For those of you out there that don’t realise the difference between e-ink and conventional displays, some chap has put a Kindle and an iPad under a microscope. The results are interesting. By interesting I mean “freaky how e-ink mimics actual ink so well.”
You can see the results here
It didn’t take long then. Hot on the heels of the new £109 wifi Kindle from Amazon, Waterstones have cut the price of the Sony eReader Pocket Edition to a mouthwatering £99. Other retailers have cut the price but none as low as Waterstones. Get one while there is still stock!
The drive to mass adoption of ereaders took a massive step forward today with Amazon announcing a £109 6inch wifi only Kindle on their UK store. A second version with built in 3G costing £149 was also released but it looks like this is going to drive prices down across the board. Drop the wifi and £20, and it’s almost the dream price for mass adoption.
As the title says really, if you get hold of a copy of the current issue of popular scifi magazine SFX, tucked away in the final third is a coupon for a free copy of hard scifi writer Reynold’s 2008 novel House of Suns. It’s a special SFX print, but the normal version is still on the shelves at £7.99, so it’s definitely worth a punt. It’s original coupon only for redemption though, so no photocopies.
The cover price of SFX is £3.99 or you may like to entertain this entirely fictitious scenario:
*Enter public library stage left
*pick up SFX
Oooh, a free book coupon!
COUGH *RIP COUGH *RIP*
*pocket coupon
*finish reading magazine
*stroll to Waterstones
As I was saying last week, one of the main issues to adoption of ereaders is the price. The device is seen as a gadget in it’s own right and not a facilitator/enabler for the reading of books. I was reading earlier on Techlogg that Sony has cut the prices of its ereaders substantially in response to a price war going on between Amazon and Barnes & Noble with their respective devices.
The device that I’d like to see as the universal format for an ereader, Sony’s 5 inch Reader Pocket Edition has had $20 lopped off the price, bringing it down to $150. This is the smallest price cut in the range- Sony has knocked a whopping $60 off the Reader Touch Edition, which has a larger screen, expandable memory via two different card slots and a touchscreen. Sony are now selling this for $170, which considering the extra features over the Reader Pocket Edition, suggests the price for the more basic device could go a lot lower. Sony selling for what they think the market can tolerate? Probably.
It’s interesting to note that converting in pounds and adding VAT would put the Reader Touch Edition at £132, and the Reader Pocket Edition at £117. These prices are £70 and £30 cheaper respectively than Amazon are currently selling them for.
It’s speculation whether these price cuts will make it to these shores as Sony are notorious for pricing what they think the territory will accept but who knows, we might be closer than we think to an affordable quality ereader over here in good old Blighty.
This year, like last year and the year before that should have been the year of the ereader and ebooks. But it isn’t and there are some fairly obvious reasons why not.
Firstly the sort of pricing hi-jinks that I’ve documented before don’t help. If you can buy a hardback over the internet and have them post it to you for four or five pounds less than the ebook equivalent, there is no incentive to buy the electronic version. The soution is simple and can be borrowed from other media.
Sell the ebook for a sensible price ( Victor Finch has done a survey of what people are willing to pay here), and more importantly do what film studios are doing with BD releases. For a couple of pounds more than the stand alone price, they give you a double disk set with the DVD and usually a digital download version for your iPod. That means you could have a hard back to keep at home and a digital version to read on your commute. Sensible.
I’ve read a lot of claptrap about the cost of making an ebook and how high it is. About how publishing a physical book isn’t much of the total end cost of production. That is true but its a little pointless in its selective truth.
Shipping and storage are two other major costs of physical book production. Most production is done in the far east now days and that means shipping on the high seas. If you’re not expecting to sell out your first print run immediately, you’ll need your own warehouse or distribution centre. And you’ll need to heat it, staff it or pay someone else to do it for you.
Yes, editing, proof reading and the rest are all intangible costs but how relevant are they to electronic editions? To my mind they’re only really relevant if there isn’t a tangible paper copy. At the moment ebooks, certainly for mainstream authors and publishers, are an extra, not the be all and end all. This means the sunk costs have already been sunk. Apportioning them to the electronic version doesn’t make sense. Of course this is different for new authors or those braving the new frontier of electronic publishing but lets face it, those seeking to justify the high RRP aren’t web 2.0 literate are they?
Secondly I like Seth Gordin’s idea of a Paperback Kindle- strip the ereader of all it’s superfluous functions, make it good at purely what its supposed to be good for and sell it cheap. Stupidly cheap. In fact give it away for free with ten ebook purchases, it’s the medium not the message, don’t look to make a pennies profit on it because you’ll slow adoption and lets face it its all about mass market really. Sell the Sony PRS 300 for £70 and be done with it.
Finally, get those back catalogues up there. Do I really want to buy book four in a series when books 1,2 and 3 are unavailable in electronic form? It’s all about the catalogue available. Google are working on something big, their first entry into online retail (barring the nexus 1) and the market needs shaking up. Books for the Kindle, iBooks and every other format are riddled with DRM and are still too expensive.
Well there you are. If I worked for a large consultancy firm, I would charge you a couple of hundred grand for telling you that. Aggressive pricing gets you penetration, and a large affordable catalogue gets you consumer buy in. Email me for payment terms chaps.
I tend to pop up to our local Waterstones about once a week just to have a rummage through the new releases. What stood out this week for me was the sheer amount of space devoted to Warmhammer tie in novels- the 3 shelves you can see in the image are entirely Warhammer. This could be forgiven if it wasn’t at the expense of more deserving titles but they’re missing A Game of Thrones, large chunks of the Wheel of Time, most of JV Jones back catalogue and they hardly have any Robert Rankin.
Shame on you Waterstones!
Dragonmount have posted a finished version of the cover to the next Wheel of Time book, due out (fingers crossed) this October in the US. It ties in with the blurb from the cover that in part says:
Matrim Cauthon prepares for the most difficult challenge of his life. The creatures beyond the stone gateways–the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn–have confused him, taunted him, and left him hanged, his memory stuffed with bits and pieces of other men’s lives. He had hoped that his last confrontation with them would be the end of it, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The time is coming when he will again have to dance with the Snakes and the Foxes, playing a game that cannot be won. The Tower of Ghenjei awaits, and its secrets will reveal the fate of a friend long lost.
It irritated me that the whole Tower of Ghenjei resolution didn’t happen in volume 12 but I suppose it was necessary for the pacing of the novel (although not since the end of Tad Williams The Stone of Farewell have we been left hanging on so badly), so to see Thom with his gleeman’s cloak on appearing to unlock the entrance to the Tower with Matt and Noam/Jain Farstrider in attendance is pretty exciting.
The first chapter of gainst All Things Ending is available for download as a PDF on Mr Donaldson’s website.
I am reading it at this very moment!
UPDATE
A very interesting read. At points it took me back to being 12 again as there was at least one word per page that I didn’t completely know the meaning of. I still think the phrase “Time Warden” sounds a little cheesy but I suppose we’re stuck with it.
I also need to have a real think how resurrecting Covenant should/does have a greater cost on the Land than the resurrection of Kevin Landwaster by Elena. Okay, the Law of Death was broken at the time but even so…
There is an interesting blog post on Joe Abercrombie’s website that does a bit more than tell the reader he’s finished his first draft, it actually details the mechanics of how he writes. What I found interesting was how closely it tallies with what I was reading in this blog post at Bubble Cow.
Its worth a read, especially if you’ve liked the First Law trilogy or the excellent Best Served Cold or if you’re interested in the mechanics of writing.
