Nook fails to save Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble, America's biggest book retailer, is in trouble with declining sales of both print books and ebooks through its Kindle-clone ebook reader, the Nook.

"Retail sales from the company’s bookstores and its Web site, BN.com, decreased 10.9 percent from the comparable nine-week holiday period a year earlier, to $1.2 billion, the company reported. More worrisome for the long-term future of the company, sales in the Nook unit that includes e-readers, tablets, digital content and accessories decreased 12.6 percent over the same period, to $311 million." (NY Times)

We were very interested to see the Nook being advertised on TV before Christmas, with its differentiator being its unique nightlight feature. Except it's not unique, there's a Kindle with a backlit display too. And a Kobo. And of course, an iPad is nothing but backlit, which would be useful if you could hold the thing up for more than a few minutes at a time.

B&N's Nook has a problem: Amazon's Kindle has been for sale in the UK since 2009. Kindle has a 3 year lead on Nook.

In the UK, you can only buy ebooks for the Nook from WHSmith, however, "Underlying sales at WH Smith have continued to fall in the first 10 weeks of the retailer’s financial year." (FT)

So far, we've seen nothing to slow Amazon's tightening grip on the supply chain...

Why All the Fuss About Books?

With Amazon pushing the Kindle and WH Smith pushing the Kobo in a battle for first place under the Christmas tree, a lot of people are asking what the big fuss about paperback books is. Surely people read for the content of the book, and therefore an ebook reader is a no-brainer? Why harp on about ebooks meaning the death of the printed book? So what?

Some people would be cynical and say that the big publishers are so tied into the print production business model that they can't exit gracefully and still protect their profits.

However, I have a different view to offer you that explains the reason behind our love affair with the printed book.

Consider what we had before the advent of the printing press: Nothing. There was no unified written language. Symbolic languages were the property of royalty and priests. Knowledge could only be passed down through word of mouth or the equivalent of cave paintings. People couldn't even do simple multiplication because there was no written language with which to effectively represent numbers.

The printing press was our very first attempt, as a society, to make language accessible to all. The printed book represents knowledge torn away from the select few and made available to the masses. The printed book represents freedom; not just freedom of knowledge but freedom of a society.

So you'll have to forgive our love of printed books, they have a very special place in our history.

They're At It Again

According to The Guardian:

"A class-action lawsuit has been filed in the US alleging that Apple and five major publishers "colluded ... to illegally fix prices" of ebooks."

Here we go again. The big publishers, in this case HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster are accused of conspiring with Apple to set prices and force Amazon out of its 'cut prices to win market share and expect the publisher to take the hit' business model.

The complaint centres on the agency model – used by Apple for iTunes and by most major publishers for ebook sales – in which the publisher, rather than the retailer, sets the retail price of ebooks.

It's interesting, because what they say about the agency model makes it sound as if the publishers are calling the shots. Not so.

Here's the way it works. Normally, we set the cover price and the retail discount level, and retailers can sell the book for whatever they want. Makes no difference to us if they make any money on it, we still charge them the same wholesale price.

But with agency pricing, we set the end user price, and the retailer, in this case Apple, takes their margin out of that. Essentially, their retail margins are protected by the fact that they tell us how much profit they want and we then have to price the book to allow us, and the author, to make some money too.

So agency pricing is not in the publisher's interests at all. Nor the authors. Guess who it benefits? Oh yes, Apple.

We have an iPad. Most of the time, iTunes doesn't work, and iTunes is the only way to get anything onto the iPad. The latest problem was a continuous loop of having to verify an email address that prevented logging into the iTunes Store. It seems that Apple's attitude is that their products are perfect, therefore everyone wants one, and all content producers want to work with them.

We don't like Amazon's cut price policy any more than anyone else does, except of course readers, who are always on the lookout for a bargain. But we protect ourselves against a financial loss by setting our retail discounts accordingly. In the past, we mistakenly joined Amazon's Advantage program. Guess who it's an advantage for? Amazon. On two books, we made a loss thanks to their non-negotiable 60% discount.

So now we treat Amazon like any other retailer, and everything works well. Customers still buy books, we get our wholesale prices, the author gets their royalties, and Amazon have to make a living like everyone else - by not abusing their suppliers.

Of course, in an agency pricing world, if we were to start talking to Apple and agreeing to fix prices, which would only happen if we were a really big publisher, then that wouldn't be fair at all. It would mean that Apple wasn't treating its supplier relationships fairly and equally. Could you imagine such a thing?

The lawsuit alleges that "the five publishers "feared" Amazon's move to price ebooks at $9.99 – a figure considerably below physical book prices. The pricing "threatened to disrupt the publishers' long-established brick-and-mortar model faster than [they] were willing to accept", and to set low consumer expectations for ebook prices."

Oh, shame. Don't we all feel sorry for them?

Changing My Mind About the Amazon Kindle

A while ago, I said that the Kindle is a pointless device given the price difference between something that only displays ebooks and a tablet computer that can do pretty much anything that any other computer can do.

