December 27th, 2009
Happy New Year and Adieu, dear readers
I’ve been writing for Ziff-Davis, ZD Net and their many facets for almost two decades. It is just a few months short of 19th anniversary of the first time my byline appeared in MacWEEK, in fact, as I write this last posting at Rational Rants. As the trade press morphed, ZD Net graciously continued to give me the benefit of its pages to talk with you. It has been very good to be in dialogue with all of you, dear readers, as well as with my fellow ZD bloggers.
Throughout all that time, even in the midst of the Y2K “crisis” when I was disparaged by nut jobs and profiteers while running the ZDY2K site, that vast majority of you have been very kind in your assessments and comments on my writing. When I wrote badly or made mistakes you pointed out the errors with constructive good spirit and I’ve appreciated it, even when kicking myself and, unfortunately, sometimes letting my temper show rather than directing it at the sole author of the problematic writing. A writer can only wish to do better as they hone their craft and to have understanding readers, like you.
We have agreed despite our disagreements, which is what makes all this worthwhile. Moreover, if it weren’t for this blog, I doubt very much I’d be walking and earning a living. I’ve been very fortunate to be published here on ZD Net.
Since I recovered from my neck surgery last year, I’ve been increasingly focused on solving business problems for companies rather than writing. After all these years, I have decided to join a company that I have not started or helped to launch, because that’s where the next steps in “the constantly changing boundary between media and social networks” will be taken (the quote is from the mission statement of this blog). Using massive amounts of information within an enterprise to create intimate and valuable connections with customers is the greatest challenge in publishing, and I’ve taken a job with just about the biggest company imaginable to tackle that problem.
I’ll be continuing to blog at BooksAhead.com on the future of reading, there’s even something new today. I can no longer promise even the infrequent contributions I’ve made here on other topics, because there is wide swath of issues about which I will not be able to write without seeming to represent my new employer’s views.
Again, everyone, thank you very much. Write whenever you can.
December 26th, 2009
Updating Kindles sold estimate: 1.49 million
Based on the ever-vague guidance provided by Amazon.com in the form of obscure comments from CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos and fluffy PR releases, such as today’s holiday sales update, I’m continuing to update my educated guesswork on the number of Kindles sold.
Two interesting factoids emerge from the marketing verbiage: First, Kindle books outsold paper books on Christmas Day, the first time that has ever happened; Second, the Kindle is the “most gifted item ever in our history,” according to Bezos. The first may not mean much, since Christmas Day isn’t necessarily a normal shopping day, though the volume of Kindle books sold suggests that on that day a lot of new Kindle users started stocking up on e-books. The second, an aggregate figure that appears to reflect all gifted items over all time, may be very significant or mean absolutely nothing at all, as the increase in online shopping and gifting continues to dwarf previous “record-setting” gift sales by the law of large(r) numbers.
Nevertheless, it is clear that this was the Kindle Christmas. During the third quarter of 2009, I estimated that Amazon sold 289,000 Kindles on sales growth of 60 percent year over year. We can assume, given the disappointing availability of most competitors, that Kindle grabbed a very large percentage of e-book reader sales this holiday season. However, it was also a poor Christmas overall, in terms of retails sales, even if Amazon did sell more stuff than ever before.
So, how many more Kindles sold between the end of the Q3 and Christmas Day? Extrapolating from previous quarters, and assuming this was a break-out sales season for Kindle, meaning that it more that doubled over the previous quarter, factoring in the sales of Kindle books versus paper books as Christmas gift cards were redeemed yesterday, I estimate Amazon sold 419,000 Kindles in the fourth quarter, or 145 percent of the sales in Q3.
That would make the total number of Kindles sold to date 1,491,000. Kindle now represents approximately 65 percent of the hardware reader market despite the appearance of Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which may reach 30,000 units in the quarter because of delays.
I still don’t think Amazon is in the hardware business for the long term. It’s all about building digital library lock-in.
Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com.
