My Favorite Kindle Stories From Real Users

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Screenshot from new Amazon Kindle TV ad - The Book Lives On

A while back I put out a call to a journalist’s network, asking Kindle users to answer one simple question: what’s your own favorite story about using the Kindle? The answers poured in from all across America, but each person seemed to have a very positive experience that was also very unique! For example, Patrick Kerley, an account supervisor for a PR firm in Washington, D.C., remembered a great Kindle story about his mother. “She and my father were traveling between North Carolina and southern Florida when they blew a tire. The Kindle’s web browser helped them locate a replacement!”

I thought about that story today, because Amazon this fall Amazon didn’t included the free 3G service for web browsing with their new Kindle Touch (and the new $79 Kindle). So the experience of owning a Kindle is a little different today — though of course, it’s also made the new Kindles cheaper. And for Kindle Touch owner’s, Amazon’s still making free 3G service available for browsing in the Kindle Store. So it’s still going to possible for Kindle owners to stumble into their own unique experiences of using their Kindles in unexpected real-life situations.

For example, the free wireless internet access once played an even bigger role for Sophia Chiang, a San Francisco entrepreneur on an extended trip through China. She reported that the Kindle was a great way to buy “uncensored English magazines like Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly.” Amazon’s Whispernet network actually allowed her to circumvent the Chinese government’s ongoing news censorship.

Her Kindle also let Sophia beam down travel guidebooks that were written in English. “We went on a last minute trip to a more remote part of China and we got our Lonely Planet guide immediately on the Kindle.” Without the Kindle, she reported on her blog, the only alternative would’ve been scrambling around trying to find a Chinese bookstore, and then hoping that they’d have a travel guidebook, in stock, that was written in English!

Because it was a long trip, Sophia was also glad that her Kindle could last for over a week without a recharge. But her last reason was one of the most exciting. Even though I’ve written a lot about children’s books on the Kindle, Sophia is the first person I know who’s actually using the Kindle to buy ebooks for her children. (“Our kids loved the Kindle and loved being able to buy Magic Tree House, ABC Mysteries series even in the middle of the Middle Kingdom.”)

And speaking of kids, I think my all-time personal favorite response probably came from Marc Pittman, who runs a fundraising-education business in Maine. At the time, he described himself as a “proud owner” of an original Kindle 1, and says “I think my happiest moment so far happened at the playground last week. I was using my iPad (*gasp*) when a 5 year old kid ran past, stopped, and shouted ‘Cool Kindle!’

“Kids know where the real innovation is!”

I’d also heard from Andrea McKinnon, a publicist in Burbank who was “an avid book lover, reader and saver” — until her husband dared to give her a Kindle in May as a Mother’s Day gift… Within seven days, Andrea was assigned a 250-page manuscript, and she’d had to read the entire thing before passing it on to a publisher. “My choices? Read 250 pages on my laptop or print out 250 pages.” But wait! There was a third choice — uploading the document to the Kindle, and then reading it as an ebook! And — to cut to the end of the story — Andrea soon began describing herself as “a new Kindle convert.”

“I was also traveling at the time, so along it came with me, to read on the plane and in the hotel, along with the novel I was reading at the time. One small Kindle, two giant tomes en route for work and pleasure!”

And meanwhile, on the opposite coast, a woman named Elaine Bloom was also enjoying her Kindle for an entirely different reason. Elaine described herself as a LinkedIn Strategist, but unfortunately, she also had a broken left leg. (“I fell on ice in a diner parking lot at the beginning of March…”) It was painful, and her foot was constantly kept elevated — which made it difficult to read in different positions, or even turn the pages of a conventional book. But fortunately, with the Kindle “I could easily read it while I was lying down in bed. I could hold it in one hand and use that same hand to hit the button to advance the page. It would have been difficult for me to hold a book and no way I could read and turn the pages with one hand.” The grateful New Jersey woman reported that the Kindle “saved my sanity….I was able to do a lot of reading when I couldn’t do anything else.

“The only other thing I could do was watch daytime television — which could drive you crazy!”

A Kindle Store at Your Local Mall?

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Amazon office building in Seattle

Your local mall might be getting a new tenant — a Kindle Store, filled with Kindles, accessories and the most popular books in print (including books published exclusively by Amazon). At least, that’s the new rumor which found its way to Publisher’s Weekly.

On their Twitter feed, the industry magazine shared the juicy headline (from a story by the Financial Post). “Is Amazon bringing a bookstore to a mall near you?” it asks, citing a report from the blog “Good E-Reader.” Within the next few months, according to the story, Amazon will try opening a real-world store to sell books and Kindles in Seattle, as “a test to gauge the market and see if a chain of stores would be profitable”! They cite multiple sources at Amazon “close to the situation,” and predict the store will open before next Christmas, and maybe even towards the fall, when Amazon officially launches their own line of books, or when Amazon releases the next version of their Kindle Fire tablet.

My first thought was: Maybe it’s because of the Kindle. Maybe ebooks have become so popular that Amazon now needs a new way to get rid of all their printed books! But then I remembered a bitter fight that Amazon’s been having with Barnes and Noble. Amazon announced they’d start publishing their own line of printed books, and then Barnes and Noble announced that they wouldn’t sell them! And they’re not the only bookstore planning to freeze out Amazon’s books, according to a columnist at Publisher’s Weekly. “I asked a number of independent booksellers in my beat (the South) whether they’d be stocking Amazon-published books. Answers ranged from ‘No’ to ‘Hell, no.’ ”

It’s an interesting column, because it points out that Barnes and Noble acquired a publishing house of their own in 2003 — after which other big book-sellers (including Borders and Costco) announced they’d
they stop carrying books from that publisher. “It’s easy to forget, in the age of monolithic publishing houses and ubiquitous big-box retailers, that the bookstore-as-publisher tradition goes way back – as pointed out in a recent Salon article, Shakespeare & Company published Ulysses, and City Lights published Howl.” But it still feels like an aggressive move, with Amazon launching both a publishing house for print books and a line of stores for selling them.

Of course, their real target may be Apple. Maybe Amazon’s decided they need their own stores at the mall where people can buy a Kindle Fire tablet, to keep competing with Apple’s iPad. Maybe Amazon wants to be able to offer same-day customer support, where you can bring in a defective Kindle, and receive a replacement Kindle the same day! And in the long-run, Amazon can keep benefiting from any new customers that their stores would bring in. After all, once a customer buys a Kindle, they’ll start buying all of their ebooks from Amazon!

It’s stories like this convince me that our world is changing — and fast! Last year, we were debating whether Amazon would destroy local bookstores. Now instead, we’re wondering whether Amazon will become our local bookstore!

Does the Kindle Make You Smarter?

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Dr. Larry Rosen once wrote an interesting article for Psychology Today. His blog is called “Rewired: The Psychology of Technology,” and he ultimately confronted a new argument against digital readers – that non-linear reading “is changing our brain and moving us away from deep thought into more shallow thinking”!

