Has Amazon taken the eBook market?

A few months ago Amazon launched an aggressive campaign to get the eyes of eBook readers on books offered through them.  They launched Kindle Unlimited, which provided access to all the books in the Kindle library - but not necessarily in the Kindle store - to subscribers.

About a month ago they launched the same scheme in the UK and I have no doubt it is being progressively rolled out across all the main eBook regions. It has its merits; all the eBook subscription services have their merits.  The main one is that the reader pays a monthly subscription and gets as many books to read as they want, much like Netflix and Lovefilm do for films and TV shows.

The downside of all subscription services is that, unlike films and TV shows, books tend to be read by individuals.  They generally take longer to consume, or read, than films and TV shows do to watch.  A year or so ago we could have argued that at least you can consume books when streaming internet services were unavailable, but that is less valid today.  Many of us have access to 3 and 4 G services with ever increasing monthly allowances (mine is currently 2 Gb over 4G).  My top tip for anyone wanting to use an eBook subscription service is to create a family email account and use that for multiple devices.

I can't speak for all authors, but since the US launch my sales have quite literally flatlined.  Hardly surprising, mind, given that whenever Amazon launched the service it included the first month free as a trial, so many would have used that month to fill up on eBooks and are probably now all read out for the time being.  Many of them would have cancelled their membership once the month was up but Amazon have gambled on a significant amount liking the service so much that they stay, others will just keep forgetting to cancel - it's not like Amazon care.

Some might have been frustrated that the books they wanted weren't available - many big sellers aren't in the library, possibly never will unless Amazon hammer out a loss leading deal with them.  Others, such as myself, are also absent - I refuse to give in to Amazon and sign over exclusive rights to them.  I'm not going to bang on about my views - again - just search my blog for KDP Select if you've missed my rants.  However, despite zero sales since Kindle Unlimited started my books have been perused more than ever on Smashwords.  I don't see Smashwords as a major outlet for books - I never think to look there to buy - but they provide metrics that let me know if there's any interest in my books.  Probably I've seen more activity on there than ever before.  I've been cautious about over-interpreting the metrics, it could be one person continually visiting my book page and downloading the 20% samples time and again. However this last 30 days sales have kicked in again - not large amounts, but first Apple, then Barnes & Noble, now Smashwords reporting sales.

While I hope those who subscribe to the Amazon Unlimited scheme get what they want out of the service, while Amazon insist on exclusive rights to any books listed there you won't find me there.  If they lift that requirement I'll be on in a flash.  But I really hope they don't dominate the eBook market any more than they do right now, we need competition, you need choice. 

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Could Microsoft Buy Nook?

Barnes & Noble are fighting an uphill battle, as are many of the traditional bookstores world-wide.  To be fair to B&N they recognised that the future of literature involved a heavy helping of eBooks and consequently invested in their eBookstore and launched generation after generation of ground breaking Nook eReaders.

The only mis-step I can see is that they took too long to establish themselves in the UK.  We may not be the largest eBook market on the planet - that's the US - but we're pretty big players.  They had an opportunity a year and a half ago when they were being wooed by Waterstones, a  UK bookseller filling a similar market segment to B&N.  I have no idea what went wrong - possibly they were a little too alike - but B&N didn't sign up and Waterstones started to stock Kindles, for goodness sake.

That brief outburst of frustration is not that there is anything wrong with Kindles - I have one and think it's great, I use the Kindle app on my Microsoft RT too. Technically I have it on my Nexus, but as I can't get past the cracked startup screen I don't count that one.  No, my frustration is due to Waterstones badmouthing Amazon and their overt attempts at ruling the eBook world.  If I didn't know better, I'd say I was writing copy for Waterstones back then, certainly I didn't have the monopoly on concern over Amazon.  But, the deal with B&N apparently gone south, Waterstones jumped into bed with Amazon even though their online eBookstore sells ePubs, not Kindle books.  Talk about mixed messages.

Anyway, B&N are struggling, have been for a couple of years.  They design their eReaders in-house, which is ballsy for a bookseller - it must be all those electronics books on the shelves - and they've been building them themselves too.  Now that does surprise me - I assume they are the first tier in the production chain, working with whichever factories produce their products, but now they are looking for someone to take over the whole production process.  They're still going to continue to design them in-house though, at least for the time being.

