Posts Tagged ‘amazon’
Did you know Best Buy carries the Kindle 3?
Did you? I didn’t. Apparently I have been out of the loop. You can now walk into a Best Buy and compare a Kindle with a Nook and hold them both in your hot little hands. Even better than this? Best Buy sends out coupons on occasion. What does all this mean? This means that I have finally upgraded my well loved first generation to a brand new 3rd generation (wifi only) version.
Tada…. (click for full resolution)
Thanks to a nifty price match, best buy gift card rebate on a Nintendo DSi purchase for one of the girls, and a $20 reward zone coupon I was able to snag my snazzy new K3 for only $89 plus sales tax.
First impressions? O.M.G. Love. Seriously. I want to fornicate with it. I didn’t think I could love a Kindle more than I already did, but I was wrong. Now, do keep in mind… I upgraded from a 1st generation so the improvements on a K2 probably aren’t as dramatic.
So, my most loved upgrades?
- The size. Ironically with the K2 they increased the length and with the K3 brought it back down the original size, but made it thinner and lighter. Its like a freaking feather…. so easy to hold in one hand. I have always read my K1 inside its leather cover but I think to read the K3 in a cover would be wasting its incredibly comfortable size.
- The page turns. I never thought my K1 was slow until I turned the page on a K3.
- The chapter marks and percentage bar. Oh how I love. Not that it will keep me from staying up til 3 am to “finish this chapter” but… its nice to see.
- The screen. Better contrast and I get absolutely no glare from the lights overhead at the gym. I always had glare on my K1 and it drove me nuts trying to find the right angle.
- Text to speech. I don’t buy audio books but I can admit I’ve used the text to speech a few times already. At the gym when I want to jog instead of walk, for example.
- Landscape/Portrait Mode. This goes along with the text to speech gym thing. I was on the treadmill thinking to myself… Damn, I’d really like to be able to plug in headphones and listen to this book right now but the audio plug is on the base of the Kindle. I can’t plug it in, keep it resting on the ledge of the treadmill, and still follow along on the page. Then I remembered the landscape mode….. I turned it sideways, adjusted the text mode, plugged in my headphones, and was able to read/listen while working out. *happy sigh*
Things I’m not in LOVE with.
- Number keys. I miss having number keys on the keyboard. It is a bit awkward to remember to hit the “sym” button when I need a number.
- The “joystick” is nicer than my K1 scroll wheel but it takes some getting used to if you don’t have tiny fingers.
All in all, well worth the upgrade. As for why I chose the wifi version over the 3g version? Well I rarely use my 3g on the K1… I just don’t find it that necessary. I buy books on the computer and transfer them via the usb cable 9 times out of 10. The only time I use the 3g is to get netgalley books and I could work around that if I needed to, but I don’t see why I would have to. I am happy to load up my kindle via wifi and or computer once a week and be done with it. If I traveled a lot I’d consider the 3G but otherwise I think the wifi only version is plenty for most people.
Just as I expected when I first read about the Kindle 3s, Amazon has really upped the game with this release. Many people will still complain about its lack of color, but for those who just want a book reading device, you can’t get much better than a Kindle. Color comes with a cost, both money and convenience wise. I held the Nook Color and was disappointed in both its battery life and the sheer weight of the device. I will choose my black and white, easy to hold above my head, Kindle over that any day of the week.
Fight Night: Amazon vs. MacMillan vs. Apple ?
No Saturday Sound Off today…. too much news to post about! Before I get to the explosion of ebook drama all over twitter today, I had saved up a few reaction posts to the Apple IPad I wanted to share. First – the IPad? Really? *sigh* I am an apple fangirl, but even I can’t swallow that name and say it with a smile.
Links of Interest:
Kindle vs iPad is an easy decision because these are very different devices built for two distinct sets of customers.
So is the iPad a Kindle killer? No. And it probably won’t make a dent in Kindle sales. The people who are going to buy an iPad are most likely not the people who would buy a Kindle.
It’s far more likely, in fact, that the millions of iPad buyers over the coming months will include very large numbers of people who will use their iPads to buy books from the Kindle Store. The bottom line is that by the end of this year there will be over 5 million Kindles and, I suspect, just as many iPads, and those numbers together will mean over 10 million people for whom the Kindle Store provides the best selection and best pricing for their ebook purchases.
“If you like your kids, get them an iPad so they can play games,” said Russ Wilcox, the head of E Ink Corp., which created the digital paper technology used by the Kindle and many other e-ink-based readers. “If you love them, get them an e-reader so they can actually read.”
