Blood Lust for Books

When I was at BEA earlier this summer, I picked up a few galleys and books to read. 

OK, if you were with me or saw me at the show, you are falling over laughing right now.  I’m well known as someone who cannot pass by a free book.  I have been known to resort to crawling through the show floor while I carry 30 or so new books on my back like a literary sherpa.  This year, I had so many, I had to have them sent back with the convention shipment.  I heard it was, ahem, a large box.  A Very Large Box.  All caps.

Anyhow, among the galleys were a bunch of teenage vampire books.  I had no idea this was a whole genre in the teen book market.   I’ve always said I’m a sucker for a good gothic novel (sucker…get it?).  Apparently, the craze was started by the Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” books.  I hadn’t heard of her or the books before, but those were the first ones I picked up.  I really liked them, and was excited to see the 4th book was coming out this month.  Sure, they’re “teen” books, but it’s not like I get a lot of free reading time these days for the deep stuff, and these were entertaining and fun.

The 4th and final book in the series, “Breaking Dawn” publishes tomorrow, but many bookstores are having midnight release parties in an effort to capture some of the Harry Potter mojo.  Today I read in PWthat ebook customers won’t be able to have their own midnight madness parties - the publisher, Little Brown, is delaying release of the ebook version to 24 hours after the print edition has dropped.  The reasoning they give is a little lame - they want to make sure that everyone has equal access to the book.  If the ebook released at midnight, someone on the West coast could get a jump on reading it online early than someone in the same time zone could get the print copy.

Seriously?  That’s the best they could come up with?  That’s beyond ridiculous.  Why should ebook customers be penalized for being adopters of technology?  Shouldn’t they be able to sit at home and download their hot new book at the time others have access to it?  Even my West coast peeps would agree wtih that one.  Not only should they have not done that, they should, in my opinion, have given ebook customers a 24 hour or more ADVANCE on purchasing.  Why not?  Don’t we want to encourage sales of ebooks and purchases of ebook readers?  Hachette, incidentally my least favorite employer ever, did say that they would try to manage these situations more efficiently in the future, but you have to wonder why they overthought this and managed to piss of all the Kindle, Sony eReader and other customers out there. 

Me, I’ve got a copy coming to me from my local non-chain bookstore.  Just hope I can find some spare time this weekend to read it.

“Sree Advice” takes on eBook readers

Sree Sreenivasan from WNBC here in NY did a story this morning comparing the Kindle to the Sony eBook reader.  You can view the video and the article here. 

Short story is he likes both of them, but would love price reductions to spur more widespread adoption. 

Kindle me

If you’re considering buying Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, or just want to hear what people are saying about them, our publisher and blogger Joe Wikert has set up a special Kindleblog called Kindleville.  Be sure to check it out as it looks to be shaping up as a must-read.  I’m reading it because I want to see if noted cheapskate Wikert is shelling out the $400 to become an early adopter of this product.  The man who changes his own oil is not necessarily the target audience for Kindle but who knows?

A Rush & A Push & The Land Is Ours

In a virtual land grab in the e-content arena, Amazon’s finally launched their long-awaited eBook reader today.  It’s called Kindle and it retails for $399.  The page on Amazon is richly detailed and should give you a lot of information on the reader.   If you want a demo of it, Stephen Levy does one on Newsweek.com.  In the video, it appears in parts that he’s viewing Kindle through the famous Steve Jobs RDF, but admittedly, it does look like a great product.  It’s such a big deal, Jeff Bezos is even gracing the front page of Newsweek’s print edition.

Now, let’s say I am overcome with gadget lust and decide to go on Amazon click the buy button to get a Kindle into my hot little hand.  I have a reader coming!  But I need something to read.  I need CONTENT.  Scroll down the page on Amazon to see what’s available, I see that I can buy most books for $9.99.  Sheesh, that seems a little steep, but I will suck it up and take one for the team, for the good of the entire publishing industry.  What’s next?  Look there, it says you can get access to newspapers, magazines and even blogs on this thing!  And they cost how much?  It’s a case of nickel and diming you, and then you start to do the math and tally this all up.  Thankfully, I don’t have to as ZDNet did…

As I scrolled down through the product page I couldn’t help but start adding up how high the monthly fees for this thing could possibly be. There are monthly subscriptions for newspapers from US$9.99 to US$14.99, magazines at US$1.99 and US$2.99, blogs (yes free blogs) for US$0.99 each per month, and Word document and photo email attachment support for US$0.10 each. I think the device hardware is a bit steep to start with, but you could easily be paying a monthly subscription cost that dwarfs the hardware cost over a rather short period of time.

Yikes!  That’s what kills the acquisition of these gadgets for me.  The whole monthly subscription model dooms me every time when I try to make the case to Mr. IT that we should be early adopters.  Same reason why I still don’t have TiVo (I know I know).  Mr IT can’t handle the idea of yet another subscription that you have to pay for.  He gladly bought the iPod for me because for about 99% of what’s there, it’s stuff I had already, no monthly fee charged.  I’m not keen to pay $400 to have nothing on there, so I’d have to pony up for some content, and that just won’t be pretty. 

From the looks of the device, it’s a beauty and it hopefully will change our reading habits.  I’d love to say I’m jumping right on board.  But not for me, not yet, and not at that price.  Who knows if someone like an Audible might come on and bundle the readers with an all you can eat subscription kind of model?  That would work for me, and I probably would pay $400 for that kind of feature.