They'd be long gone, I reckon, if it hadn't been for a couple of handouts - or investments as the market probably calls them - and one of these was from Microsoft.  But the road is still very bumpy and there's a lot of concern about the future viability of B&N eReaders.  Speculation is that Microsoft may be muscling in for a takeover.

It makes a lot of sense, assuming B&N are truly up to their neck in muck.  Microsoft would get a foot in the eBook market, another step towards erasing the Apple differentiation and one that sits well with the Xbox music.  Also, the platform could be used to launch further Windows 8 tablets - maybe there's still life in RT after all?  And it keeps B&N as a viable entity in the eBook world and I for one would be grateful.  I'm unlikely to buy a B&N product right now - as I said they left it late launching in the UK and I'm up to my ears in Kindles, Microsoft Surfaces and cracked Google Nexii right now, but in another time I might consider it.  As an author who sells a proportion of his books through the B&N network to their clearly discerning readers, I want them to continue , if only to challenge Amazon.

The sale price is rumoured to be in the region of $1 billion, which suggests B&N aren't out of the game yet.  My guess is that Microsoft will be looking to get in before the main holiday sales push - there's only one real time to gain market share and that time is coming up in a few months.  So we should know before September  is out.

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Kobo Launch Hi Def eReader

Kobo, the eReader and eBook company owned by Japanese company Rakuten, has announced it's launching a high definition eReader to compete with the Amazon Paperwhite eReader.  It's being pitched at about £30 more than the Paperwhite, so perhaps the word 'compete' is stretching the concept a little.  There is some speculation that it may be a better choice for 'coffee table' style eBooks and children's eBooks.

According to some reports Kobo is now firmly the number two seller of eReaders after Amazon and its Kindle range, but that may not be as remarkable as it might have been.  Since the launching of multiple tablets to challenge the iPad range in the last two years the meteoric rise in eReader sales has translated to a more representative meteor trajectory.  Down.  Given the relatively high price of dedicated eReaders compared to multi-functional tables such as the iPad (full fat and mini), the Kindle Fire, Google Nexus and quite a number of me-too devices it is less compelling to buy one of the dedicated eReaders.

It's not that eReaders are without their attractions - the lack of  multi-functionality can be seen as a blessing in disguise.  Less distractions from your reading and less chance of the device being 'borrowed' - owners of tablet computers who are parents to teenagers might recognise that benefit.  Other attractions include the extended battery life of the eReaders, usually between one and two months in-between charges for most of the main brands, often less for the lesser known makes.  Most tablet users will be used to the discipline of putting their tablets on charge overnight, every night, but go on a long transatlantic flight - and I'm not aware there are many short ones - then the eReader battery life starts to look very attractive.  And currently nothing is as good for reading in direct sunlight.  We had some sunlight the other day, the first this year, and the forecast is that we may see some more later in the year.  I would recommend everyone has an eReader at their disposal - your books will load across multiple devices anyway, so if nothing else it can be your lending library when you have an unexpected overnight stopper, however I would wait until the prices drop as they surely must soon.

Although I have no reason to doubt Kobo's assertion that they are the number 2 eReader seller and their  additional claim that the increase in sales has boosted their eBook sales, I doubt they are the number 2 eBook seller.  Given that the eReaders generally sell at cost, it's the eBook sales that make the money.  Amazon have long been the leader in that field, but it is understood that Apple are rapidly catching up.  They are almost certainly number 2 in that race.  Perhaps Kobo is number 3?  Maybe, it's probably between them and Barnes and Noble.  Or Sony, who still plug away like they are the market leaders they used to be.

I'm sorry that the eReader market peaked and sank as quickly as it did, I think eBooks will be the poorer for its rapid decline.  But eBooks are here to stay, that's for sure, and we'll all need devices to read them.  However we can't ignore the rapid adoption of tablet computers and personally I'm happy that the technology became affordable as fast as it did, even if it has rendered the eReader market almost obsolete in one stroke.

If you're still in the market for an eReader, especially for one with better resolution than the average model, then this may be worth a look, but for most people the money being asked for is painfully close to the price of the entry level tablet computers from Kobo.

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Amazon Broadens Book Review Tools

I have mixed feelings about user reviews.  I guess, like most people I use them to help guide whether to make a purchase, whether a booking for a hotel, a new vacuum cleaner of the latest Kindle Deal of the Day offer.  I also guess that, like most people, I probably don't contribute to the common wealth of knowledge by putting my own reviews up there myself often enough, though.