Now that we have the initial Apple IPad reactions out of the way, let’s get to the ebook drama that exploded on the web last night and continued over to this morning. A condensed timeline of events:
So what does this all mean? For the time being if you own a Kindle, you can not purchase books published by any author under the MacMillan name. Additionally, you can not buy new copies of these books from amazon.com unless you are willing to go through secondary sellers.
Many seem to be jumping to attack Amazon.com for being a bully or throwing a tantrum, yet I want to point out, it seemed obvious from Steve Jobs’ comments that book publishers were getting ready to do exactly the same thing. Withhold books in an effort to get what they wanted, higher e-book pricing. Amazon simply beat them to the punch, instead seemingly taking the consumer’s side on this one and saying NO. That is not to say that Amazon is doing this for the good of you and me, lets be realistic…. they are all about profits as much as publishers are. They are just more in the know with how to make profits from Kindle users….. we buy more books when they are priced lower and easily accessible. Pulling the sales of print books in addition to kindle books may seem like an unrelated move, but we must remember that Amazon sales volume is their negotiating tactic in this.
Being a Kindle lover, I find myself siding more with Amazon on this. This issue ties in with my previous post about publishers making users wait for Kindle releases. Once again I find myself thinking, major book publishers simply do not understand their various customer bases. I will not pay 14.99 for a new release, even if the print is hardcover, to read on my Kindle. Not when they still come loaded with overreaching user agreements and the horrible atrocity known as DRM. If you give me an ebook that I can own, transfer to any device I want, resell, and be able to lend in some way…. then I will happily pay “dead tree book” pricing for that ebook. Until then, 14.99 or more for an ebook is overinflated and unjustifiable.
Have I spent that much on e-books in the past? Absolutely… for authors I love and don’t want to wait for. But those are rare instances and if all e-books were that price you would loose a great many sales from me. Especially when I can head over to Fictionwise.com and MBaM and get great authors like Moira Rogers, Keith Melton, and Josh Lanyon for far less than that… and without DRM. Lower priced e-books give readers the chance to try out new authors without worrying about spending too much, without risk! Publisher’s need to figure this out and run with it. I can not even begin to understand why they don’t have someone in their marketing department who does not see e-books as the death of the publishing! Author Carolyn Jewel nailed it on the head with this:
Publishers need to hire someone who actually understands technology. Someone who grew up with it or enthusiastically threw themselves into it when the world changed. And it did, people, it did. And then they need to actually LISTEN to that person. Any C-Level employee who didn’t personally take a look at Twitter when the buzz started is automatically disqualified from this position.
The sad part about this entire situation is that the readers and authors are the ones stuck in the middle and ultimately taking the most harm. Just as we readers aren’t able to buy books at a reasonable price from Amazon during this time, authors are going to lose a what I imagine is a large chunk of royalties from Amazon sales. Let’s all cross our fingers that Amazon and MacMillan find some way of working this out quickly.
Update
While I was writing this post, there was an update to this article about the situation.
Motoko Rich, my colleague, spoke with a person who had a direct conversation with a person at Macmillan familiar with the conversations with Amazon. Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.
There now appears to be confirmation of this here.
Wow. *shakes head* I’m Team Amazon.
Book Publishers…someone needs to give them a clue.
As I sit here with a stuffy nose and a box of tissues in my hand, I stumbled across this article in the Wall Street Journal online about ebook publishing dates. It seems that two of the large publishing houses, who obviously have marketing geniuses working for them, have decided to push back publishing dates on new releases in ebook form. So anyone with an ebook reader will have to wait 3-4 months after the original publishing date to purchase it.
I read this and wanted to bang my head against my Kindle screen. Seriously? A quote from the smart guy in charge of one of the houses:
“We’re doing this to preserve our industry,” Mr. Young said. “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.”
uh huh. Just because this doofus brought up bargain basement prices I would like to bring up Stephen King’s Under the Dome. This is one book that the publishers are holding off the ebook for until December 24. However, Amazon and Walmart were selling preorders of the hardback version of this book for $9.99. Even now at Amazon the hardcover version is only $14.99. I can’t help but point out that if they were selling the ebook version of this book at $9.99 or $14.99 right now they would be making off with quite a bit more profit and a lot less bad press. (Side note: I do realize that the sellers may be taking a hit in this scenario, but shhhh my point isn’t as effective if you think about that!)
