eReader Wars

Woke this morning dreaming about digital eReaders. In my dream a company called Digital Mayflower had been the pioneer in eReaders, which is funny because when I woke and looked it up online, there really is a company called Digital Mayflower, though in a different technology category. The trigger for this dream was an Editor’s Pick article that I read yesterday in Wired magazine about eReaders.

About Wired Magazine
In 1994 I took a one day class about the Internet at U of M, Duluth in part because I wanted to be ready for the coming technology revolution. There were many highlights that day, chief of which was searching through libraries in Berlin and Pisa via Archie, doing Veronica searches. When I got home, abstracts for several articles were magically downloaded onto my 20 meg Mac… Right then I knew something powerful was happening.

The second highlight was less profound, but quite practical. The instructor said there’s a new magazine all of us should be reading, and he showed us his copy of Wired. I went out and bought a copy and have been reading it ever since.

Back to the Story
So yesterday I was paging through the January issue which I came in the mail earlier this past week. In the midst of a hundred other topics was this Editor's Pick article by Tim Carmody. In Carmody's estimation, the surprise winner is... the Kobo Touch.

Huh? Never even heard of it. But I'm sure they will make hay with the endorsement, because Wired magazine is no longer a fledgling start-up. It is a million reader powerhouse whose recommendations and endorsements have real clout.

For the record, you really don't need an eReader to read eBooks. Browsers like Chrome can download books from the Amazon.com store or the Barnes and Noble eUniverse. But as Carmody points out, "When it comes to book-length reading, no glowing LCD tablet screen can hold a backlight to the eye-saving e-ink of these readers."

Other eReaders compared and featured included the Nook Simple Touch, the Sony Reader PRS-T1 and the Kindle from Amazon. And why it matters which eReader you choose? Well, the Kindle and Nook each have special relationships with the "mother ship" and the more Kindles there are, the more Amazon sales will soar. Ditto for B&N for buyers of Nooks.

Despite Wired's influence, Kindles have been selling at the brisk rate of a million per day as we head into Christmas, undoubtedly due to the low price point of less than a hundred dollars per unit. Nook countered by lowering the price on its own eReader.

To best understand the eReader wars, picture the theater industry. Hollywood made the movies, but there was a time when no one could view them without the theaters. The distribution network gave the film industry its power. Likewise modern ePublishing. B&N and Amazon maintain the inventories, but the distribution systems determine which resource people will use to buy their eBooks from.

For this reason questions were raised in various blogs regarding the article's selection of the Kobo. Why? Because something is at stake. And here's the first article I found in response: Paul Biba's short and too the point Wired’s Tim Carmody stacking the deck against Amazon ereaders? Slanted review warning! It's a really concise criticism that you'll really want to read if you're still undecided between a Nook, Kindle, Sony and now Kobo.

The heart of Biba's beef is summed up in a paragraph that appears after listing the four eReaders reviewed by Carmody.

What’s going on here? Carmody is taking a completely different category non-touch Kindle and comparing it to three higher-end touch ereaders. In addition, one of the “Cons” he lists of the low end Kindle is that it has ads. This same version of the Kindle is available without ads, but he chose not to mention this and then decides to use the ad version and list it as a con.

Biba's barb ends, "Shame on you, Wired."

On the very same day Carmody posted a few comments of his own at another site.

The January issue of Wired has my first article/review in the print magazine, a roundup of new e-readers. We didn't get to include the new Kindle Touch or the Kindle Fire, because they weren't released until a month ago (magazines take a long time to make!). But I was still surprised at how much I liked the Kobo Touch and how disappointed I was with the $79 entry-level E Ink Kindle.

Kobo put up scans of two pages of the review. (I don't even have my print copy yet! The world is crazy.) Still, very happy to be in my first issue of the magazine — and I'm already writing something for my next issue now.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other what eReader you choose. I already have my Kindle and love its ease of use. What matters more to me is that people continue to enjoy reading. The high volume of eBooks being sold seems to indicate that there are still a lot of folks with this passion.

