e-Book Echo — Barnes & Noble Begins Assault on Kindle
Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. Barnes & Noble is getting ready to take on the Amazon Kindle with a full-court press. B&N has already made it clear they are going to put their e-book content on as many devices as possible, to provide customers with lots of options. They have previously announced deals with iRex and Plastic Logic to put B&N e-books on electronic readers coming early next year. We thought it was interesting that neither of those deals was exclusive, but now it makes sense.
This week word leaked out that B&N is going to also produce their own e-book reader. This new reader is thought to be based on the Android platform, a smart move if it pans out. Android would be a great platform for such a reader, given its solid capabilities including 3G support. Such a device could easily be used by the bookstore to make it drop-dead simple to browse and buy e-books, given it can natively handle a full web browser. The e-book space is going to be extremely hot next year, mark my words.
Amazon is not sitting idly resting on their top e-book reader position. This week they released an international version of the Kindle, to bring that device to customers outside the U. S. The new Kindle is $279 and uses AT&T wireless to access the Kindle WhisperNet to download books. It soon became clear that Kindle customers outside the U. S. will pay significantly higher prices that American customers, and that isn’t sitting well with those potential customers.
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B&N could really leapfrog the competition, if their eReader is running Android. This would allow users to run virtually all of the cool apps in the Android market.
The basic functionality, over & above reading eBooks, would hopefully include:
1. listening to music
2. browsing the web (using Fast Flip would be cool!)
3. reading/writing email, IMs, SMS, etc.
4. viewing/editing docs (with Google Apps, Zoho, Quickoffice, DocumentsToGo, etc.)
5. viewing maps
2$ per title for international Kindle roaming is little a too much taxation. Ebook maker that strikes a deal with mobile carriers/cheap roaming & plethora of different publishers/independent authors will make a killing.
As for Android devices, Pixel Qi is not quite the like e-paper but it will make e-paper companies run for their money.
As long as it brings more and more digital eBook goodness… especially by way of electronic textbooks for students, then I say bring on the competition… Amazon, B&N, Sony, Microsoft, whatever… the more the merrier, but come on Publishers, stop with the exclusive agreements… you should be wide open to improve your own content earnings and leave it to the eReader makers to fight it out over features and functionality.
jk,
That “sigificantly higher prices” in the linked article at The Guardian is from bad assumptions and info.
I did a blog entry on corrections on the info in that article 2 days ago and just now wrote a comment to the Guardian article and I’ll quote it here:
===
Commenter “code162″ actually took the trouble to read the UK-info pull-down info at the Amazon product page and saw that it’s not $13.99 and 40% more.
It’s a range of pricing for the bestsellers, just as we see in the U.S.
The U.S. range is $9.99 and above for bestsellers. As a customer I can attest to the fact that bestsellers start at $9.99 and are too often quite well above that amount if that is the publisher’s choice.
The UK bestseller book-$ range is $11.99 *TO* $13.99
The UK VAT or Value Added Tax is *-included-* in that pricing.
This is true for other international countries.
This article’s myth of a general 40% increase in book pricing for UK customers by Amazon has become reality for the world since it was the only newspaper to quote the higher number to make a generality of it while ignoring the lower number AND not pointing out that the VAT (15 to 17% come January) is *included* in the price of the book. Amazon is responsible for paying the U.K. that VAT amount.
– Andrys
kindleworld.blogspot.com
I have both a Kindle and an Irex Iliad. I will stick with the Irex products, and a new reader is to be released this month. My preference is because of the 8.1″ screen of the Iliad. The bigger screen size more approximates a real book. The new device is supposed to have a greater storage capacity, a much longer battery life, and 3G connectivity with Barnes and Noble. All that and a touch screen for note-taking too! How can you beat that? Irex… bring it on!!!!
This is just a theory.
BUT, are the book publishing houses REALLY going to lower the prices?
The music industry did not lower the price on CD’s vs round records.
No, they just collected the extra profits.
Same with the VHS vs DVD movies, until mass production hit the market.
I can remember seeing DVDs for more than the VHS movies.
Now mass production has lowered the price somewhat, but the manufacturing costs have fallen at a much greater rate.
If everyone goes to electronic format books,
then your paper books will be VERY expensive.
Paper will cost much, much more.