Anyway, my point is that it is obvious some publishers just don’t understand ebook readers. I bought a Kindle for many reasons, but a few of them are:
1. Space. I simply do not have space for a bookshelf of books. I live in a tiny 1200 square foot house with 2 adults and 2 very loud children. Space is a valuable commodity and no matter how much I love urban fantasy, I just don’t have room for bookshelves filled with paperbacks I still need to find time to read. Over the last year I have read more than 240 books…. that would need to be a seriously large bookcase. Because of this, even if you prolong the ebook release to boost hardcover sales…. I will not be one of those buying a hardcover. I imagine this is true of many ebook readers. Why would you spend $25 on a hardcover if you could wait 3 months and get it on your kindle for $10? All you are doing is pissing me off and doing a good job of convincing me NOT to purchase your ebook versions either.
2. Convenience. I love my Kindle because on release day I can have my brand new book to read within seconds. No amount of date pushing is going to change my love of convenience. I am not going to pack my 2 wild things up and head to the bookstore to get something on new release day. Again, all you are doing is annoying me that you care so little for my time.
3. Price. Being able to buy ebooks at a lower cost was a minor factor, but still one I considered. Even with that said, I am happy to shell out anywhere from $5 to $15 for an ebook. I don’t think that is unreasonable. I prefer to spend under $10, but if it is something I love I will put out a bit more. I wish someone out there could explain to me how the publishers are losing out so much by charging $10 on an ebook that has no shipping/distributing costs when they are willing to sell it to me for $7.99 in paperback? Surely paperback would be the lower profit margin when you compare the two? I venture to guess that most people buying ebooks are also paperback buyers, not hardback buyers.
I am curious to see how this works for these two companies. I forecast that that they will not see an increase in hardback sales, but instead will see a decrease in ebook sales as people boycott them for being idiots or look to illegal ways of finding these books or just getting them from the library. You would think that the Harry Potter books being the most pirated book in history could offer a lesson of sorts, but eh….
Additionally I think they will lose ebook sales simply because not all ebook readers are obsessed with release dates and make elaborate spreadsheets ~looking around at my fellow book bloggers~. With a hard publicity push for the hardback release dates, people notice, they make impulse buys when they hear about titles through word of mouth or blogs (especially at amazon.com). With ebook sales starting months later I think it gives time for people to forget about a title/author that looked interesting or move onto other books that are available. Unless a reader is really connected to an author or series, how many will remember to pick up that book later on? With ebooks its so very easy to give in to that impulse and hit the buy now button. Amazon seems to get it, a quote from their spokesperson:
Authors get the most publicity at launch and need to strike while the iron is hot. If readers can’t get their preferred format at that moment, they may buy a different book or just not buy a book at all.
In the end, I think I am just tired of publishing houses looking at ebooks as the “big bad”. Several reports have shown ebook readers to actually purchase more books than other book readers. Someone needs to take their thumbs out of their bums and use this momentum to figure out how to make it a win/win for all parties involved. Now, I think I need some chocolate after all of this ranting. I am curious for all my ebook readers out there… do you buy hardback version as well?
Reviews of the Barnes & Noble Nook start to surface.
The official review from Engadget has made its way to the surface. Some quick quotes:
In our tests — and this may just be due to the Kindle we were using — we felt it very slightly outperformed Amazon’s option in contrast, though the Kindle has a considerably faster refresh rate when turning pages. In fact, the Nook’s refresh speed was sometimes a little annoying, with us actually having moments in between page turns of waiting for more content — not a feeling you want to encounter if you’re trying to mimic the book-reading experience.
In regards to navigation:
once you get the hang of the system it starts to make some sense, but it’s nothing we’d describe as intuitive, and your rhythm is thrown off by one major factor: the extremely sluggish response of the device. That’s right, you’re not zipping and zooming through any of these menus, you’re patiently waiting for the device to do its thing. That laggy scrolling we saw in the demo the day this was launched? Not really much better in the release version.
User Interface:
While the UI is different (not necessarily a bad thing in our eyes), there are also places where it is plain bad (necessarily a bad thing in our eyes). There’s instability to spare in the review unit we used. More than once we saw the familiar Android force close / wait message when trying to load a piece of the software up, and we encountered a lot of unexpected pauses and lag when trying to get through menus, causing a number of incorrect selections and general annoyance.
Conclusion:
when it came to day to day use, we felt let down in a big way, and can only imagine how magnified that feeling would be if we’d gone and shelled out nearly $300 for the device.
In the end, the Nook is an intriguing product launched by a powerful force in the world of booksellers, but the initial offering feels long on promises and short on delivery.
I can’t imagine that Barnes & Noble is having a very good day today. Additionally, it seems that Nooks are now not shipping until January, completely missing the holiday season – that can’t be good for them. They haven’t handled this release well, hopefully they can get it to together and give Amazon a run for their money…. then we all win 
After this posted, I stumbed upon more reviews:
CNET
Gizmodo
NY Times
All Things Digital
Consumer Reports
Business Week
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin
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