What happens to book sales when the digital version is given away for free? “The present study indicates that there is a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases. However, free digital books did not always equal increased sales” ie data are non-conclusive.
Some interesting new collaborative writing/editing websites: Book Oven and Bite-Size Edits.
To celebrate Read an Ebook Week, my latest release, Bastard’s Grace, will be half-price at Smashwords between March 7 and 14 (and possibly other ebook retailers too).
The Aurealis Awards winners for 2009 were announced a few weeks ago (oh yes, always up-to-date news on this site): lots of Australian SF/F books to add to your reading list if you hadn’t got to them yet, and it’s always interesting to read the judges’ comments on the almost-winners.
The February Bullsheet and other Australian SF organisers are doing a big push for Australian authors this year. If you’re eligible to nominate someone for a Hugo Award, why not make it an Australian? To help you get started, Twelfth Planet Press is letting you try some of their publications free.
The Perth Writers Festival line-up is out. Lures for me include Saturday afternoon’s It’s Not Just the Cover… and From Cyber to…?, Sunday’s Escaping the Pigeon Hole, and, weirdly enough, the Haircuts by Children, which is exactly what it says it is. Surrender to an 8-year-old with scissors…
A great set of tips [from Book Thingo] for writing Australian characters — add your own tips in the comments. And they also have an Aussie Authors challenge for the year too [hosted by Book Lover Book Reviews, as per the clarification in the comments].
And via that site, I discovered that ebooks.com, one of the oldest ebook retailers, is actually based in Western Australia (their prices in are in US dollars though).
And, lastly, this article exactly encapsulates why I’m puzzled as to why Amazon was so universally vilified in last weekend’s Macmillan debacle, especially by authors. Yeah, it behaved like a dick, but authors — you (generally) won’t see a single extra cent when publishers put their ebook prices up…you might even lose sales as readers turn to the cheaper options. The whole situation smacks of things the big companies know that we the reader don’t, all related to the iPad/iBook release.
In personal news, I got a very nice email from a very nice reader who really enjoyed my latest book, The Frog Prince’s Daughters. Readers: make an author’s a day — email them to let them know you like their work.
eBooksale this weekend: 50% off on all titles purchased on AllRomanceeBooks.com and OmniLit.com if you use the code SBTBARe1. My romantic fantasy book, The Frog Prince’s Daughters, is usually only $4, but you can try it for $2 if you buy it today.
The big news in ebook world is of course the release of the Apple iPad. It’s such big news there seems little point linking to any of the thousands of articles about it, since I’m sure you’ve read about it already. It has, as usual, garnered the usual backlash and griping that results when any product gets this much hype. [Some of the complaints are just silly -- it's too big? That's what the Touch is for. It hasn't got a camera? Why the hell do people want cameras in every device anyway? It doesn't have a phone in it? That's because it's not actually meant to be a phone; it can be used with the Skype app; and who planned to hold something that size up to their head anyway? The name is dumb? Did iPod sound all that sensible when it first came out?] I read the same sort of complaints about the Touch, and yet the Touch is incredibly successful among the people it was actually designed to be sold to…The real test comes from real use of the iBook app and store, and I look forward to reading those specific reviews.
Teleread has a link to and commentary on an essay about Picard’s Syndrome, the attitude that physical books are better than ebooks. Teleread is great to follow if you’re interested in ebooks and ebook reading.
It’s almost a year old, but it’s a bloody good analysis of what’s going on with the adoption of ebooks, from someone who was there the first time round.
And Amazon/Kindle offer a 70% royalty split for authors. Also, they’re now allowing international publishers onto the Kindle store.
And to continue the ebook theme, Smashwords, some months ago, published its stats on which ebook formats are popular on its site. It’s seems very hard to find hard data on how each format is selling, so this is nice, even if it’s old news now.
An SMH opinion piece in love with the Kindle. Some lively comments…including the point that the Kindle is not the only e-reader out there. But the Kindle’s ease of use is hard to beat.
You know how women are supposed to go nuts for handbags and shoes? Well, okay, I have a little thing for handbags, but what I really, really have a thing for are handmade notebooks, and these ones are cute and eco-friendly too. Remember, writers, your little notebook is a tax-deductible expense.
The big publishers are continuing their creeping progress towards acceptance of new technologies, with Penguin Book’s release of a try-before-buy iPhone app for new SF/F book The Left Hand of God. It’s got a great blurb…and the chapters certainly held my interest…unfortunately, paying $20 for an ebook I can get in physical form for less than $15 kind of lost my interest (I’m not a pay-more-for-instant-gratification kind of gal — I like going to the bookstore). To be fair, books in Australia do cost more than $20 so we are getting the printing cost subtracted with that app price.
In a post last week I said there was no dedicated e-bookstore in Australia, thinking specifically for fiction books. I lied. eBookBOP sells both ebooks and ebook readers. They sell in four formats: pdf, ePub, lit (Microsoft reader) and Mobi (which is similar, as far as I am aware, to the Kindle format, but I’m not sure can be read by the Kindle).