By non-linear technology, Rosen’s referring mostly to the hyperlinked discussions which happen online, where it’s almost too easy to flit away to a new web page or a new activity (like checking your e-mail or answering instant messages). But author Nicholas Carr predicts that even reading books will soon enter this universe of “interruption” technologies, in which we’re not just reading but also simultaneously participating in a distracted online dialogue related to that same book. Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. But fortunately, he received a strong rebuttal from Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University — who’s also an avid Kindle user!

“I bought a Kindle when they first came out in late 2007…” he remembers in his blog post, “and delighted in using it on airplane trips instead of bringing along two or three paperback books.” And Rosen ultimately sees the hyperlinking of online discussions as a good thing. (“As C.S. Lewis said, ‘We read to know we are not alone.'”) “What better way to read a book than to be able to share it as we are reading? Isn’t that what book clubs are all about?

“The difference here is that people will be able to read what other people think about the book as they read. They can even discuss the book live while they are reading it, not when they have read the final page…”

I have to agree. And even without joining an online discussion, I’ve been reading some free history ebooks on my Kindle, and sometimes I’ll get inspired to dig deeper into some especially intriguing details. (“Wait a minute — the re-supply ship to the Jamestown colony in 1609 actually crashed instead in Bermuda? And they only made it to America because they built two new ships while shipwrecked? And that may have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest?“) I think one of the best things a book can do is pique your curiosity. And now it’s easier to act on that curiosity with a Kindle, since it lets you look up any word in a dictionary, and look up any topic in Wikipedia with its always-available wireless connection.

That’s ultimately going to make us smarter, not shallower. And I think this whole debate can be summed up by two brilliant sentences from author David Weinberger. “Perhaps the web isn’t shortening our attention span,” he wrote in 2002. “Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting…”

I don’t know if this is an ironic twist, but I actually read Weinberger’s defense of the web in an old-fashioned printed book. (Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web.) It was written five years before the Kindle even existed, but there’s now a neat Kindle version of his mind-boggling insights. And yesterday Dr. Rosen’s blog post seemed to make a similar argument.

Sure, teenagers may someday be participating in online discussions while they’re reading a book, but “This is way better than seeing students read the Cliff Notes or not even reading at all.” And ultimately he puts the whole debate into perspective. “As Dr. Gary Small, director of the Center on Aging at UCLA and author of iBrain said discussing online reading, ‘People tend to ask whether this is good or bad.

‘My response is that the tech train is out of the station and it’s impossible to stop.'”

100 More eBooks for $3.99 or Less!

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Amazon Kindle 399 ebook sale

It’s a special tradition. Every month, Amazon picks 100 ebooks to offer at a discount of $3.99 or less. There’s always a new selection on the first day of the month, and I’m pretty excited about the discounted ebooks for February. To see the selection, point your computer’s web browser to tinyurl.com/399books

So which 100 ebooks did Amazon choose for their big discount this month??


God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut ($2.99)

One of Vonnegut’s favorite novels tells the story of a U.S. Senator’s eccentric son, a millionaire who becomes a wandering philanthropist. Vonnegut’s next novel was Slaughter-house Five, and the New York Times Book Review says this book shows the author “at his wildest best.” But in researching this story, I discovered there’s also two free Vonnegut ebooks in the Kindle Store — both short stories. (There’s “The Big Trip Up Yonder” and “2 B R 0 2 B”). And according to Wikipedia, that second story is actually referenced in the novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” attributed to Vonnegut’s own fictitious character, a science-fiction author named Kilgore Trout.


The Borrowers by Mary Norton ($1.99)

It was one of the 10 most important children’s novels of the last 70 years, according to the judges of a Carnegie Medal awards program. In a grand English manor, a tiny family is secretly living in the floorboards of the kitchen. They “borrow” what they need for their homestead, until one day disaster strikes, and the father is seen by a little boy. The culture of the “big people” confronts the question of the existence of the little people, and the change in perspective makes this story unforgettable. “Like all great books for the young, The Borrowers can be read as an enthralling story of adventure,” writes one reviewer on Amazon, “but also contains many layers of meaning…”


The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein ($2.99)

The master of science fiction wrote this novel in 1957 — in which a hard-drinking inventor travels forward through time to the year…2000. There he discovers that the robots he’d been building in the 1950s have become a popular fixture in society — and tracks down a relative of the business partner who’d double-crossed him. It’s often been voted one of the 50 best science fiction novels of all time — and I love this explanation of the book’s title. According to Wikipedia, it came from a joke by the author’s wife about a cat that was refusing to leave its house through any of numerous doors, because it saw snow on the ground. “He is looking for The Door into Summer….”


What Would Keith Richards Do?: Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor by Jessica Pallington West ($1.99)

“To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and to be real about it…” So says the hard-living guitarist for the Rolling Stones, who became both a legend and a punchline after surviving a wild life of rock and roll. This 256-page collection offers a fun alternative to other self-help advice books, with quotes and analysis about what we all can learned from the life of Keith Richards himself. “I’m here because I’ve taken the trouble to find out who I am,” Richards says at one point — echoing the advice he gave to Captain Jack Sparrow in that Pirates of the Caribbean movie. (“It’s not whether you can live forever. It’s whether you can live with yourself.”) And I enjoyed how the advice was grouped into chapters with clever titles, like “Keith and Nietzsche” or “Keithisms: The 26 Ten Commandments of Keith Richards.”


Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded by Ann VanderMeer ($2.99)

This 431-page anthology offers some of the best “steampunk” science fiction around – including a short story by William Gibson, and another by “original” steampunk author, H.G. Wells. “Steampunk” is a trendy fiction genre that a lot of my friends love, a kind of reaction to our technology-saturated times (and the popularity of edgy “cyberpunk” science fiction stories.) Steampunk science fiction is often set in the Victorian era, where the most powerful technology available is a steam-powered engine!

Elvis Presley Meets the Kindle

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Elvis Presley sings

I did a funny experiment in mid-January. On Elvis Presley’s birthday, I’d searched for his name in the Kindle Store — and found nearly 140 ebooks about him! Though he’d died in 1977 at the age of 42, even 35 years later, people are still talking about “the king of rock and roll!” And now self-publishing’s making it possible to share even more fond memories – by anyone with their own story to tell.

I’ve always been fascinated by the life of Elvis Presley, so here’s my list of what look like some of the most interesting Elvis-related e-books that have turned up in Amazon’s Kindle Store.


Elvis: My Best Man

It seems like everyone who ever knew Elvis has published a book, but this one was written by one of his personal friends. “George was with Elvis from the beginning,” Dick Clark notes in a blurb for the book, adding the book’s author “personally knows the story.” Elvis and George Klein met when they were both in the same 8th grade class, and both men later went on to have long careers in the music industry — Klein as a Memphis radio host. (The book’s subtitle is “Radio Days, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nights, and My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley.”) Yes, Elvis also served as the best man at Klein’s wedding, but more importantly, he was an authentic fixture in the Memphis music scene. When Booklist reviewed this book, they ultimately concluded that “Klein’s paean is awfully sincere but, in its folksy naivete, oddly fetching. Maybe it’s the bio the King would have most wanted.”