December 8th, 2009
When customers love the product, but hate your mission, it's time to change publishing
I recently had the pleasure of presenting a vision for the future of publishing to a group of publishing professionals in New York. Can’t say where it was, yet, but suffice to say it was worth saying and that the message was well received by the thoughtful, albeit skeptical, audience.
Despite the increasingly rapid changes in reading due to technological evolution, the folks with whom I was talking rightly believe that they should not revolutionize their business simply for the sake of revolution, and I was perceived, unfortunately, as a revolutionary. They represented publishers, distributors, supply-chain enablers and book retailers, all of whom need to embrace changing roles as they constantly refine those roles in response to greater information about what is in a book, how books are used and what readers think about the books they purchase, borrow or steal. Having worked in publishing—in many forms and markets—for 25 years, and for several huge publishing companies destroyed by the failure to change, I think my perspective is one of pragmatic realism. Certainly, the publishing industry I arrived in as a newspaper/magazine reporter is largely gone, victim of its failure to evolve with the times, with the reader’s habits.
So, it was ironic, I thought, that my opening remark, that the future has never been brighter for publishing (in this, I completely agree with Seth Godin’s remarks about the future of publishing here—I only wish I was a good a presenter at Seth), was greeted with a sense that I was trying to paint my revolution the color of the audience’s fears about the future of their individual business models. Sure, they were thinking, it’s bright if you don’t have to fire people, change the workflows at publishing houses, in composition and printing shops, and so forth.
Books are healthier than ever, really. According to Bowker, publisher of Books In Print, more than 900,000 books will be published worldwide this year. The United States produces more than five times as many titles as only a decade ago. Moreover, the breadth of the titles has never been greater, with genres and subjects exploding in their complexity. Just as the desktop publishing revolution produced an explosion of magazines and newsletters that transformed the periodical business in the late 1980s, print-on-demand and Web technology, including e-books, have multiplied the number of books, about every conceivable topic. Worldwide, the growth of titles published is growing faster than in the U.S., as it becomes infinitely more efficient to address language and geographically specific marketplaces with printed or electronic books.
Moreover, with more than $100 billion in local U.S. media spending in play because of the fall of the local newspaper, the opportunity to connect revenue with books that engage and sustain hyper-local communities, has never been greater. Succeeding in this market, however, means changing the entire book value chain, eliminating the value chain’s focus on distributors and retailers, turning it instead to models predicated on what the reader wants and values. Reader-centrism is the only viable basis for revivifying existing publishing companies, because every new player in the publishing market is starting their business based on close identification with their customer, the reader.
Now, I want to keep this short, and go on in future postings with more detail. But let’s look at the most recent description of what a publisher does that I was able to find, in Robert Darnton’s new book, The Case for Books. Darnton, the chief librarian at Harvard and an accomplished author captures what the publisher does as completely as possible:
“Publishers are gatekeepers, who control the flow of knowledge. From the boundless variety of matter susceptible to being made public, they select what they think will sell or should be sold, according to their professional expertise and their personal convictions. Publishers’ judgments, informed by long experience in the marketplace of ideas, determines what reaches readers, and readers need to rely on it more than ever in an age of information overload.”
December 7th, 2009
Zombie Alert: CrunchPad rises from grave
Last week, Mike Arrington announced the death of CrunchPad, his mythical $250 tablet for surfing the Web. This week, Arrington’s former partner in the project, Fusion Garage, announced it will sell the device starting this Friday for $499, calling the product “JooJoo.”. I agree with Sam Diaz that it is doomed, but believe JooJoo is worse than doomed, it is poised to pollute the tablet waters due to all three of the T’s Sam identified, and more.
JooJoo carries the bad ju ju of litigation, over-promising and a high price compared to what was promised. The product name suggests it’s all illusion. It’s short history already sounds like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the Dickensian lawsuit that destroyed everyone it touched. There’s not much to like in an otherwise appealing form factor.
