New self-publishers organisation

A new non-profit membership society for self-published authors is ready to launch.

Kindle ebook sales stats for the UK

New Kindle ebooks sales statistics for the UK…

“sales of Kindle e-books in the last three months [of 2011] had increased five-fold in comparison to the same period in 2010″

In my experience, that’s likely to be up from a fairly low base, when compared to the volume of sales coming from the USA.

The value of Kindle free samples to academics

One of the great things about Kindle ebooks is the ability to sample. For academics and historians this is most useful in the case of anthologies of stories or books made up of academic articles on a topic. What someone like me generally wants most is the introductions to these, and one can usually get all or most of them via the “10% free sample”. For instance, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s wrist-snappingly heavy 7lb anthology, The Weird: a compendium of dark and strange stories (Atlantic, 2011), has two forewords by Michael Moorcock and the Vandermeers. I was very keen to have these, although not willing to devote two months to reading the other 750,000 words. I got both for free, by downloading the free sample.

Barnes & Noble refuses to sell any Amazon-published titles

This recent news seems bizzare anti-competitive behaviour. Barnes & Noble will refuse to sell any Amazon-published titles via its stores. But surely Amazon is now a publisher, to be treated like any other. The nub of the gripe seems to be that Amazon “continues to pull content off the market”, which seems to me to translate as: “Amazon are better than us at offering services to authors”.

From Masters degree to ebook

Many people seem to be taking higher Masters degrees these days, or considering doing so. The need for re-skilling — in the face of advancing technology and evolving business approaches — seems to make a higher degree inevitable. Some will even do more than one Masters in their life. So I was wondering how one might transform the whole process into an ebook, thereby sharing one’s knowledge and perhaps even earning enough to pay for the course fees. The student has the final dissertation to write of course, usually at around 12,000 words. But let’s say you do something with topical appeal — one of a range of criminal justice degrees for example. How then to transform the whole experience and cutting-edge knowledge gained into a 50,000 word book, one that’s likely to sell? A lot would of course rest on the choice of dissertation topic. A student would want to choose something that has a balance of topical interest, longer-term sales potential, and of course the vital element of academic approval. A perfectly valid study of the changes in the typology of cybercrimes that affect the individual and small businesses, for instance, could then be added to with case-studies, and a practical guide to individuals on how to avoid being a victim of online crime. The result might be a substantial new ebook, with academic weight and scrutiny behind it, yet having popular appeal. Of course, these days one doesn’t even have to physically attend a course and tediously and expensively travel to a classroom each day. Skype, HD webcams and other methods have made classrooms obsolete for some types of course. One can, for instance, take a criminal justice degree online or any number of other subjects online. One can even sample online courses, via courseware freebies from the likes of MIT, Harvard, and others, thus getting a feel for the suitability of the process and also if one likes the potential topic of study or not.

Why the Web needs to be curated

Amazon’s new ‘Send to Kindle…’ option

Amazon has made available new Send to Kindle desktop Windows software. It works a lot like Instapaper, but can send any file found via your Windows Explorer.

PDF features in the banner (above), but I’ve not yet seen how badly it mangles PDFs on conversion. Possibly Amazon may not try to covert at all, but rather just send PDFs ‘as found’?

You also get a ‘Send to Kindle…’ option in all “Print” dialogues, including that of your Web browser.

Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading

A major new study, Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading. Four take-away facts…

* Market share for ebooks was 16% at the end of summer 2011.

* 51% of ebook buyers don’t buy direct from their ereader device. My guess would be that this is because a good 50% of users simply can’t figure out how to wrangle the setup of the wireless connection to their wi-fi router.

* eReader owners spend more annually on books after they get their device.

* Academic and technical books are twice as likely to be purchased for an iPad as for a Kindle.

Kindle format 8 released

The new Kindle Format 8 is here, for ebook developers and authors…

“offering a wide range of new features and enhancements – including HTML5 and CSS3 support publishers can use to format all types of books. Many of the formatting features available in word processing programs like Microsoft Word will now appear in your Kindle books, including tables, highlighting, colored text, text wrapped around images, bulleted lists, and more.”

At the moment all this whiz-bang-ery is only for the Kindle Fire tablet. But…

“in the coming months KF8 will be rolled out to our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices as well as our free Kindle reading apps.”

“Lastest generation” sounds annoyingly like the Kindle 3 ereader users won’t get support for it?

Actual Kindle sales figures, officially from Amazon

Amazon has so far kept very quite about Kindle sales. But it has just released a categorical number. Amazon has sold “more than 1 million Kindles per week over the last three weeks”. Now, that’s Kindle readers and Kindle Fire (its iPad wannabe) combined. But if those are new-user sales and each of those buys an average of just five ebooks in 2012, that should boost ebook sales by 15 million copies or so. Which would be nice to see in the UK market, where in my experience sales have collapsed compared to the ever-rising sales coming from the USA.