However, I am beginning to change my mind.

Earlier this week, Apple announced that it is going to start enforcing its rules that mean that content must be acquired through iTunes, where Apple can of course make money. It would be like being forced to only by a BMW through a BMW dealer. OK, you might be able to live with that to get a BMW. But then you are also forced to buy your petrol (gas), car washes, bags of sweets and pine tree shaped air fresheners through the BMW garage too. You might feel that BMW were taking advantage of your allegiance to their brand.

Personally, I feel that Apple's philosophy is, "You bought an Apple. You love Apple. Apple is your life. You don't need anything else. We own you." They're like a paranoid, clingy, dependent lover that just happens to be holding a gun to your head.

Here's a snippet of the story from The Bookseller:

Apple is finally getting round to enforcing its new app purchasing guidelines after reports emerged over the weekend of direct purchasing links being removed from some third-party apps

E-book companies now have the option of selling direct through Apple's iTunes store at a cost of 30% per transaction, or hoping customers buy direct from their own stores and use the app only for reading the purchased material.

The simple fact it that no third-party aggregator can afford to pay a 30% fee for being the middle-man on a platform it does not own itself, meaning that in the short term the e-book market is going to be a less interesting environment for book readers and a less useful place for those interested in developing e-book apps.

To explain this simply, here's what has happened.

You go to the iTunes store, looking for ebooks. To read an ebook, you have to BUY an ebook app such as iBooks. Of course, the majority are free because the developer wants to make their money on ebook sales, not on the app itself. So you download the app.

You BUY some books for the app from iTunes, on which Apple makes a profit.

Inside the app is a link to find more books, which you can buy direct from the developer's website, which saves all the hassle of having to buy through iTunes, which normally involves the download failing half way through, you not getting a refund and not being able to re-download, so you have to buy another copy and then chase Apple for a refund.

So you buy the book on the developer's site and read it on your iPad.

Not any more. Apple are now forcing you to buy all content through iTunes and preventing you from buying content elsewhere.

Hang on.... We just paid £600 for the thing, and you're going to dictate where I can and can't get the stuff that I use it for?

Sorry, Apple, I just don't feel the same way about you any more... Now, put the gun down.

Amazon Kindle is Dead... Long Live the Tablet PC

We had an iPad for a year and now we have an iPad 2. It's about £150 cheaper than the original for the same spec and a lot of the original design flaws have been solved - you can actually hold it, and the smart cover works very nicely.

The original iPad's back was shaped like an oily banana and while it looked sleek, it was impossible to hold on to, so we added a leather case that just made the thing so bulky. Yes, you could prop it up to watch videos or type, but far from ideal. Like putting disabled hand rails on an Aston Martin to make it easier to get out of.

The new iPad 2 has a smart cover - £60 for a leather one! - but worth it because it is so neat and tidy, and as the iPad2 has a flat back, it folds away neatly when you're using the iPad. You can have a £30 plastic version, but the colour range is the same as B&M have chosen for their silicone spatulas. Not classy.

What has this got to do with Kindle?

Well, for £111 you can buy the Amazon device. The battery lasts a long time, and all it does is read ebooks.

The iPad was £480 for the 32Gb wifi version, from Tesco, or any other retailer thanks to Apple's price fixing.

To be honest, the iPad 2 doesn't do anything the iPad didn't do. It's just better at it.

The Kindle's battery last for weeks thanks to its e-ink screen technology, very handy for your holidays, if you're staying somewhere that has no electricity, I guess. I think most people could manage to charge their tablet computer overnight, along with their mobile phone and mp3 player.

And there's the problem. Wherever you go, you have other devices that will need charging almost every day, so is it really a problem to charge your tablet computer? Especially when you will also be reading your emails, watching videos and listening to music on it?

Disgo's Tablet 6000 costs only £98 from play.com - that's £13 less than Kindle. Yes. it's only got 2Gb of storage built in and the screen resolution isn't a patch on the iPads but you can read your emails, watch videos, listen to music, browse the internet and read ebooks for less money than a Kindle.

Of course, there are more expensive tablet PCs too, running Linux or Google's Android OS. However, the price plummet of Apple's iPad 2 will force down the price of clones too. We'll see a whole flock of sub £200 tablets on the market by the summer, we reckon.

As a publisher, the devices that people read ebooks on directly affects the adoption of ebooks. ebooks might be a wonderful evolution of the publishing industry, but if people can't conveniently read them, they won't catch on.

We think that buying an Amazon Kindle is like buying your children a Vtech laptop. Why would you? It's more expensive than a real laptop, and it doesn't do anything useful!

But wait, you say, a VTech Super Student Laptop is only £50. It has a matchbox sized black and white LCD screen and doesn't do anything that you actually want your children to learn, such as how to order stuff off ebay with your credit card.

And you can't even buy a laptop for £50, can you?

Yes, you can. £50 buys you a very nice second hand laptop from the wonderful department store in the sky, ebay.