Arrington will not let this device go to market without a sewer’s worth of litigation to choke the channel (he promised this in his posting about the death of CrunchPad). The device is going on sale Friday, but has a ship date of “eight to ten weeks,” according to various reports, which suggests it isn’t really real yet—forget “ready for Christmas,” this looks likely to remain vapor.
Finally, the price: A device with a potentially rocky legal footing that sells for twice what it was promised to by Arrington’s CrunchPad marketing (it wasn’t reporting, but marketing—something TechCrunch readers need to keep firmly in mind whenever they read the site). Many sites are reporting CrunchPad was supposed to be a $300 device, but one of Arrington’s original “features” of his tablet was that it would cost $250. Pricing differences are probably the bone of contention between the two parties that will be blamed for the break-up in the pending lawsuits.
JooJoo comes to market at almost the reported price of a low-end Apple tablet, but because it has only browser-based access to the Web, will not offer the kind of robust application platform that Apple’s tablet will, or any Windows tablet can today… or any Droid OS device. The blush is off this rose, if it can even bloom through the legal morass in which it will be engulfed, before it comes to market.
November 30th, 2009
CrunchPad illusion after all
Mike Arrington has announced his CrunchPad web tablet, covered here, is “dead”, blaming his manufacturing partner for cutting him out of the deal. In the frothy market that is media tablets, just as in other frothy markets Arrington has stirred up, this is a story suspiciously full of holes that make CrunchPad sound like a stunt all along rather than a real project.
Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.
Later, Arrington insists other manufacturers have offered easy terms to him for the rights to manufacture the device and that he had “blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk.” If he’d said they were holding off for better terms from VCs because the device had launched, I’d have found this plausible. The whole story is too nice to be taken at face value.
Because Arrington, a lawyer, discloses that he never controlled the intellectual property rights to the CrunchPad, other than the trademark, and apparently had very poorly formed business agreements around the project with Fusion Garage, his manufacturing partner, this has the look of a great deal of smoke around something he’d agreed he could market without understanding the business, design and development challenges. At one point, he suggests most of the project was “pushed to open source,” but then why is it impossible to build it with another manufacturer?
Arrington claims that “prototype b” of the CrunchPad was completed by his in-house team. Certainly, it would have represented the major functional features of the design, which, if open sourced, should be available for his use in providing a functional spec to other manufacturers who could have come up with their own solutions with different components. Since he writes that his team had the release candidate device running Win7 and a version of Chrome OS, the components involved surely are commodities supported with well-documented drivers and toolsets.
Why take apart the death notice like this? Tablets and e-readers are the hottest “category” in consumer electronics, with a glut in e-readers and many media tablets on tap for 2010, customers need to read between the lines of announcements that promise revolutions but may represent black holes for their money and time. In this case, Arrington has created expectations that a $250 touch-screen device can be expected to do what consumers want, to “surf on the couch.” He created a baseline expectation that has proven to be out of line with what is possible today. It is certainly possible in six months or a year, yet customers don’t need the noise of empty promises to add to the complexity of making buying decisions.
It sounded too good to be true and it was, yet there are plenty of people who want to buy the idea and will now say it could have been done if not for a legal showdown. Customers need real world class champions of products, not contenders who tell us they could have or should have won if only the breaks had gone their way. Customers’ time and money is too hard won to expect less.
Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com.
November 2nd, 2009
Headline 2010: e-Reader device failure
The market knows best, right? Markets are bloody paths to progress. At this writing there are approximately 52 e-reader devices coming to market in the next 12 months. Fifty-two different devices coming to market (Here’s what I wrote about Steve Jobs’ approach to reader devices when there were just 45 e-readers on the horizon). Creative, the maker of MP3 players and computer audio cards, is the latest to announce their impending arrival, Zii MediaBook.
This is the definition of “glut” becoming reality. We can see a glut of e-readers coming and there’s no waving off the Kamikaze piloting most of those e-readers toward the deck. Will they blow up the fuel supply needed to get the next generation of e-reading off the ground? No, but the coverage will likely make it sound like e-reader failures mean e-book failure.