Flowers for Elvis

This 248-page novel is actually available for free in the Kindle Store, and it’s described on Amazon as “quirky Southern fiction with a literary edge, surprising humor and an uplifting spirit.” One of the characters is a fanactical Elvis fan, and I have to wonder if the author was inspired by the real-life story of Dolores Hart, the Hollywood starlet who at the age of 22 had already done two movies with Elvis (and also starred as a spunky teenager in Where the Boys Are). In 1963, “after completing a promotional tour for Come Fly with Me…she had her limousine drop her off at The Abbey of Regina Laudis. And she became a nun.” (And 48 years later, she still is!)

So in this novel, a girl named Olivia is born in 1956 “to a nun in an old auto parts store turned convent in rural Mississippi…” — and that’s just the beginning of this strange American phantasmagoria. Olivia is ultimately raised by the nun’s sister — the Elvis fan — who’s “a renegade Southern belle, bent on self-indulgence and desperate to safeguard her multitude of sins…” According to the book’s description on Amazon, Olivia’s life story “takes the reader on a flower strewn tour of misguided love and maternal betrayal which culminates at Elvis’ funeral, where they finally discover the truth of their parentage and unravel the generations of secrets that shadowed their lives.”


The King and Dr. Nick: What Really Happened to Elvis and Me

Elvis’s death was ultimately ruled a heart attack. (When the local coroner was teased about the official cause of death, he’d reply “You can say what you want, but I still think that Elvis is dead.”) Some angry fans have raised questions about the role of Dr. George Nichopoulos, the personal physician to the high-living rock star, who also his source for some prescription drugs. (There’s a rumor that he was even the inspiration for the quack physician on The Simpson’s.) For the other side of the story, you can read Dr. Nick’s own biography, and at least one reviewer on Amazon writes “I was really quite stunned by many of the revelations in this book.” It’s an odd perspective on the death of a rock star, offering real-world stories about the medical and legal debates that followed. “Was an innocent man crucified by the press in order to get the scoop…” the reviewer asks, “or was he really guilty as charged?”


Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

I read this biography when it first came out in 1998, and I loved its personal glimpses into the highs and lows of Elvis’s rocky life. (Each chapter begins with a fascinating and revealing photograph, offering a kind of visual counter-commentary.) After Elvis’s strange tour of duty in the army in Germany, he resumed his singing career (and starred in dozens of cheap movies), and this book follows him all the way to his 1977 drug overdose. Biographer Peter Guralnick spent several years interviewing nearly every significant person in Elvis’s life, and some of the stories are really touching. (Like the way Elvis sang Christmas carols with his fellow soldiers while he was stationed in Germany, and even donated money to a local orphanage).

Now it’s finally available as a Kindle ebook – and I recommend it!

Is the Kindle More Popular Than We Think?

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Blonde woman in new $79 Kindle ad buys one for herself

There’s a strange statistic making the rounds. British newspapers are reporting the results of study about all the people who received a new Kindle this Christmas. It claims 22% of them aren’t even using their new Kindle, if you believe the coverage in the Telegraph or the Metro newspapers. But another site filed an entirely different report on the same study, suggesting the Kindle may actually have been much more popular as a gift.

PC Advisor notes that the study first focussed only on people who were dissatisfied with something they’d received as a gift. Only then did the researchers ask the follow-up question: okay, well then, which gift was it which you weren’t satisfied with? Even then, 78% of them identified a different gift, but the Kindle was named by 22% of the people who were dissatisfied with a gift. And more than half of those people even admitted that they hadn’t even used their Kindles yet. They had yet to download a single ebook. (No wonder they were dissatisfied!)

In fact, this year the Kindle was one of the most popular Christmas gifts in England. Even The Telegraph notes a separate survey which discovered that this year, a whopping one in 40 British adults received a Kindle for Christmas. So obviously, among all those new Kindle owners will be a handful of recipients who are still techno-phobic, or who simply haven’t gotten around to using their Kindles yet. It’ll seem like there’s a lot of more of them when you calculate only what their percentage would be of those grumpy people who didn’t like their Christmas presents.

In fact, 9% of that group reported that the gift they weren’t using was…an iPad! And another 14% said they weren’t using the mp3 players they’d received for Christmas. Interestingly, an even higher percentage of this group said it was because they hadn’t gotten around to downloading anything yet to listen to — 67% of them. “It is surprising to see how many people have not used gifts they received almost one month ago,” noted the Chairman of the web site which released the study. But he added, “I think we are all guilty of putting gifts to one side now and again.”

And no matter how cynical the headlines are, the chairman actually reached a very positive conclusion. “It is likely that these gifts will be used eventually, perhaps when the owners get a chance to download books or music…” The site which conducted the study is MyVoucherCodes.co.uk — a British web site offering shopping coupons for discounts. It wasn’t a research firm filled with professional market analysts, or even an academic study from a university. (I wonder if they simply asked random people visiting their web site to make their selection from a small list of choices.)

Unfortunately, I can’t find any information online about how they conducted their study, which makes me feel a little guilty about even reporting these numbers. (At this point I’m writing an article about an article about a study — and it’s not even clear how that study was conducted!) But there’s one fact I’m absolutely sure of, and I think a lot of Kindle owners would almost certainly agree.

If we a new Kindle as a Christmas gift — we’d definitely be using it.

The Kindle killed a minister?

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It was almost two years ago that I heard a strange mention of the Kindle on the radio. There’s a news quiz show called Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! (Three stories are read to the contestants — one true but unexpected, and two which are outright lies.) And that week, the category was “technology disasters.”

The first concerned Apps-berger’s syndrome — a newly-discovered medical syndrome in which people use cell phone apps obsessively to perform tasks they could just as easily do by themselves. (I was pretty sure that story was false!) And story #2 concerned a guy who insisted to his girlfriend that the sexy text messages she’d found on his cell phone had actually been pre-loaded on the phone when he’d bought it.

So was story #3 true or false?

It concerned a minister who bought a Kindle. Actually, not just a Kindle. Late in life, the minister become a raging technophile, while also helping elderly members in his congregation learn how to use technology themselves. (And at one point, he even placed a bet on the exact date of the Apocalypse.) He bought himself a pocket-sized Kindle, to which he downloaded the Holy Bible, and he always carried it with him in his jacket’s vest pocket.

One day while hunting, a gun accidentally fires a shot. The bullet rips through his jacket – and rips through his Kindle – before passing through the minister’s is body and then out his back. Two nearby hunters heard the shots, and rushed to the aid of the fallen minister. Looking down at the scene, one of the hunters said…

“Where the hell is your pocket bible? That would’ve stopped the bullet clean!”



