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 »
September 2nd, 2009
AT&T's "problem" customers get the blame
Fortune Magazine swallows the AT&T pitch hook, line and sinker in a story titled “Bandwidth hogs — iPhones and other smartphones.” Writer Jon Fortt dishes up a steaming dish of bull shoveled straight out of AT&T PR:
Now the wireless providers hawking those Internet-enabled mobile devices are experiencing the digital equivalent of being proprietors of an all-you-can-eat buffet: It seems like the perfect business until the sumo wrestlers show up.
Well, forgive us, AT&T, for buying your dog food. And, yes, I do hold telecom carriers to the promises they make. I only seem to pick on AT&T because I am a customer who has covered the company through years of over-promising and frequent under-delivery. AT&T has been selling its 3G services for years and only now is claiming it can’t make an adequate profit (because, get set for the PR spin: AT&T is positioning to raise prices in this Fortune article).
Unfortunately, the reporter didn’t think to check into AT&T’s claims by, for example, comparing AT&T’s assertions that users are overtaxing its 3G network to the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of 3G networks, the spectrum for which the agency freed up to serve data-intensive applications for mobile handsets: “Key features of 3G systems are a high degree of commonality of design worldwide, compatibility of services, use of small pocket terminals with worldwide roaming capability, Internet and other multimedia applications, and a wide range of services and terminals.”
Specifically, the carriers asked for the bandwidth in exchange for: Fixed and variable rate bit traffic; Bandwidth on demand; Asymmetric data rates in the forward and reverse links; Multimedia mail store and forward; Broadband access up to 2 Megabits/second (my iPhone 3G typically delivers about 700 Kbps throughput, not 2 Mbps). Customers haven’t even got MMS on the iPhone, but AT&T is angling to justify higher prices well before it delivers improved network service.
AT&T’s CTO, John Donovan, is quoted saying “3G networks were not designed effectively for this kind of usage.” Not much of a CTO, if you ask me, unless CTO is an acronym for “Liar.” Mr. Donovan, please read the FCC’s definitions of 3G technology, review AT&T’s own promotional materials, and answer one question: Why does AT&T promise all these ‘3G’ features and services if its network cannot deliver them? If your network cannot provide 3G services, don’t charge as though they do. I get a bill for 3G services every month.
The next section of the article, which labels the top five percent of data plan users as “problems,” according to a remark attributed to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, sets the stage for price increases for 3G, because “4G systems won’t be available for years.” That AT&T would describe its most active users as “problems” is ludicrous, but the complete lack of any alternative perspective on the question in the article is outrageous.
The problem lies with AT&T, not its customers.
July 24th, 2009
Don't take my Moleskine notebook and Rotring pen
What’s the technology I’d least like to lose, the thing you’d have to pry from my cold dead fingers? Well, you will have to pry a Moleskine notebook and pen from my hands when I am dead.
The Moleskine, a venerable notebook made by Moda & Moda of Itally, and a Rotring fountain pen (either the classic Rotring 600 or the more recent Initial) make the best system for collecting ideas and notes anywhere I travel. Compared to the many PCs I’ve owned over the years, the Moleskine notebooks have never crashed and I have every single note I’ve ever made stored on a shelf in my office. Moleskines can be labeled and shelved for easy reference. If I need notes on a particular topic, such as e-books, which I am working on these days, I keep a notebook about just that topic. I also have general notebooks stored by date, so that with a little idea of when I had a discussion, I can quickly find the notes.
I keep two to five Moleskines, each dedicated to various topics or the current date, on my desk at all times. I pick which notebook to take to a meeting based on the topic to be covered. While I haven’t tried it, the Moleskine can now be pre-printed with your own templates, making the book completely personal from unwrapping.
Email archives, which I have dating back to 1998 (the previous mail accounts, back to 1988, were lost along the way), are a distant second in personal record-keeping. The fountain pen, which works reliably and never wears out—Rotring’s steel nibs could be used as a lethal weapon, then to write a graceful couplet—is always ready to record a thought. The Moleskine’s archival-quality paper ensures that, even after I am dead, someone will be able to excavate my thoughts. I’ll be writing in one of these notebooks until the very end.
July 14th, 2009
Why is Facebook whoring me out?
I’ve been pondering this note, sent to me by a friend on Facebook last week:
Facebook needs to recode their ads… It’s one thing when the ad for singles waiting for me is accompanied by a picture of my lovely wife… Its another when the pic is Mitch Ratcliffe!!!
