Post Xmas Kindle sales statistics

Unsurprisingly, it’s said that Kindle sales dropped off a cliff after the Christmas / New Year period — at least according to one canny business analyst who has been tracking e-ink manufacturer inventories and sales…

“he estimates that Amazon was selling around 7 million Kindles per quarter last year. In Q1, he thinks they sold only 1.75 million.”

Actually, only 1.75 million doesn’t sound that bad. Cliff…? or speed bump?

I guess the real figures should be about how many of those holiday season Kindles are gathering dust on a shelf or in a drawer, and how many are in active use. My own Jan-May experience on sales suggests that UK users may have gifted Kindles in bulk, but those Kindles are seeing little use for ebook purchases. Meanwhile, the USA sales are doing well.

Kindle Kounter

A handy new Bookmarklet for Kindle publishers. It shows the total number of books sold per month, on your Amazon KDP dashboard.

Readability vs. Instapaper

I nearly swopped from Instapaper to Readability today, for reading newspaper and magazine articles on the Kindle. Readability added Kindle support in late summer 2011. But after a whole load of rigmarole, the Readability service just wouldn’t work for me.

I love the Instapaper format, but it’s getting too flaky about what it will and won’t send. Half the time, four or five articles are missing from my weekly bundle. Other times, article headers come through, but the body of the article is missing. And yes, I did make sure to keep the number of articles under the threshold number for the free version of the service.

So I tried setting up Readability for use with the Kindle. It’s a bit of a hassle. You need to do it all in this order…

1. Sign up for a Readability account at their website.

2. Go to your email in-box, find the new Readability email, click on the link it contains, to activate the account.

3. Install the browser addon.

4. Add the email address kindle@readability.com to your Account | Manage Your Kindle | Personal Document Settings | “Approved Personal Document E-mail List”.

5. Log in at the http://www.readability.com website, with your new sign-up details.

6. Use this page to tell Readability what your Kindle’s delivery email address is.

7. Go to Account settings and make sure “Privacy” | “Hide reading list” is ticked.

8. Set your keyboard shortcut in the options settings of the Readability browser add-on. You can also use the browser toolbar “armchair” graphic, which drops a menu that includes “Send to Kindle”.

But after doing all of this, I just could not get my Kindle to receive any Readability articles. Something obviously went wrong, but I’ve no idea what. Articles sent via Amazon’s own “Send to Kindle” print driver came through fine. Sorry, Readability. I really wanted to swop. I correctly and carefully jumped through all the hoops to set up the service. I triple-checked all my setup settings and email spellings. But you let me down at the most vital point — delivery of the actual article.

/Sigh/ Oh well, uninstalled. I guess it’s back to wrestling with Instapaper.

Boffins cook up a fake-review hunter bot

Software boffins at the University of Illinois at Chicago are working on ways to detect fake Amazon reviews. And they’re developing an algorithm for a software bot, sponsored by a Google Faculty Research Award. They try to detect groups of people working in cahoots, by looking for obvious things such as:

* a sudden rash of glowing five-star reviews for a brand new ebook, suggesting the author has rounded up his family and friends to boost the book;

* a sudden clustering of good reviews (all reviews appearing in a four-day window, although I guess this could legitimately be a ‘cascade’ effect arising from a genuine good review);

* and they’re using stylometrics to detect similarities in language across different reviews, which might suggest they were all written by the same person under different names.

eBooks are changing the rights landscape for authors and publishers

An intellectual property lawyer suggests…

“Under older, more traditional contracts, the rights would revert when [a book] went out-of-print, meaning it was no longer being distributed in print form. Now, with print-on-demand and ebooks, it’s becoming irrelevant. I think what we need to do is create a new structure for those rights to revert back to the author — that could be based on some sort of minimum sales threshold and that the book is no longer available through the major online retail channels.”

Nekhet – second in the Dreamline series

Available now is a welcome new sequel to Reswyt, a lengthy novel that I reviewed here at the start of March 2012. Nekhet is the title of the second new volume in David Mayer‘s epic Dreamline series. Like the first book, it’s a work intended for intelligent and well-read teenagers who have developed a taste for high-quality fantasy. Despite the presence of talking animals the series departs from the wizards/dwarves/elves cliché, into much fresher and more fascinating areas — such as the conflicts and complexities inherent in the meeting of technology and magic. From the opening chapter Nekhet clearly announces that it is far superior to the current publisher-driven “young adult” pap. I’ll spare you a plot recitation (it’s available on the Amazon page, though be warned that spoilers abound in it), since I don’t want to spoil the journey for readers who enjoyed Reswyt or who might be coming fresh to the Dreamline series. Suffice it to say that you really do need to read the first book, before you read this one. You’ll find here more finely crafted writing, more baroquely rich world-building, all woven around ideas about dreams and Ancient Egyptology. The fantastical is again deftly contrasted with an American High School setting, and an emotionally-faithful account of adolescence.

This second book opens with a dramatic and memorable account of a soul-harvesting night-voyage through the skies by the god Ra. It’s a beautiful and dense chapter which clearly shows why novels can play more glitteringly in the mind than any of the baubles offered by Hollywood or videogames. The richness of the opening of this second book may be challenging for some younger readers, but older teenagers who have read and enjoyed Reswyt should have no problems. All the basic set-up has been done by the first novel, and now the second can plunge us straight into a complex set of plot lines strung across richly-drawn worlds. I’m currently only some way into this new book, but already the plot is spiralling outward into a complex tapestry. My experience of Reswyt shows that David Mayer will have no problem in gathering all these threads together again for a satisfying ending.

Nekhet is available now for the Kindle on Amazon USA and Amazon UK.

Kindle un-censors written erotica

Excellent news from PayPal. Rather than effectively censoring perfectly-legal written erotica, by withdrawing vendor payment services for it, PayPal will now instead only refuse to offer a payments service for novels which contain actual graphic images that it regards as obscene or potentially illegal. A very sensible move, because otherwise they would have found themsleves in a legal quagmire that could ultimately have seen them forced to censor The Bible.

We haff ways of making you pay…

Why does everyone in government in Europe (except the British) just not understand the Internet? Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using snippets of their material. But surely they’re already effectively paying them, in terms of masses of free traffic that the publishers can then monetise with advertising.

Three in every ten U.S. adults read ebooks

Some new statistics. Almost three in every ten U.S. adults (28% of the population) are now using an ereader or tablet device “to read books”. The results are a new Feb 2012 Harris Poll (2,056 adults surveyed).

GlueJar

GlueJar is an interesting new start-up. Basically: fans who want a book to be more widely read, get together and buy out the author. Then they make the book free.