With excessive abundance comes failure, and that spectacular conflagration of hardware products, unfortunately, will dominate the headlines in this market next year as many, indeed most, of these devices are pulled due to lack of sales. They are ridiculously expensive for a market where the vast majority of customers buy one book or less a year—more than 180 million Americans don’t buy a single book in any year.
Many hardware makers will retreat and e-books, not the glut, will get the blame.
Today’s dedicated e-readers sell for roughly 10 times the price of a new hardback book. Most people don’t buy hardback books, so for argument’s sake, let’s say the average price paid for a book by the 120 million Americans who buy a book each year is $12. Amazon Kindle2 and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, both of which sell for $259, cost as much as 21.6 books, which suggests they break the book-buying budget for most people. I don’t want to suggest there is a magic price for reader hardware, because we’ll see some of the new e-readers announced this year selling for $59 next year, because retailers cannot get rid of them. That is a result of fierce competition, but leave it to the press and bloggers to turn the whole process into a mandate on e-books, not the expensive hardware.
This isn’t a horse race, but a complex evolutionary event, that cannot be reduced to headlines. Consider: “T. Rex extinct, world awaits silence of lifelessness” would have made the papers, if dinosaurs had had their Gutenberg.
Yet, it’s a short step from “people don’t want e-readers” to Read the rest of this entry »
October 23rd, 2009
Updating Kindles-sold estimates: 1.072 million
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.
October 22nd, 2009
Kindle books come to the PC -- a Nook counterpunch
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.
October 21st, 2009
Nook Clarified: Really solid progress for e-readers
Yesterday, I posted a long analysis of what I thought was right and strangely wrong about the Barnes & Noble Nook. Matt Miller today got a clarification about my main concern, which was that Barnes & Noble seemed to have said, according to several published reports, that Wi-Fi would work only in its stores at launch and be “opened up.” A PR representative for Barnes & Noble’s agency, Fleishman, attributed the Wi-Fi information to “an error, so we’re glad to clarify it today.”
Matt asked the question of William Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble on a press call this morning and got the clear answer: Nook Wi-Fi will work in stores and on Wi-Fi networks operated by third-parties and on home computer networks to allow shopping in the BN.com store. I’ve been able to get some additional details and, to some degree, my criticisms in yesterday’s article have been addressed. I’m going to leave that article up, with clarifications and corrections as part of the public record. I have confirmed it, as well, though only on background.
Nook Wi-Fi will work at launch anywhere you want to use it.
That said, I still think the Nook has some flaws, which are fewer and less bizarre than I thought.
I also received clarification of another important point I raised yesterday: Shopping in the Barnes & Noble e-books store is free via 3G, but it was not clear that Google Books titles would be accessible via free 3G service. That would have raised a lot of synching issue for customers who, frankly, don’t want to synch as much as early adopters are willing to do it.
Barnes & Noble, through its PR firm, said that Google Books will be downloadable from the BN.com eBookstore. So, B&N is subsidizing its customers wireless access to free out-of-print books offered by Google, which is a very good thing indeed.
If you are visiting BN.com, you will have access to more than one million e-books, more than twice the total available at Amazon.com. There are issues of quality in Google Books, but the solution is Read the rest of this entry »
October 20th, 2009
B&N's Nook e-reader: Weirdly unrevolutionary
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:
- Two screens, one 3.5-inch LCD for navigation and purchasing and a six-inch E-Ink display for reading;
- Virtual keyboard via the LCD display
- ePub and PDF formats supported;
- Free 3G connectivity when shopping via BN.com;
- Sharing of books, across Nook, smartphones and PCs;
- Wi-Fi built in
, but with strange limitations at launch(see below); - Synchronization of location, notes and annotation across multiple devices;
- Audio is supported, though only MP3; Audible books not supported.
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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- Happy New Year and Adieu, dear readers
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