The name of the news quiz was “You were supposed to make me happy!” And it turns out the true story was… #2. (The pre-loaded cell phone text messages — which was my guess. It reminded me of a similar true story about a cellphone that was pre-loaded with someone else’s pornography!) Still, it’s worth noticing that the Kindle was also included in this pageant of technology folk tales.

It shows digital readers are now becoming part of the popular consciousness. The same year I’d been watching Wheel of Fortune, and as Vanna White flipped the letters, it turned out that the contestants were trying to guess the phrase:

Digital Book

Somewhere inside, I decided that we’d past an invisible milestone. I’d turned to the mass media — and I’d seen people talking about the Kindle!

The Face of an eBook Pirate

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The mask of a pirate

Within just the last 12 days, Amazon’s removed close to 100 plagiarized ebooks from their Kindle Store. They’re responding to an article in Fast Company magazine about “pirates” who were publishing other people’s stories as their own. Now the magazine’s published a fascinating follow-up article. And they’ve actually identified and interviewed one of the ebook pirates!

Our story begins with a humble security guard — a 64-year-old man who wrote a dirty story, and then published it on a sexy web site. He later discovered his story on the Kindle — or at least, available for sale in Amazon’s Kindle Store. But it had taken a strange path to get there — through the seamy online underworld where spammers trade secrets — and then eventually, to Kuwait! And according to the article’s semi-dramatic subhead, this remarkable journey “sheds light on black hat hacker forums — and the theft, taboo sex, and swindles festering in the recesses of Amazon.”

When contacted by the 64-year-old author, Amazon did a strange thing. Instead of giving him the money that the ebook had earned, Amazon simply provided him with the pirate’s contact information — their name, address, and e-mail. Amazon’s response “was, in essence, to tell the aggrieved party to work it out with the thief,” writes Fast Company, while Amazon still “kept its cut… It profits no matter what.” The writer ultimately turned to the magazine for assistance, giving the contact information to their reporter — who is also a journalism professor in New York.

And the reporter then tracked down the ebook pirate in Kuwait, who shared his own side of the story. When he’d re-published the erotic story, the pirate didn’t even know he was stealing another writer’s work. The story was purchased as part of a “starter kit” for aspiring book publishers, which included dozens of different stories that were bundled together in a small .zip file. He’d paid $100 for the file, plus $15 for some images to use as the covers of his ebooks (and another $35 to watch a video demonstrating exactly how to publish an ebook in Amazon’s Kindle Store). And that expenditure ate up almost 45% of the money he’d earned, since he’d sold just 187 copies of the ebook. He was apparently selling them at $2.99 apiece, since his net sales were $559.13 — but Amazon kept 40% of that amount, so even before deducting expenses, he’d brought in just $335.

That’s a lot of work to earn $185 — and the reporter notes that the pirate earned even less from some of other ebooks that he’d published. (“My first book was a diet guide,” the pirate says. “Total copies sold: one.”) In addition, he was creating the books in a strict Muslim country, where pornography is illegal. So Fast Company‘s reporter notes that the ebook pirate “could face dire consequences if Kuwaiti authorities found out about his sexy shenanigans.”

Maybe the moral of the story is simply that crime really doesn’t pay — or at least, not enough to make it worth the trouble. Another author in the story had published over 22 different books — using material which Amazon considered nearly identical to ebooks they were already selling in the Kindle Store. They’d removed all 22 of the duplicate titles, but altogether they’d only earned a total of $60 — about $2.72 for each book — after nearly three months in the Kindle Store. They’d created all 22 ebooks over “a long weekend” simply by formatting and publishing them, all at once.

Depending on how much time was spent, this pirate may actually have earned less than the minimum wage!

Amazing New Statistics about the Kindle

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What just happened? The number of people who own an e-reader nearly doubled — in less than four weeks! That’s according to a new study from the well-respected analysts at Pew Research Center. And they’re concluding that now one in five Americans own a Kindle (or another digital reader)!

According to their just-released survey results, between mid-December and early January, the number of people who own a Kindle (or a Nook, or another digital reading device) jumped from 10% to 19%. It’s especially amazing because there’d been almost no new purchasers during the previous six months, according to their research. “These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers…as the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted.”

I love these studies, because they provide hard data about who owns Kindles, with a chart showing a demographic breakdown. For example, 30% of college graduates now own a Kindle, a Nook, or some
other digital reader. (And 31% of people earning more than $75,000 a year!) They’re the two fastest-growing groups in the study, since just last month, only 16% of college graduates owned a Kindle (and 21% of people earning more than $75,000 a year.) If this study is correct, 14% of America’s college graduates got a digital reader within the last month — and 10% of the people earning over $75,000 a year!

The statistics are nearly identical when you ask who owns a tablet computer like the iPad or Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablets: the percentage also jumped from 10% to 19%. In fact, 31% of college graduates now own a tablet computer, according to the study — and 36% of people with an income over $75,000 a year. (That’s 14% more — for both demographics — than it was just in mid-December!) And if you ask about both devices, asking if people own at least one digital reader or one tablet computer, the numbers are even higher. In December it was 18%, but by January, it had risen to 29%!

Women are now also more likely to own a Kindle (or another digital reader) than men. Back in November of 2010, it was an even split — 6% of the women in America owned a digital reader, and so did 6% of the men. By this December, it had risen to 11% of the women vs. 9% of the men — and after Christmas, the number of women who owned a reader had nearly doubled, to 21%, while the number of men rose only to 16%.

Click here to see the study’s chart showing “the big jump in gadget ownership over the holidays.” They estimate that their survey has a margin of error of just 2%, since they phoned nearly 3,000 people to compile each set of results. The research is supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “to look at how these devices are affecting people’s relationship with their local libraries, the services those libraries offer, and the general role of libraries in communities.”

And in a few weeks, the researchers will reveal more interesting data from their survey participants — about “reading habits and their interactions with their libraries related to e-books and other digital content!”

The ghost-writer, the eBook, and “Shark Tank”

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Mark Cuban on Shark Tank
Mark Cuban published his own ebook in 2012

I’m always watching for Kindle references on TV, especially talk about how ebooks might take the place of books. But the last place I ever expected to hear that was on the season premiere of “Shark Tank.”

If you haven’t seen the show, five rich investors listen to pitches from start-up business owners who are hoping to earn some venture capital (in exchange for a stake in their company). But Friday night, the business was simply a ghost writer — and he believed he could make millions by writing and publishing the biographies of businessmen. It sounded crazy, until he revealed that he’d already written something like 100 “vanity” books. And he was charging up to $35,000 for each book (which included a run of printed copies).