Books are a labor of love for those who write them, and authors find no small measure of satisfaction in connecting with readers who appreciate their work, in whatever form it is encountered. As an author myself, I am not very particular whether you buy my novel The Red Scorpion at Amazon.com or B&N. What matters to me is that you enjoy the ride.

Here's the page to visit for a brief introduction to my four current books. And if you get an eReader for Christmas, start anywhere.

Book Beat: Tablets and eReaders See Increased Market Share

This month's Internet Retailer arrived yesterday and it seems impossible to not mention a few stats that the editors had assembled at the back of the mag. I like graphs and stats because they can compress a whole lot of data into a tight, easy to grasp image. A good graph really is worth a thousand words.

The title of the page reads, "E-readers outpace tablets in sales to consumers." The first chart shows how rapidly the e-reader and Tablet devices have been funneling into the market. In 2009 only 2% of the population owned an E-reader like the Kindle. And this is hard to believe but Tablets like the iPad did not even exist yet.

Think about it. Doesn't it seem like iPads have been here forever?

A year later 3% of all Americans, according to Pew Research, owned a tablet. Just a few months later it was 4% and 5% owned a Kindle. By May of this year, this number had grown to 12% owning e-readers and 8% having tablets.

Why is this? First, no doubt it's due in part to price. The iPad has been a $500 item during this span and Kindles around one-third of that. But the versatility of the iPad is worth that extra chunk of change, since Kindles are essentially only good for reading books (Like!) and browsing the Amazon.com online book store. (OK, yes, there are some free games, too.)

A second chart on the page shows the E-reader and tablet market share. Then the third chart shows how cell phones still rule, with 83% of U.S. adults owning one. 57% own a desktop computer, and 56% own a laptop.

But its the growth of the e-readers that is interesting to me. The number of adults who have e-readers (Kindles, Nooks, etc.) actually doubled from November 2010 to May 2011. And with the Kindle dropping to below $100 it shouldn't be long before we see this market penetration double yet again.

What's on your Santa wish list? My guess is that there will be a lot of Kindles under Christmas trees this year.

One of the more interesting stats on the page is the market penetration by race of these two electronic devices. 11% of whites own e-readers and 7% own tablets. African Americans are a smaller percentage, but in the Hispanic community e-readers are owned by 15% of all adults, and so are tablets.

Naturally I have a vested interest in following some of these stats. In September I began publishing my own eBooks through N&L Publishing. This weekend my associate TJ Lind will upload The Breaking Point and Other Stories, my third collection of short fiction, all priced at $1.99 apiece, joining my debut novel The Red Scorpion. All of our books are available on Kindle, Nook and soon the Apple iStore.

An article in Tuesday's edition of PC World outlines some of the reasons why e-readers have become big winners in the tablet wars.

As e-reader prices plummeted, features improved. Released two years after its predecessor, the Kindle 2 was 50 percent thinner, improved battery life by 85 percent, ballooned storage to 2GB from 256MB, and showed 165 shades of gray versus only four shades in the original. Another two years went by and the third-generation Kindle improved on that -- two ounces lighter, 50 percent clearer contrast -- until today, when the Kindle Touch barely resembles the original in looks, feel, or function. Similarly, when the Nook Simple Touch debuted, it blew the original Nook out of the water at more than 4.5 ounces lighter, 25 percent faster, and a huge, two month battery life. Sony, which also just joined the tablet wars, updated its Reader to version PRS-T1, which retails for $149 and is the lightest of the bunch at 5.9 ounces.

Near the end of the article there's a humorous picture of a box of cereal with a big starburst proclaiming "FREE NOOK INSIDE!" That's certainly the direction pricing has been going. Ultimately B&N and Amazon.com are in the book business, and as movie theaters were to Hollywood film producers, so these distribution channels need to be out in the streets in order for their digital wares to find distribution.