I have done, especially for books, sometimes for hotels, never for vacuum cleaners.  However I've been quite tardy in the last year or so for leaving reviews for books although I have dedicated a few blog posts to update on books I've read recently.

Why so reluctant?  Well, I'm a great fan of democracy and the cornerstone of that is voting.  Although not an overly political person I do insist on voting at all elections and have a blanket policy of not getting into discussions over politics with people who refuse to vote.  But voting for a political representative is a fairly quick affair and  thankfully is only required every few years or so when you include local elections as well.  But when you read a lot of books, writing a meaningful and fair review can become an onerous task quickly. A bit like deciding to write a regular blog, I guess.

Of course I could strip the reviews down to bare basics and slap a 1 - 5 star review on.  It might make a few review hungry readers feel frustrated but it would add something to the canon.

There is another reason that I shy a little from posting reviews these days and that is if I give an author a glowing review and they reciprocate, on purpose or by pure random chance, then it wouldn't take much for the intelligent book reading population to recognise a mutual admiration society in the making.  In a similar vein, if I truthfully mark a book down in a review and the author(or a committed fan of the author) spots I'm also a writer then I could find myself on the receiving end of some harsh reviews.  I don't get a lot of reviews, so front-loading with negative ones isn't the way forward, I guess.

But I'm actually loath to rip a book apart on artistic grounds.  I've read a few books lately that I either struggled to finish or in the case of one, failed to finish.  Common issues were a preponderance of minutia and an over zealous focus on character traits.  One book, which has received fairly good customer reviews, spent more time describing the attributes of different coffee brews than developing the story.  Perhaps the coffee played a major part in the denouement - I never got the end of that book.  However, perhaps it was the wrong person reading the book - I chose it from a Kindle Deal of the Day offer and perhaps I read more into the blurb than was actually there.

So, if I'm not going to condemn a story because I don't like the way the author unravels it, what is left?  Well, I spot plenty of spelling and grammatical mistakes and in fact have just completed an otherwise entertaining thriller by a mainstream author that had way more typos than should have been expected.  Fair enough, in an ideal world there shouldn't be any typos, but I rarely find a book without any these days and I'm  sure there still remains some in my own, despite editing until I'm blue in the face.

But who wants to read a review from the full stop monitor?

So the reality is that the reviews for any given book probably represent the views of a minority of readers.  From what I've seen, some reviewers regard the process like a hobby and review everything they read.  And to be fair, some of them are extremely professional in their reviews, because writing a good review is a real skill akin to constructing a good blurb.  Some of the reviewers clearly have an agenda, especially if you drill down their other reviews.  The rest probably just read books and occasionally something inspires them to say whether it was good or it was bad - probably not much of a middle ground there.

But one of the problems in this multiple eBookseller world is that a book may have a handful of reviews on Amazon UK, a couple more on their US site, some more on Barnes & Noble, and Apple may have a review or two.  So the reviews are distributed across a whole load of locations, hence the consumer is only exposed to a small amount of the potential reviews available.  Apart from anything else, the wider the field and the greater number of reviews means that something near a consensus can be identified.

I've noticed that Amazon have introduced a beta facility on its UK site recently that allows US reviews to be added to any UK reviews.  The two sets of reviews are kept separate so you don't mix them together, so if there is a national bias it should be identifiable.  I don't know at present if reviews from other regions are being included, and it looks like the trial is purely UK centric at the moment, but it should help some of us to select books to read unless we're too xenophobic to take the views of other nationalities on board.

Personally I think it is a good initiative.  The optimist in me would like to see a mechanism where all the reviews from all the eBooksellers worldwide were made available in one place, however that is probably a step too far.  Of course authors could take responsibility to collate all the reviews for their books and place them on their website, but could we trust them to place the negative reviews as well?  I think it would be a very confident person who did that.  For example, I'm currently the proud recipient of a one star review for Project: Evil by a lady who gave up after reading less than two short chapters - I have a view that she expected something different from a parody of the James Bond arch villain from a project manager's perspective (come on, keep up) and it's balanced by two very flattering independent reviews by a couple of guys in the US, and I think I've managed to treat the harsh criticism in a way that helps readers of the review make their own mind up but  apart from mentioning it on this blog I don't think I'm as generous of spirit as to leave the negative review on my website.

So for the short term I will have to be content with Amazon sharing US reviews on my UK Amazon pages, for the benefit of UK readers making their mind up.  If it is deemed a success, then perhaps readers from other regions might be able to look forward to enjoying this facility.

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