there might be an upgrade path to full Web connectivity: “There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB.” I have queried Sony PR about what “basic wireless connectivity” means and whether there will be options for additional service. It isn’t entirely clear that Google Books will be downloadable over the air or only via PC download—since there is no revenue to support 3G downloads, this needs to be clarified.
Unlike the Kindle, the Sony Daily Edition offers handwritten note entry (stylus included with the system) and built-in links to local libraries, which can “loan” electronic copies for up to 28 days through the Overdrive.com library collections service. A social network for discussing literary. And the devices will be available at physical retail outlets, including Best Buy and WalMart, making it easier to try than the Kindle.
Amazon is prepared to counter the perceived accessibility of Sony’s ePub strategy by both opening the Kindle readers to ePub and making its proprietary format readable on a wider range of devices. Sony may have the cheapest e-reader with the $199 Pocket Edition (sans wireless connectivity), but this still looks like a fight that is going to be waged on Amazon’s terms.
Dropping in from a flu-induced respite to say: Barnes & Noble is trying too hard. According to The Wall Street Journal‘s Peter Kafka, BN.com, in addition to teaming with Plastic Logic to sell ebooks, now plans to partner with iRex, maker of an upcoming iLiad device the features 3G connectivity and an 8.1-inch screen, described here. BN.com will be the e-book store for both devices.
We get the “we’re more open” argument already, even though every e-book format comes with DRM and compatibility baggage, but the challenge is not merely to sell books but to establish a platform customers can rely on. That comprehensive experience of reading goodness doesn’t come from a shallow focus across many devices, but deep focus on the reader’s experience with an e-book.
It would be a better use of Barnes & Noble’s modest marketplace goodwill to focus on making one device a stellar experience while supplementing that experience withiPhone and other smartphone e-reader applications than to try to sell and support e-books across a growing inventory of devices. Individually, any one device will require a substantial amount of BN customer support, which they are not well placed to provide, and as a group of devices that still are incompatible with half of the e-books or more sold, they increase the complexity of the customer’s choice. So, if BN.com fails to support the devices, even if it is the manufacturer’s problem, they will lose a customer. If their books don’t work with a device, it’s BN’s problem.
Now is the time for focused investment in a pleasing end-to-end shopping and reading experience. Amazon is already poised to compete with compatibility, so Barnes and Noble has nothing to win by spreading its bets. Factor in the Apple tablet-of-destiny (the Journal also reports today Steve Jobs is all over that tablet), which will run all sorts of e-reader apps at launch, and BN’s strategy looks very dangerous. It could be overwhelmed on the customer experience front, the e-book choice front and in terms of its relationships with marginally committed partners—in exchange for a largely undifferentiated (“we’re as open as anyone”) win if they execute perfectly.