The books looked slick, and investor Daymond John asked an interesting question: why aren’t you marketing this service to ordinary people? (“Because ordinary people don’t have $35,000 to spend on a book!” screamed my girlfriend at the TV!) The writer gave an answer that was much more nuanced, but essentially making the same point — that not everyone has the quality for a book. I think he danced around the specifics, but as I remember it, he said that he didn’t feel he could produce a good book for just $10,000. And that he was telling his customers that instead of expecting profits from the sales of their book, they should use them as a marketing tool, to promote their other businesses.

The presenter had a good patter, and the investors all seemed to like him, but one by one, they’d started dropping out of the bidding. Soon there was just one left — the newest panelist, the unpredictable billionaire Mark Cuban (who owns the Dallas Maverick’s basketball team, as well as the Landmark Theatre movie chain). He seemed genuinely intrigued, but then he raised a devastating critique. You haven’t mentioned the way the book industry is changing — meaning specifically the Kindle, or ebooks, or the self-publishing revolution.

It was a poignant moment. Ghost writer Michael Levin had already proven his success in the world of printed books. (According to his web site, he’s ghost-written the biographies of sports commentator Pat Summerall and Dave Winfield, a former outfielder who’s now the vice president of the San Diego Padres.) And at one point, the panel pointed out that the writer was doing what nearly every other writer had dreamed of but failed to do: he was actually making a ton of money. But unfortunately for the ghost writer, Mark Cuban had just published his own ebook — which was called “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” So he was going to be skeptical about investing in a company which produces nothing but books in print.

Now the ghost writer was called out on nationwide TV, in front of a panel of cynical investors. (“If this was 1995, I would’ve said yes,” explained Mark Cuban.) As his moment of glory turned to unanimous rejection, the ghost writer came up with one more clever — or desperate — last hurrah. I saw him as an unheralded giant — an invisible kingpin — in the dying world of printed books. And maybe he just didn’t want to admit that the world was really changing. Instead, he told the panel that ebooks would only increase the relevance of his business model. Since then printed books would become even more of a curiosity — a quaint and intriguing artifact that businesses would want even more!

And the last word seemed to belong to those same ordinary people who could never afford his ghost-writing services anyways.

“Dude was clueless as hell…” posted one viewer on Twitter. And another tweeted a condensed version of Cuban’s reason for declining the investment opportunity: “no future in a hard copy book, like a weightlifting snowman.” (Which means that no matter how impressive it is, it’ll still vanish before you know it!) And ultimately, soon even Mark Cuban himself had turned up on Twitter, confirming that that’s why he’d left behind the world of printed books.

“exactly why i publish my book as an ebook.”


Check out Mark Cuban’s Kindle ebook, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It!”

The Kindle Store vs the eBook Pirates

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Long John Silver vs. the Amazon logo

It’s an investigation that’s worthy of a crime novel — but it’s a crime against ebooks! (Or at least, the authors who write them.) Acting on a tip, the business magazine Fast Company researched Amazon’s Kindle Store, and discovered four authors who were hiding a secret. They’d plagiarized every single one of their ebooks from somebody else!

Like any good crime story, it begins on the seedy side of town. At midnight in Amazon’s erotica section, the magazines’ reporter discovered “a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement.” I’m always suspicious when a publication decides to do a “business” story about the business of pornography, mostly because I assume they’re just trying to get attention! But the site’s editor obviously had some fun riffing on that theme when they wrote the article’s headlines. “Even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn’t appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action…”

I think it’s worth investigating, and their reporter found a perfect way to illustrate the issue — with the story of an ebook author named Sharazade. She’s never plagiarized anything herself, but when she studied the Kindle Store, Sharazade “was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation.” I’ve also seen some badly-formatted books in the Kindle Store, so it’s not hard to imagine what the offending titles looked like. “Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering,” reports Fast Company. “One author managed to misspell her own name…”

One of these knock-off ebooks, by Maria Cruz, had become the #1 best-selling erotica book one day in the Kindle Store for Amazon.UK. So Sharazade downloaded a free sample to her Kindle, and made a discovery that was even more shocking than the vampire story that the author had written. That author “had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.” (Emphasis mine.)

But that was only the beginning. Sharazade’s discovery prompted an investigation from Fast Company, which revealed that Cruz “isn’t the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site…” In fact, Maria Cruz “had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent.” Another author had published 31 ebooks in the Kindle store — every single word of them plagiarized. A third author had plagiarized 11 ebooks, and a fourth author had plagiarized eight more. And “she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews….”

Of course, it’s not just the Kindle store. (Fast Company also discovered the same author had also published five completely-plagiarized ebooks in Apple’s iBookStore.) And the real victim here isn’t Amazon — or even their readers — but the hard-working authors who discover that their creations have been stolen. A 52-year-old math teacher complained to the magazine that “What makes this kind of theft so insidious is how easy it is to get away with and avoid getting caught.” A Canadian novelist named S.K.S. Perry even discovered that, without his knowledge, someone was already selling his novel as a Kindle ebook. “All I can assume,” he wrote on his blog, “is that someone convinced Amazon that they were S.K.S. Perry, and submitted my book for sale.”

It won’t be the first time. I remember when a friend of mine — also a technology reporter — convinced Amazon that he was the author of a book. The author he was claiming to be was Socrates, and he even ended up filling out an autobiography which was displayed on Amazon.com. This was back in the late 1990’s, so my memory of the details may be fuzzy. But I remember “Socrates” claiming that he’d had a lifelong friendship with another popular writer — Louis L’Amour. (The 20th-century author behind hundreds of cowboy western novels…)

“Self-publishing has become the latest vehicle for spammers and content farms,” writes Fast Company, “with the sheer volume of self-published books making it difficult, if not impossible, for e-stores like Amazon to vet works before they go on sale.” They note that six years ago, there were just 51,000 self-published titles, but last year, there were 133,036, “and that number is destined to climb.” That’s a good thing, and I’m always excited to see the walls crumbling between “professional” authors and the rest of us ordinary people who have a story to tell. Unfortunately, plagiarism looks like one of the unintended consequences. Some of those ordinary people just aren’t very honest.

“Writing a book is hard…” notes Fast Company. “It’s a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else’s work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in.” But it gives me a special feeling to watch the real self-published authors taking so much pride in their work, and sharing protests from the heart about how it feels to find their words stolen. “I have no problem competing against legitimate writers and publishers,” Sharazade told Fast Company. “That’s all part of the deal.

“But I am irritated by competing with cheaters.”

Amazon Announces a New Way to Send Stuff to Your Kindle

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Download Amazon's new Send to Kindle software app

Amazon has quietly announced a new application. There’s now an easier way to get your own documents onto your Kindle. Just download and install Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” software onto your PC (by pointing your computer’s browser to amazon.com/sendtokindle.) “Support for Mac is coming soon,” Amazon promises further down the page…

Once you’ve installed it, a “send to Kindle” choice appears whenever you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer. And “send to Kindle” also appears as a choice on the “Print” menu in Microsoft Word, “or in the print dialogue of any Windows application.” In the past, you had to e-mail your documents to the e-mail address which Amazon had created for your Kindle. Or you could also connect your USB cord to your PC, and then transfer documents by connecting the other end to your Kindle.