And there is also Read Without Paper, which launched on 1 December, again supporting ePub (with Adobe Digital Editions DRM – cannot be read on Stanza) and pdf. (By the way, Dymocks is also meant to sell ebooks via their website, but I’ve never come across any). Apparently, this site got so much interest from international customers they added books that aren’t available to Australians. Most of them are…but still, what is the point of having an Australian (and NZ) bookstore if we’re still going to get that freaking geographical restriction message? At least filter the selections.
Both sites have limited range – I searched for a couple of books I know I can get from the Kindle store, and they weren’t here – but those books aren’t on Fictionwise either. They don’t have the exact same range as each other – Read Without Paper is affliated to Overdrive, an ebook distributor; the other big distributor is Lightning Source, so that might be who eBookBop is with. They also suffer from the same problem as the overseas ebook retailers: they don’t give sample chapters, they assume you already know what you want to buy rather than that you’re browsing.
However, this is a promising move. Next step: integration to Stanza. Since they’re DRM ePub, which is not currently able to be read by Stanza, I can’t try them out. If anyone else wants to try them, I can highly recommend The Magicians, from Read Without Paper.
This SMH article says the popular gifts this year were books – figures from the Australian Retailers Association show that 70% of seasonal shoppers were buying books, compared to 45% for iPods. Did you get a book for Christmas this year?
Steal these books, an essay about the prevalence of theft in bookstores (digital piracy only slightly touched on). It says only 40% of books read are bought, and only 28% are bought new. How would you even measure that?
The TLS [UK Times Literary Supplement] has its books of the year (from late November).
Shortcovers changed their name to Kobo. It’s usually a bad move to completely change names, but this might help them compete with Stanza (I admit to having both apps on my Touch but very rarely accessing Shortcovers; I always go to my Stanza reads first) and widen their appeal across other mobile app groups.
Except they don’t seem to have changed overly much and the first time I tried to read a book preview-and-purchase, I got the dreaded geographical-restriction message. Sorry, author of Inside a Dog, I would have bought your book for $9.99 off Kobo just to try them out, but I wasn’t allowed and that’s irritated me so much I’m not going to go find you at the print bookstore (I’ll read you at the library instead). Is this a publisher-failed-to-secure-worldwide-digital-rights issue or an Australian-restrictions-on-parallel-imports issue? It certainly seems to affect Australians an awful lot.
Semi-related, Borders gets its act together to offer ebooks, partnered in some fashion with Kobo. Let’s all hope they won’t come up with yet another format.
The Independent lists its heroes and villains of the literary world. They mean actual people/entities, not fictional characters…as you would expect, Google and Amazon make both lists.
The Australian Publishers Association are calling for submission for their 2010 Book Design Awards – for Australian books published this year. What are your favourite cover designs from this year’s reading?
I notice on the APA website that they are advertising a symposium called “The Digital Revolution: Publishing in the 21st Century”. In 2010. About 10 years into the 21st Century. And definitely a little slow on the old digital revolution. That question I just asked, about why Australians keep getting thwarted in their ebook access? I’m now guessing it’s because Australian publishers often hold the Australian digital rights (why, why, why sell digital rights regionally, especially to a country like Australia which has no dedicated ebook store? What possible justification is there for making an electronic downloadable product available (or not) by region?*) and they’re still holding symposiums to work out what to do with them.
NSW State Library have released a report about scenarios for their public libraries in 20 years [pdf]. This is actually a really well laid-out and interesting report.
Arstechnica Weird Science says:
Give some physicists a collection of classical literature, and what do you get? If the New Journal of Physics is to be believed, a discussion of Zipf’s law, Heap’s law, and phrases like “The estimated γ values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing text length.” The gist of the matter seems to be that authors introduce new words into their works with a frequency that remains stable across all of their output, regardless of how their subject matter or styles change over the course of their literary development.
*Yes, I know it protects local publishers in the same way the parallel import restrictions are meant to. For those who aren’t aware: the right to publish printed book is leased off the author on a region-by-region basis, which gives the publishers in each region the ability to cash in on the big sellers, as opposed to one publisher in one region getting all the dough. This in turn lets them support the vast majority of authors who do not make the bestseller list. The same logic applies to electronic books: if the first publisher of a book is able to snatch up worldwide digital rights, they get all the profit from the ebook sales – not a huge problem now, but will become a problem as the ebook market grows. However, this traditional approach is not useful for readers in countries like Australia who are being shut out of the ebook market because the local publishers are apparently failing to act on electronic rights, nor does it help the authors who are losing out on international ebook sales.
An example of why ebook formats need to be clearly labelled – especially if changes are being introduced.
[title of show]‘s Nine People’s Favourite Thing. An ode to micro-audiences.
This article asks what many readers are asking: why shouldn’t ebooks be $9.99, or, more to the point, why do publishers expect us to pay more for a limited and vulnerable format than for a paperback?
An OP writer called Kindle owners Nazis. Not going to link to the post because I figure he got enough attention and since his argument amounted to “Nazis used high-tech stuff, therefore all high tech stuff is bad” and “Nazis burned books, and digital books are the equivalent of burning books”, it’s probably a waste of your time to read it. Go pet a kitten or something instead.
Bali is having a book festival. The ultimate beach read?