What about the cost of software?

Load the bargain laptop with the wonderful, free Ubuntu, a user friendly version of Linux, the absolutely free and fabulous operating system. Free office software, free everything. Does more than Windows. More reliable. Free. Easier to use. Free. Did we mention that it's free?

You have absolutely no excuse for not getting your children a real laptop, so why on Earth would you buy an Amazon Kindle just to read books on?

Sorry Amazon, considering that you fancy yourselves as a market innovator, you are five years late to market with the Kindle.

Our prediction is that the Kindle will go the way of the Sinclair C5, the Tandy TRS-80, the Psion palmtops and pretty much any kitchen appliance that you bought from QVC.

Only buy a Kindle if you want to show your grand children the product that killed the mighty Amazon.

ebook adventures

We've been working long and hard to get two new ebook formats into production; Amazon's Kindle format and Apple's iBooks format. They're similar but different enough to create a whole host of file conversion problems.

Some of this post is rather technical, which is aimed at anyone who is having similar problems and understands what we're babbling about.

Our first ebook release is The Pitching Bible by Paul Boross. It's a 70,000 word book with around 100 images, so it was quite a challenge to format it correctly.

ebook readers such as iPads, Kindles and a whole host of less popular devices as well as software readers for PCs share a fundamental design principle; they display text. Because the file format used for web pages, HTML, is a ubiquitous and simple text formatting language, it's perfect for use in ebook readers. An ebook is essentially a mini website stored locally on the ebook reader. Whilst Apple's iPad is a complex product capable of displaying many different file formats on its high definition screen, Amazon's Kindle uses e-ink technology. Its power consumption is tiny, giving you enough battery life to last through your summer holiday, but it can only display text and greyscale images.

The majority of ebooks are text only, so support for images in an ebook format is actually quite messy.

Here's the meandering and torturous route that we took to finally get everything working.

First; Amazon. Amazon like to hold their cards very close, so they let you upload a 'raw' HTML file which they kindly convert for you. A helpful hand? Maybe, or another way to look at it is that all Kindle conversions go through Amazon which means that they have total control over distribution and therefore royalties. You can't load an ebook onto your Kindle without going through Amazon. Whilst we could debate Amazon's business practices, from a technical point of view, this ebook was relatively easy to set up. The only downside is that you can't fiddle with the formatting; once it's uploaded, you have to wait for it to be approved before you can then upload a revised file, so if the formatting isn't quite right then it's easier just to leave it alone. Amazon don't make life easy when you're a perfectionist.

Apple's iBooks are far more complex. Apple use a 'standard' format called epub which, apparently, is the future of the ebook format. It's much more complex, so what can it do that good old HTML can't? So far, we can't find anything. It is, however, much more difficult to set up.

We use OpenOffice for the actual writing and formatting, and export the book as a HTML file. Then we used a piece of software called eCub to convert the HTML book to an epub file. Then we used another piece of software called epubchecker to tell us everything that was wrong with the ebook. Finally, a piece of software called Sigil allowed us to make the changes to correct the errors.

We went through about 20 file conversions before realising that the strange and meaningless errors displayed by the iPad were caused by exporting the book from OpenOffice as HTML instead of the more complex XHTML, even though eCub is supposed to convert HTML to epub. An epub file is actually just a renamed XHTML file, with all of the supporting files such as images packed inside.

OpenOffice fills the exported XHTML files with an unbelieveable amount of junk; formatting and styles, peculiar 'span' tags that only contain apostrophes and other miscellany. This creates two problems. Firstly, all of this hidden text doubles the file size. Secondly, the hidden text isn't actually hidden. Whereas a web browser wouldn't display all of the formatting, the iPad displays lots and lots of empty space instead. So, we went through and manually took all of the unecessary formatting out. Perfect!

The next problem was images. We create images for books using Inkscape, a SVG drawing program. Images are output in .png format and imported into OpenOffice. Being lazy, I make the images bigger than necessary and size them in OpenOffice so that their resolution is always more than 600dpi for printing. The problem with this is that when OpenOffice converts the file to HTML or XHTML it exports them at full size with image 'width' and 'height' tags to resize them. On the iPad, the images looked terrible. The first solution I tried was to resize all of the images manually and then take out the width and height attributes of the 'img' tag, however this just resulted in the iPad not being able to display the book at all. So we bit the bullet and re-inserted all of the images back into OpenOffice at the correct size so that OpenOffice would format them at 100% of their original size. In OpenOffice, the images were tiny and most were completely illegible. Yet when exported to XHTML, they all displayed at the correct, glorious size. In future, we'll be creating images at just the right size in the original document.

Once we had the image size issue fixed, we went through the OpenOffice - eCub - epubchecker - Sigil sausage machine again and the iPad opened the epub file perfectly.

So, finally, we have our first working epub iBook. The next challenge is to get Apple to accept it into the iBookstore, so we'll keep you posted with our continuing adventures.