This was seems much more convenient, and it might get me to use my Kindle for more than just reading ebooks I’ve downloaded from Amazon.com. “Kindle Personal Documents Service makes it easy to take your personal documents with you,” Amazon explains at the top of another web page at amazon.com/kindlepersonaldocuments, promising that it eliminates the need for a print-out!

I say Amazon “quietly” announced the news, because I only found out about it from a post on their “Kindle Daily” blog. And they also suggested another way you can use Amazon’s servers to manage files that you want to store. “You can also simply archive documents in your Kindle Library for re-download later. Your last page read along with bookmarks, notes and highlights are automatically synchronized for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across your Kindle devices and supported Kindle reading apps .”

Part of me wonders if Amazon is up to something. Once your personal documents are stored on Amazon, it becomes a part of your life – and then it’s even harder to switch to a competing digital reader! You’d have to transfer all the individual documents — and more importantly, you’d feel a personal attachment to your Kindle. “It’s not just that device where I downloaded 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. It’s also where I stored that draft of an important manuscript that I’m trying to finish…”

I think Amazon has concluded they’ve got a real business reason to encourage their customers to store documents “in the cloud.” The new, trendy concept in technology is the idea that your smartphone and your PC and your Kindle (and other tablet devices) can all access the same set of files – your own personal collection of digital content. You can buy an mp3 of your favorite song for your new Kindle Fire tablet — but you’ll also be able to listen to it on your PC using Amazon’s “cloud player.” Of course, you can also just download that mp3 straight to your hard drive, and then do whatever you want with it.

But if you’ve ever tried that, you’ll know that Amazon adds extra steps to that process. It’s like they’ve optimized their mp3 service for use with the Amazon Cloud Player, and they’re simply supporting, reluctantly, the old-fashioned custom of listening to mp3s directly from your hard drive. Maybe I’m just suspicious because “cloud storage” still feels new — and in time, I’ll wonder how I ever lived without storing everything on a universally-accessible cloud drive. But for now I still find myself wondering what’s the catch. Do I really want my personal documents to be stored in Seattle, and beamed to an orbiting satellite in outer space?

It does sound cool — like something that James Bond might do. But in any case, this capability has arrived, and how we use it is up to us. “Reading your personal documents on Kindle is now easier than ever,” Amazon explains on their web page.

“You can download archived personal documents from your Kindle Library on Kindle Keyboard, Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle for iPad, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPod…”

Larry McMurtry Challenges Amazon’s CEO

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Larry_McMurtry
Image courtesy of The Dallas Observer

Larry McMurtry has a question: “Will Amazon kill the book?” At least, that’s the headline for a new article that he’s written for this month’s issue of Harper’s magazine. The 75-year-old author provides a very thoughtful answer, looking for historical precedents to the rise of Amazon. But I also learned that besides being famous — Larry McMurtry also owns a bookstore!

“My own bookshop, Booked Up Inc., consists of four buildings and about 400,000 books,” he explains in the article — establishing his credentials for weighing in on the future of publishing. The store sells mostly used books, and he reports that since the dawn of the ebook, he’s actually seen an increase in orders from overseas. “Of course it’s not all roses for traditional booksellers now, and in part the downturn is due to the digital revolution. We have bought the stocks of some 26 booksellers, but it wasn’t just the e-book that caused these shops to die, it was a withering of generations.

“The owners of these shops had no one to pass them on to…”

McMurtry himself is the son of a Texas rancher, so he’s seen first-hand how the world can change. In 1986, McMurtry even won a Pulitzer Prize for his historical novel about cattle drivers — Lonesome Dove — and he’s also been involved in several Oscar-winning movies. (He wrote the novel Terms of Endearment in 1975, and co-wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain.) But for his article in Harper’s, he casts a skeptical eye on the claim that the death of the book is inevitable. “The culture has surged in the direction of e-books, but the surge might not go on forever,” he writes. “It might be a bubble; history grinds slowly, and despite impressive sales of the Kindle, it seems to me a bit too early for Bezos to gloat.”

McMurtry is reviewing a new book about Amazon’s CEO, called One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com. He writes sardonically that “There were rivalries, failures, and leadership crises, and Amazon is now one of the largest book suppliers in the world.” But it takes a certain amount of ego to run a $40-billion-a-year corporation, and McMurtry wonders if bookstore owners recognize something that’s being overlooked by Amazon’s CEO. “He is so accustomed to the very vastness of his own empire — 850,000-square-foot distribution centers — that he may not see the tenacity of our appetite for variety: for good books of all formats, including old-fashioned ones.”

I thought McMurtry’s assessment of Bezos was ultimately pretty fair — and it was grounded in a real sense of history. He reports that like Henry Ford, Bezos “had a single culture-changing idea that they executed doggedly until the culture came round.” And he applauds Amazon for the way that they’ve already revolutionized the purchasing of printed books. “Bezos is a farsighted merchant whose company provides an excellent service,” McMurtry writes. “Want a book? Use Amazon and you can have it the next day. Such literary expeditiousness has never existed before and all readers should be grateful that it’s here.”

But McMurtry also notes that despite the popularity of the Kindle, printed books are still competitive, and he considers the position of Amazon’s CEO to be “less attractive”. “He has pointed out that the traditional book has had a 500-year run; he clearly thinks its time for these relics to sort of shuffle offstage. Then he will no longer be bothered with old-timey objects that have the temerity to flop open and cause one to lose one’s place.”

I know that I don’t know, for sure, what’s going to happen in the future. But I do know that something big is going on, and it’s fun to watch writers — and corporations — as they try to make sense of these changes. So I enjoyed reading what Larry McMurtry had to say — especially knowing that it comes from a man who’s owned a bookstore for more than 40 years.

“Jeff Bezos and his colleagues are free to make and sell as many Kindles as they can, but Bezos shouldn’t be persuaded that our Gutenberg days are over, at least not from where I sit. One thing we offer that he can’t is serendipity — a book browser’s serendipity, the thrill of the accidental find.

“Stirring the curiosity of readers is a vital part of bookselling; skimming a few strange pages is surely as important as making one click.”

Authors Profit from the Kindle “Lending Library”

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Today Amazon revealed their first statistics for the “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library”. There’s over 75,000 ebooks that can now be borrowed for free for one month by the members of Amazon’s “Prime” shipping service, who are paying an annual fee of $79. That service also offers free two-day shipping (and cheaper one-day shipping), plus free access to a selection of online movies and TV shows. But the people who may be benefiting the most are some of Amazon’s self-published authors!

