June 15, 2009

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Getting More Magazines on the Kindle The Kindle is now more than 18 months old and there are still only 24 magazines available for it. Why so few? I've heard several reasons why and the most likely ones are (a) the magazine publishers don't like the financial terms offered by Amazon and (b) they also don't want to give up control of their content (and direct customer access) to Amazon. I've got an idea that solves both these problems and would make Kindle owners everywhere much, much happier. The company I work for, O'Reilly Media, Inc., sells Kindle editions on Amazon's website. We don't rely on Amazon as our only means of access to Kindle owners though. We also sell e-book bundles on our site and those bundles feature all the popular formats including .mobi for the Kindle. Magazine publishers (and newspapers too, for that matter) should take the same approach and sell Kindle content right from their own websites. Granted, we're talking about a single block of content with a book vs. an ongoing subscription with a magazine or newspaper...and that's where things get interesting... Amazon has a document conversion service for all Kindle owners. I can e-mail a PDF to my Kindle address ([email protected]) and Amazon will convert that PDF and wirelessly send it to my Kindle. The service used to be free but now it costs 15 cents per meg for the upload. Each of the magazine issues currently on my Kindle (The New Yorker and Technology Review) are less than one meg, btw. Here's how the model would work: Each magazine website would simply add another option to their new subscriber page. This option would be for Kindle delivery. Choose it, give the magazine publisher your @kindle.com address, set your Kindle e-mail account to accept incoming messages from that magazine's server and you're done. The result is a direct relationship (again) between magazine publisher and customer; it's just that this particular customer happens to receive issues via their Kindle. That's how the front-end works, but how about the back-end? The magazine publisher could prep the issue in PDF format, send it to the customer's @kindle.com address and let Amazon do the conversion and upload work for them. Sure, Amazon gets 15 cents/meg, but each magazine publisher would simply have to figure out how much that translates to per issue and price the subscription accordingly. Btw, if you want to avoid the Amazon charges, have the subscription sent to your @free.kindle.com address and simply move the content from in-box to Kindle via USB cable. Another option is to take that last option a step further, automate it a bit, and go back to wireless delivery, like KindleFeeder now offers. As a magazine publisher you'd keep 100% of the subscription price. You'd also do away with printing and postage fees, so please keep that in mind when setting the subscription price! Finally, you could determine how much advertising you want to keep in the digital edition. Maybe you'd want to offer two plans: A higher-priced subscription with no ads and a lower-priced one with all the regular ads. As an added bonus, those ads could now have live links to the advertiser sites; good luck pulling that off in the print edition. Speaking for Kindle owners everywhere, I hope magazine publishers will follow O'Reilly's lead and start offering a direct-to-Kindle-customer subscription plan. What do you have to lose?! P.S. -- Why am I so comfortable publishing my Kindle e-mail address here? Because every spammer in the world can send messages to it and they won't get through. I give Amazon a list of acceptable incoming e-mail addresses and none of them are from spammers.
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Recent Thoughts About the Amazon Kindle I made a few notes while reading this Book Business magazine article over the weekend. It's well worth reading, btw, but here are a few items I underlined: The innovation of the Kindle was not to improve e-reading—many earlier e-readers offered a very similar reading experience—but to dramatically alter the purchasing experience through its wireless capability. So true and yet so easily forgotten. The Kindle could have simply become Newton 2.0 without this important feature. Customers come for the eInk display but Whispernet is what keeps 'em coming back. (It still blows my mind that no other Kindle competitor has figured this out...) ...obviously publishers could do better by designing online-oriented cover versions that would not only be more eye-catching and dynamic, but potentially even interactive. Another obvious but overlooked point. We're all still applying the print rules to the e-world. Just put a two-dimensional image of the print book's cover on the Kindle edition's product page and you're all set. When will we start seeing that precious screen real estate occupied by something that's much more engaging and dynamic? This analysis suggests that e-books could, as a stand-alone business, be priced far below Amazon’s current $9.99 pricing and dramatically lower than p-books. I have no doubt some e-books can be priced below $9.99. Heck, quite a few print books are already there (e.g., mass market paperbacks). I'm also a big fan of the idea that lower and lower prices will cast a much broader customer net, meaning you'll attract quite a few customers who otherwise would have ignored your product. But as Apple's iPhone App Store has proven, while there's a big difference between sales of a $4.99 app and a $9.99 app, there's a much bigger difference between a free one and a 99-cent one. Experimentation is the key here, of course, and thanks to the e-book model, it's pretty easy to make price changes on the fly. As I've also mentioned before, I think sponsorship will have a role in the e-book marketplace. Just like ads make the magazine world work, sponsorship is likely to help keep certain e-books at an irresistibly low price. Finally, I wanted to toss in another idea I'll bet Amazon will spring on us at some point. Why haven't they bothered to insert any "Where do I go from here?..." links at the end of Kindle editions? If I just read a great book by Joe Author, why aren't they inserting links to other books written by Joe Author at the end? Enable one-click buying and boom, they extend their e-commerce reach even further. If not other books by the same author, what about simply utilizing the "customers who bought this item also bought..." functionality of their website by inserting it at the end of the Kindle edition? If I just had a good experience reading this book (or magazine, or newspaper) I'm more likely to buy something else from you; why rely exclusively on email blasts and other e-marketing strategies from the 1990's? Btw, when Amazon does implement something like that last item (and they will!), they'll make even more money off it by structuring it like their other online placement/marketing campaigns. Publishers will have to pay for the privelidge to be included in these links. I'm not suggesting that's good or bad...just pointing out it's yet another way Amazon can make a few more bucks along the way (and possibly reduce the price of the Kindle hardware?...)

Joe Wikert

I'm Chief Operating Officer at OSV (www.osv.com)

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