I am married. Facebook knows I am married, because it is in my profile. Yet, the company feels free to use my picture to promote singles ads under the headline “Local singles are waiting for you.” I confirmed that this was the situation with my Facebook friend—you can see the thread here.
Moreover, I have never given any company my permission to use my image in advertising. Someone owes me money.
Finally, I don’t think my wife, her friends, my family or anyone who knows me would be pleased to see that I am apparently trolling for dates on Facebook. The numbskull at Facebook who thought of using member photos in this way should learn that “transparency” in our lives does not make our life story malleable and changeable by commercial interests. In a way, this is a libel (a written slander), since it associates my name and image with a perceived act of adultery.
Facebook, if you are listening: Stop using member photos for any commercial purpose they do not explicitly endorse. If I see or hear of this use of my image again, I’ll be thinking about calling a lawyer.
The abuse of personal data is only beginning. Companies that offer everything for “free” are extracting a huge price from each of us in the form of information, images and private records that they intend to “monetize.” It is time to stop letting these companies see how far they can get before someone gets angry.
June 24th, 2009
Amazon on the record: Device limits set by publishers
I queried Russ Grandinetti, vice president, Books, at Amazon about the lack of clarity about how many devices can access a Kindle book or how many times a buyer can expect to download a title from the Kindle Store. He referred me to Drew Herdener, director of communication at Amazon, who replied with the following:
Russ forwarded me your note. Thanks for your interest. To answer your question, there is no limit on the number of times a book can be downloaded to a registered device (i.e. Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone). In the case where the publisher has chosen to apply DRM, there may be limits on the number of devices that can simultaneously use a single book. If a customer has upgraded or replaced their device(s), they can delete the content and deregister any device(s) no longer in use, which enables the customer to download to new registered devices.
So, to reduce the answer to its component parts:
- Buyers may download an unlimited number of copies of a Kindle book title they have purchased to a registered Kindle device or iPhone (and, future supported devices) that are associated with the buyer’s Amazon account,
- unless a publisher has decided to impose a limit on the number of devices that may simultaneously have access to the title,
- in which case, the user may go to their Manage My Kindle page and “deregister” a device to allow for downloading to a device that does not currently have an access to the book.
Publishers, not Amazon, make these decisions. Customers need information about device limits when buying, it should be displayed on the product page as a courtesy to customers. I still believe setting a higher limit than six is essential to making a book useful to a family.
I have asked Drew several follow-up questions and hope to have a bit more soon on how customers can identify books with limits and whether there is a system-wide default limit on number of devices.
A usability note based on this information: The Manage My Kindle page does not list either the number of devices on which a title may be accessed, nor the devices on which the title is currently is readable. Both would be helpful information, the latter because it should be possible to deactivate a device’s access to a single title without wiping out the device’s library—this is doubly important because only some of the titles in the Kindle Store come with simultaneous device limits.
I may want to make a book accessible to my son’s iPhone, for example, which would be the seventh registered Kindle device in our household, by taking it off my daughter’s Kindle. If I disable all the titles on my daughter’s Kindle by deregistering it, she’d be pretty disappointed, when all she wanted to do was share a book with her brother (not that she’d be in the mood to do that very often).
My roughly hewn mock-up of what this should look like in the Manage My Kindle library is displayed to the right. There is ample room in the Your Orders listings for a book to include a device listing that allowed per-device registration of the title. By checking the red box, one could deactivate the title on just one device, in this case “Dad’s Kindle.”
Without per-device control of titles, the system effectively limits the number of devices a customer can use conveniently to the lowest number of devices on which they may want to read a DRM-limited title. That needs to change. And it is good that Amazon is listening.
Cross-posted from Booksahead.com
June 15th, 2009
The future of the book, expanding
I’ve posted a couple excerpts from the book I am working on, about the future of books and reading. It’s a different topic than Rational Rants’ mandate, and with so much news and opinion every day to comment on, deserving of its own place and community. So, without further adieu, I introduce you to BooksAhead.com, where today’s comments include topics as diverse as Blackberry e-reader applications, color e-readers, Kindle DX and the meaning of spoken word rights when e-readers can read aloud.
Keeping up with news about the future of publishing is a full-time job. I’ll also be reproducing e-book and publishing-related articles from Digital Media: A Seybold Report, which I edited way back when, when e-books were only eight years old (which is longer ago than you think).
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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