The program’s “off to a strong start,” Amazon reported today, noting that in just the month of December, nearly 300,000 Kindle owners borrowed an ebook. In fact, each ebook in the library was borrowed by four Kindle owners in December, on average — though of course some ebooks were more popular than others. And Amazon had set aside a $500,000 fund for December to be shared among “KDP Select” authors (who publish their ebooks using Amazon’s tools and agree to let Amazon hold exclusive digital distribution rights). Today Amazon announced they’re bumping up last month’s fund by 40% — to $700,000 — which means “KDP Select” authors will earn $1.70 for each time one of their own ebooks was borrowed!

Self-published authors seem to have discovered a new way to measure their success. The 10 most-popular authors in the KDP Select program saw their Kindle ebooks being borrowed an average of 4,117 times, if I’m reading Amazon’s statistics correctly. They’d reported that those authors earned $70,000 from the lending library — which has to be a cumulative total, meaning on average an extra $7,000 per author. And since Amazon’s reported they’re paying $1.70 for each “borrow,” the total number of borrows is $7,000/$1.70 — which comes out to 4,117 times. “The list of top 10 KDP Select authors includes Carolyn McCray, Rachel Yu, the Grabarchuk family and Amber Scott,” Amazon announced today.

That’s especially exciting for one author — Rachel Yu — who is just 16 years old! She’s self-published five children’s books in the Kindle Store, including “A Wolf Pup’s Tale,” which she wrote when she was 15. “All proceeds will go to Rachel’s college education fund,” reads a note on the book’s page at Amazon.com. She published her first ebook just 16 months ago — “A Dragon Named Dragon” — at the age of 14, and now she’s one of the 10 best-selling authors in Amazon’s KDP Select program. “It’s so cool to be part of the success of KDP Select…,” she says in today’s press release from Amazon. “There’s truly no other opportunity like Amazon for self-publishing.”

Rachel earned $6,200 just in the month of December, according to Amazon’s announcement, and another self-published author earned even more. “Participating in KDP Select has quadrupled my royalties,” reported Carolyn McCray, who writes paranormal romance novels as well as mysteries and historical thrillers. Amazon reported today that just in December, Carolyn McCray earned $8,250.

In fact on average, all “KDP Select” authors are earning an extra 26%, according to Amazon. “KDP Select appears to be earning authors more money in two ways…,” announced Amazon’s Vice President of Kindle Content. Besides their revenue from the lending program, “we’ve been surprised by how much paid sales of those same titles increased, even relative to the rest of KDP.” Obviously Amazon is touting the experience of their most-successful self-published authors. But it’s inspiring to hear about their success. It makes you wonder if the world of publishing really has been transformed forever.

“During many decades our family is working in the Puzzle World,” reads one humble “author profile” at Amazon.com for the Grabarchuk family. Besides creating and marketing puzzles, they “produce interactive puzzles; solve hundreds puzzles a year; make puzzle researches and historical studies; and are involved into many other puzzle activities all over the World.” The Grabarchuk family also became one of the 10 top-selling authors in Amazon’s KDP Select program for December. In just 31 days, they earned $6,300. “Finally indie publishers are playing as equals with the big publishing houses in the world’s biggest eBook marketplace,” co-founder Serhiy Grabarchuk said enthusiastically in today’s press release from Amazon.

And Amazon provided one more example — romance writer Amber Scott. With seven Kindle ebooks, she’s reporting that the KDK select program “utterly transformed my career,” and her earnings for December were $7,650. She’s apparently attributing some of her success to the Kindle Lending Library, saying “I’ve experienced not only a surge in royalties but a surge in readership thanks to the increased exposure.” And she ended her comment with an exciting prediction for 2012.

“What an exciting time to be an author!”

The Day I Held a 100-Year-Old Book

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Mark Twain writes a play with Bret Harte

The new year always gives me a special feeling, as I think about how the last year is gone forever, and remember all those charming moments that are slowly falling away. In 2012, ebooks will continue changing our world — but that’s going to make some memories even more precious. And there’s one particular story that I’m always going to cherish…

Mark Twain once co-authored a play with a forgotten writer named Bret Harte. Their legendary meeting was even depicted in an advertisement for Old Crow whiskey (above). Here’s how Twain himself described it.

“Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect…”

In fact, “They both worked on the play, and worked hard,” according to Twain’s literary executor. One night Harte apparently even stayed up until dawn at Twain’s house to write a different short story for another publisher. (“He asked that an open fire might be made in his room and a bottle of whiskey sent up, in case he needed something to keep him awake… At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elated, with the announcement that his story was complete.”) I was delighted to discover that 134 years later, that story was still available on the Kindle, “a tale which Mark Twain always regarded as one of Harte’s very best.”

Bret Harte’s short story (as a free Kindle ebook)

Biography of Mark Twain by his executor (as a free Kindle ebook)

Right before Christmas, I wrote about how Harte’s words had already touched another famous writer — Charles Dickens. Before his death, 58-year-old Dickens had sent a letter inviting Bret Harte for a visit in England. But ironically, that letter didn’t arrive until after young Harte had already written a eulogy marking Dickens’ death. It was a poem called “Dickens in Camp,” suggesting that to the English oaks by Dickens’ grave, they should also add a spray of western pine for his fans in the lost frontier mining towns of California…

But two of Harte’s famous short stories had already captured Dickens’ attention — “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” John Forster, who was Dickens’ biographer, remembers that “he had found such subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in later years discovered… I have rarely known him more honestly moved.” In fact, Dickens even felt that Harte’s style was similar to his own, “the manner resembling himself but the matter fresh to a degree that had surprised him.”

The Luck of Roaring Camp and other stories
Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (Kindle ebook)

So on one chilly November afternoon, I’d finally pulled down a dusty volume of Bret Harte stories from a shelf at my local public library. I’d had an emotional reaction to “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” — and an equally intense response to “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” But Harte’s career had peaked early, and it seems like he spent his remaining decades just trying to recapture his early success. (“His last letters are full of his worries over money,” notes The Anthology of American Literature, along with “self-pitying complaints about his health, and a grieving awareness of a wasted talent.”) Even in the 20th century, his earliest stories still remained popular as a source of frontier fiction — several were later adapted into western movies. But Harte never really achieved a hallowed place at the top of the literary canon.

Yet “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was the first ebook I’d ordered on my Kindle. I’d checked for print editions but hadn’t found a single one at either Borders, Barnes and Noble, or a local chain called Bookstores, Inc. Days later, I’d decided to try my public library, where I discovered a whole shelf of the overlooked novelist (including an obscure later novel called The Story of a Mine). And that’s when I noticed the date that the library had stamped on its inside cover.

“SEP 21 1905.”

Bret Harte library book - checked out in 1905Close-up of library check-out date for Bret Harte book

I felt like I was holding history in my hand. The book was published just three years after Harte’s death in 1902, and there was an old-fashioned card, in a plastic pocket glued to the inside cover, which showed some of the past check-out dates, including FEB 12 1923 and APR 8 1923.