There will be less trees grown
because why re-plant, protect the forests,
and have printing houses, if your
not going to harvest the timber?
Many jobs will be lost, because the publishers
will now go “direct to the public”.
The publishers will no longer have to have a capital outlay for
printing, distributing, shipping, stocking, etc.
I don’t think they will cut the price much either,
they will have full control of the market.
Just alot of jobs will be lost.
Oh, and forget about loaning your copy of your favorite
best seller to your friend to read…
I had to print SAM’s comment out in hard copy to read several times. Recorded music evolved from 78 rpm clay pressed records into vinyl 45s and 33 1/3s. Then along came 8-track tapes (for a short while), then cassettes and now CDs. If you account for inflation, CDs are now about the same price as a 33 1/3 vinyl record was 30 years ago. Video evolved from VHS and BETA (also short lived) to laserdisk, from laserdisk to DVD and now to Blu-ray (let’s not forget the short lived HD DVDs). As each new format was released, the quality got better. Slowly, as Blu-ray reaches a higher market saturation, those prices, too, will come down.
Now let’s talk about books. When books were transcribed by hand, before the typewriter, one had to be exceptionally wealthy to own a book. With the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, the price of a hardback book decreased greatly. Paperbacks came into vogue, and the price decreased even further. Now we are able to listen to a book on MP3 players or CD players or on our computers. The price of these audio books has come down as the market for them increased. Now we are seeing an emerging market for e-book readers (I own two, by the way). Amazon says that their e-book market for new releases is approximately equal to that of similar hard-copy editions. I don’t understand your leap of logic to say that “if everyone goes to electronic format books, then your paper books will be VERY expensive.” Why will paper cost much, much more? Why will there be [less] trees grown? If anything, won’t fewer trees be harvested? And isn’t that good for the planet? Where will all the job losses be? And why do they have to cut prices for e-books when you can purchase one now of under $10.00?
As far as loaning an e-book to a friend, I think that will be an easy task by the end of this year. I think that even Amazon will decide to drop the DRM if Barnes and Noble and others follow in dropping encription.
The idea of the e-book reader is here to stay. Think of the number of text books that can be easily edited to bring them up to date is students all read on an e-book reading device. Think of all the paper that won’t be tossed into a landfill. And breathe all that great O2 generated by the more trees on the planet.
E-book readers? Bring them on!
With pricing being the way it is, ebooks will only be a novelty enjoyed by a small percentage of the population. I agree with Sam’s comments that the publisher no longer has to pay for printing, distributing, shipping, stocking, etc. But yet, why aren’t those savings passed on to consumers? My favorite Louis L’Amour western paperbacks cost $4.99 at the local bookstore, but they are still $4.99 to purchase in ebook form. And when I’m done with the paperback, I can give it to anybody else to read. I’m a criminal if I do that with an ebook. The whole ebook idea just doesn’t make sense. And with the ebook reader prices up around $300, that’s just too much to pay for a little bit of a convenience. Maybe it’s just me, but I think in today’s economy ebooks will always be a novelty for the few until prices are more reasonable.
To answer some of James questons above.
Just an extreme example(appx):
If we print 100 catologues, they will cost $4 ea
If we print 1,000 it will cost $3 ea
If we print 100,000 it will cost $0.89 ea
Mass production, costs less per unit.
If your favorite novel only sells 10,000 printed copies,
then it will cost 10x more—at least.
As far as saving trees, yes less paper used, saves trees in the
short haul. But, if the forests are idled, then you lose a whole
industry that “protects” the trees and forests (for future harvest).
Where does the money come from to hire foresters, tree planters,
biologists, fire fighters etc?
The timber/pulp(paper) industry.
I’m not saying clearcut the forest, but it’s a renewable resource,
unlike oil, that can be re-planted and grown back again.
The trees
are not gone forever like the radical Enviromentalists want you to think.
Remember how expensive paper was when you were a kid compared to a ream of paper now?
Mass production drives the costs down.
Back to the subject.
I don’t think the publishers are going to drop the
price of a book 90% to sell it to you in electronic form.
Everyone knows it’ll ‘definetly’ cost them less to publish said book…
Personally I think eBook readers are cool devices. I have nothing
against them. Paper books will hard to beat though.
I think both will co-exist