VETERANS DAY SPECIAL

There are still some who do not own a Kindle or Nook and prefer reading the old fashioned way. I won't hold it against you. Your kids make poke fun some at you some day, but I won't.

Today is Veteran's Day and I can't let it pass without mentioning my father-in-law's book,

AND THERE SHALL BE WARS
World War II Diaries and Memoirs
536 pages. Illustrated with 178 original photos and documents.

Available at Savage Press:

And There Shall Be Wars.

Read On!

Unremembered Histories

In 1991 my short story "The Breaking Point" won the Arrowhead Regional Fiction Competition. The unexpected rose had a thorn in it. This was the first year that the winning story was not published.

It's strange how those things go. After this, repeated submissions to literary magazines and other publications were perpetually returned. I started to conclude that publication of an unknown writer's fiction seemed to be a futile pursuit. I did not have the postage or the motivation to continue that route and instead chose to share my stories on a website that I created in for that purpose, among others. Three of my stories were eventually translated into Croatian, Russian and French.

For the most part the stories remained dormant as my energies had been directed into other pursuits... until this past winter. An email from Portuguese artist Margarida Sardinha reminded me that I had poured a lot into my fiction, had been serious about it and took great pains to craft stories worthy of any collection. The stories were things of value and needed to be treated that way.

My very first impression is that there's a certain style in some ways similar to Franz Kafka which is good and intense - very mysterious for one doesn't know where the whole thing is going to go... but is sure that there's a message to be captured from the many moments stated in the short sentences that are all poignant to the story. Perhaps what I want to say is that I feel the work to be extremely existentialist in a serious way and not in an ironic one - best portrayed by Sartre.

Also, there's an enormous spiritual and ethical awareness in your writing which is not directly implied in Kafka's work but if one reads him under the light of the Jewish religious upbringing he had like Harold Bloom pointed out, one will find it there, something that is completely ruled out in Sartre's views. Yours, generally speaking and only from what I've read so far, is slightly more lyrical or poetic if you will, but carries that acute seriousness and extreme loss of hope and faith (common to Kafka) only you give it a try in explaining it, be it searching for religious/spiritual arguments or other author's references which I very much sympathize with because it becomes a "loss of hope when hope is not all lost"... And there you achieve something great for the stories are open cycles (not dead-ends like Kafka), they become allegories, which by definition are circles constantly closing and opening on themselves. You match Borges here beautifully. I also like very much how you build the stories to show the two sides of the same coin without being preachy or moralist, again this duality which has been around since the beginning of time, is explored in a very simple and engaging way enabling us to breathe and reflect when needed; for although the stories are of an existential character they are mostly of an extrovert attitude, in the sense that the reader understands what the character is feeling by what he says and not by some introvert description of how he feels which in my modest opinion is extremely liberating and contemporary - reminding me of Eco in some ways and of Plato's simple dialogues full of meaning and hidden messages.

Maybe this is a very simplistic way of putting it and I know you are influenced by many other writers and not necessarily by Kafka or the others I mention here, but still as I'm meant to humbly and with all respect say what I think in these comments I hope you take it as a personal view that is only "simply another view" and not set in stone in any way.

Ms. Sardinha's commentary set in motion a renewed desire to see the stories brought to a wider public. As the year progressed a pathway opened up and the launch of N&L Publishing has created the platform from which several books will be launched this fall. N&L Publishing is a collaboration with TJ Lind, a high school student with an iPad attached to his fingertips.

Currently we are in the final stages of preparing The Red Scorpion, my debut novel, for publication. It's starting to feel like we're close, aiming to launch in September. The three volumes of stories will roll out on the heels of that release.

Unrembered Histories is a compilation of six stories with a supernatural twist. The collection will feature:
Two Acts That Changed the World
The Empty Space
Duel of the Poets
Lu Lee
Unremembered History
The Nonsense Room

This volume will sell for $1.99 on Kindle and Nook. And I'm fairly confident that they will make you hungry for more.