I was more pleased than I expected to see my recent book Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror is finally available on Kindle. I use the Kindle myself for its portability and excellent storage with books accessible from anywhere. (No more endlessly adding bookshelves, which are overloaded the next day.) If my own view is any indication the Kindle and related e-books will morph quickly into the paperback reprints of the future. And unlike paperbacks, these digital books won’t disintegrate on the shelves.
An interesting question for publishers will be the time delay between hardback and digital publication. My own book was in print around Feb 1 with the Kindle appearing mid-May. But this was entirely an accident of the new form. In the old days, a paperback wouldn’t appear until a year after initial publication. My Moses Wine books will reappear on Kindle later this year – not sure yet whether this will be all at once or phased in. Some of that will be in my control (for once). [Then you will have nobody to blame but yourself.-ed. The truth is out!]
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16 Comments
1. Doc:Didn’t Palm have books on its handheld PDA years ago?
May 13, 2009 - 6:04 pm 2. John Moore:Something like the Kindle, I suspect.
The Kindle is proprietary to Amazon, which is not a good long term model. It’s just like having cell phones tied to specific cell service providers.
Something like the Kindle, with copyrights protected [essentially forever, unfortunately, due to our obscene copyright laws], has got to win out over paper.
May 13, 2009 - 7:22 pm 3. Mike_K:I have had one for about three months and like it a lot. There are some issues, such as failure, but books can be downloaded again. Newspapers and magazines may not be available after a time so that is an issue for those who choose to use it to read periodicals. It is really convenient. My wife gave it to me in hopes I would buy fewer books and so far that is one advantage.
May 13, 2009 - 9:10 pm 4. Barry Dauphin:I’ve had a Kindle for several weeks and am ditching the print version of the WSJ for the Kindle version. One thing I find interesting is that many tree huggers (who usually are so worried about excess paper) are worried about the demise of newspapers and even find the Kindle threatening to some degree (admittedly based upon a very limited sample of opinion of people I’ve talked to). I throw away a lot less paper recently. Isn’t that saving the planet and reducing my carbon footprint?
May 14, 2009 - 6:15 am 5. Professor Guvinoff:When Gutenberg pressed his strikingly beautiful 42-line Bible, almost 600 years ago, he accelerated the cultural revolution that led to the greatness of the West. Today, the developing world is using cell phones instead of copper lines, showing how the leatest technology allows leapfrogging instead of just catching-up.
Similarly, today’s baby steps of digital distribution may drive the next cultural revolution, casting ideas around the world like never before. The third world could well become the next battlefield of the war of ideas.
Mozart made an opera out of Beaumarchais “The marriage of Figaro”, arguing for the small people being as valuable as the elites.
Today, security and prosperity is blessing at most 20% of humanity. The dispossessed of the so-called “modern” world are the numeric majority. It’s their turn to discover for the revolutionary ideas that made the West great. Will the Kindle rekindle the western ideals?
May 14, 2009 - 8:24 am 6. Sam S:I got my Kindle two weeks ago and love it. Now I can have numerous books, newspapers and magazines with me at all times. The first book I bought was Blacklisting Myself followed by a collection of Orwell’s essays.
May 14, 2009 - 8:47 am 7. PC14:Nothing beats my local library. I live less than a mile from the local branch. I can reserve most books online that I want to read and have them delivered to the branch. They email when it’s ready to pick up. Return is an easy drop off outside and doesn’t even require going inside. And it’s all free…so to speak.
May 14, 2009 - 8:55 am 8. Sgt. Mom:I made one of my books – “To Truckee’s Trail” available on Kindle 18 months ago, when Amazon first launched it. As near as I could tell at the time, getting it up there was fraught with difficulty, Amazon didn’t post the cover pic for months, and I had zilch sales for a year. I was not pleased at all, and planned to put no more effort into it with my other books. But in January of this year, one of the other IAG writers was singing praises of the Kindle, so I uploaded all three volumes of the Adelsverein Trilogy – it was a simple process, everything went well, and damned if I haven’t had very satisfactory sales of all four books ever since the beginning of this year. The royalties per author are much less than for print versions, of course – but the cost of a Kindle download relative to a hard-copy version makes it much more likely that a reader will “take a chance” on a relatively unknown writer.
May 14, 2009 - 9:23 am 9. LarryD:So, I’ll take a smaller cut, just for having more people out there willing to sample my books. In that sense, a Kindle down-load is the equivalent of an inexpensive paperback.
I have a problem with any system that has “features” like this.
Who knows how many other remote flags the Kindle “supports”.
This is the sort of thing that makes me uninterested in the Kindle, or any other proprietary equivalent. I’ll stick with paper, for now. Or a net book and open source software.
May 14, 2009 - 10:18 am 10. SeanLA:I love my kindle. I used to have a stack of books near the sofa that drove my wife crazy, now its a larger stack but its its kept in a slim leather binder.
I did read an interesting criticism, the person wrote that when he puts his book down in the evening hes sure the text will be the same in the morning, he doesn’t have that assurance with Kindle.
May 14, 2009 - 11:33 am 11. Margie:Its paranoid (right now), but I see his point…
I would love a Kindle but not at the current price…I’ll just wait awhile.
May 14, 2009 - 1:21 pm 12. Anita Hope:I am with you Margie.. But used my daughters and it is great, as you can adjust print size to fit your vision.
May 14, 2009 - 1:56 pm 13. chuck:I’ll miss the paperback covers, often the best part of the book. And what of the few remaining pulps, they would go well on the kindle, no? I hope colors for the readers isn’t too far in the future.
May 14, 2009 - 10:33 pm 14. Michael McCollum:My wife informed me about 18 months ago that she could “never read a book on an electronic machine.” So, I bought her a Kindle for her birthday. She has since nearly bankrupted me buying books for it.
I am a professional science fiction writer who went into business for himself 15 years ago (after 15 years in the book stores). I sell both trade paperbacks and ebooks (nine different varieties) of 11 novels,a book of short stories, and four books on the art of writing. I have not been quick to go online at Amazon with Kindle editions because of the 65% they take off the top. When I sell ebooks through my website, I make 100% profit.
However, upon learning that they will have a 7×9 Kindle out this summor, I decided to give it a try. I have sold $100 worth (my profit, not total sales) this week and am waiting to see if that rate holds up or was just the initial flurry.
Kindle has succeeded where everyone else has failed because of the ease of electronic delivery. Even though I make a lot more at my personal site, there may be enough people who now have Kindles that my profit of 35% on Kindle sales will exceed 100% profit from my own sales. As the zen master said, “We shall see.”
May 16, 2009 - 6:10 pm 15. kytraveler:I have never used a Kindle but I have read different people saying that even after you purchase a book it can be taken away or the Kindle service turned off. Is this true? If so, I cannot understand peoples’ enthusiasm for the device. If I purchase a book I want complete control of it – no way would I pay money to purchase a book to read on a device when someone else had the power to turn off the service and essentially take the book away. This sound ridiculous to me. Can someone please straighten me out on this and let me know how it really works?
May 16, 2009 - 6:18 pm 16. Omnibus Driver:I’d really like to get a Kindle, but find the cost prohibitive at the moment. I don’t understand why Amazon isn’t bringing the cost down and making it a loss-leader, instead of a profit center in itself.
Until the cost comes down and they add color to the display, I’ll stick to my laptop.
May 17, 2009 - 2:18 pm