Bret Harte library book - old check-out datesCheck-out dates for old library book

More than a century later, my local librarians had tagged this ancient book with an RFID chip so you could check it out automatically just by running it across a scanner. A computerized printer spit out a receipt, making sure that the book wouldn’t remotely trigger their electronic security alarm when it was carried past the library’s anti-theft security gates.

I hope that somewhere, that makes Bret Harte happy.

Amazon Sells Special Mp3s for Just 69 Cents

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Vintage phonography gramophone record player

Amazon just announced a big sale on mp3 music files. They’ve identified 129 “one-hit wonders” — from six different decades — and they’re selling their most famous songs for just 69 cents each!

You’ll be able to listen to them on most Kindles — everything except Amazon’s new bargain $79 Kindles — and you’ll even be able to purchase them on your Kindle Fire tablet. (Otherwise, just point your computer’s web browser to tinyurl.com/69centMp3s .)

But what’s really fun is the way Amazon’s letting you hear a preview of all 129 songs automatically. Every 30 seconds, they’ll switch to a different song, creating a massive jukebox that covers the entire history of pop music — from the 1950s through the 21st century! At one point I heard Phil Spector’s very first song from 1958, “To Know Him is to Love Him” (which, according to Wikipedia, was inspired by the words on his own father’s gravestone). But towards the end, you’ll hear a song by Jace Everett — who wasn’t even born until 14 years later. (In 2005, Jace released the song “Bad Things,” which became the theme to HBO’s True Blood series in 2008.)

So what songs can you get from Amazon for 69 cents? It’s a fascinating mix!

1950s AND ’60s CLASSICS

“Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp-Bomp-Bomp)”

The original “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen

“Yakety Sax” — immortalized forever as the background music for The Benny Hill Show.

“(Do the) Loco-Motion” by Little Eva (who was Carol King’s baby-sitter!)

“Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies

“Tequila” by the Champs

“Barefootin’ ” by Robert Parker


’70s CLASSICS

The theme to Rocky (“Gonna Fly Now” by Bill Conti) — a special digital remaster from 2006

“Black Betty” by Ram Jam

“Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet

“Kiss You All Over (’til the Night Closes In)” by Exile

“Brandy” by Looking Glass

“(Tired of) Toeing the Line” by Rocky Burnette

“You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone

A forgotten top-10 hit by John Travolta called “Let Her In”


’80s HITS

“Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones

“Come on Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners

“I Know What Boys Like” by the Waitresses

“99 Luftballons” by Nena

“Come on, Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot

“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers

“Down Under” by Men at Work

Irene Cara’s “Flashdance”

“I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany

“The Promise” by When in Rome (which was later used as the closing song in Napoleon Dynamite)


’90s HITS

“No Rain” by Blind Melon (which they promoted with the famous “dancing bee girl” music video on MTV)

“Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer

“Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice

“Unbelievable” by EMF

“Cotton Eye Joe” by the Rednex

“Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star

“(I’m a) Bitch” by Meredith Brooks

“Insane in the (Mem)Brain” by Cypress Hill


21st CENTURY HITS

“Stacy’s Mom (Has Got It Going On)” by Fountains of Wayne

“(Just) Breathe…” by Anna Nalick

“Who Let the Dogs Out” by Baha Men

“Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon

“Falling in Love in a Coffee Shop” by Landon Pigg

“Stars are Blind” by Paris Hilton


It’s a fun jumble of music, and I’ve thought about surprising my friends with an mp3 — or maybe teasing them with one of my least favorite songs. (Amazon’s page helpfully reminds you that you can also “gift these songs to your friends and loved ones.”) There’s even some novelty numbers on sale, like “Monster Mash” by Boris Pickett and “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles, or “Shaddap You Face” by Joe Dolce — and even the song “Rubber Duckie” by Ernie from Sesame Street. I like how Amazon’s offering discounts on songs that I actually remember from when I went to high school many years ago.

And I really like how they’re selling each one for what’s basically the loose change in your pocket — two quarters, a dime, a nickel, and four pennies!

How A Writer Confronts the eBook

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Thomas S Roche - author of the zombie crime novel The Panama Laugh

As the holidays roll around, I remember my friends. I don’t want to sound like Charlie Brown, but it is a good time for some extra warmth and sharing. So today I’m sharing a special personal glimpse into the life of a professional writer — the rest of the interview with my friend, Thomas S. Roche!

He’s been working as a professional fiction writer for nearly 20 years — and just published his first novel under his own name. (A bracingly original zombie novel called The Panama Laugh.)


   *                              *                              *

Q: I was really surprised to hear you’ve actually been reading e-books for more than eleven years! That’s a lot longer than most people…

THOMAS S ROCHE: I was an early adopter of e-books; I read a couple hundred e-books on the Palm Pilot, before anyone had ever heard of a Kindle. I used to read books on a tiny monochrome display using the Pluckr ereader! I am a big fan of e-books and always have been.

Q: So how do you feel about the Kindle and the other new digital readers, and the way e-books look today?

TSR: My main gripe about e-readers in general is that is that I don’t like it when manufacturers and publishers try to make them seem like books!

E-books are not books, and I feel like the big problem with e-reading in general is that I learned how to use a certain amount of functionality with e-books very early on, and made it work for me. Then the industry changed it, and changed it again, and changed it again, and keeps changing it. This is all supposedly in the interest of providing greater functionality to the user, but it’s not; it’s about providing marketing control to corporations.

I still think that e-books should not attempt to imitate a five- or six-hundred-year-old technology (books). The people who say “But I like the way books smell!” have one perspective, and I don’t believe you’re going to win them over by providing a “page” that “turns.” E-books are something different than books, a new form entirely — the same way that online magazines are not magazines, but a new art form.

Q: But does that change fiction?

TSR: Books are not stories; books are books. The fundamental, underlying artistry of writing a novel or a short story or a nonfiction work doesn’t change when you take it out of manuscript form and typeset it. The experience of reading does, and I’m somewhat baffled by users who want to try to duplicate the experience of turning a page, when what they’re doing is nothing like turning a page.

That said, I use my Kindle a lot. And I’ve finally gotten used to the e-ink’s tendency to black out when you turn pages. I don’t need a tablet computer, so the added expense, weight, etc. wouldn’t be worthwhile for me. I prefer to have a straightforward, simple, easy-to-carry e-reader so I’ve always got a book with me, and the Kindle has satisfied that need in my life. I’ve also tried the Nook and I’m fairly impressed with its most current forms, and I’m a fan of the Sony Reader — though that platform seems to be on its way out.

Q: I know you recently bought one of Amazon’s new $79 Kindles. So what exactly do you when it’s time to read?

TSR: In addition to reading a Kindle book a week or so, I also read books quite frequently on the Kindle app for my iPod Touch. It’s advantageous because if I get caught without a book or without my Kindle, like waiting in line somewhere when I wasn’t planning to, the iPod Touch can always be in my pocket — something that the Kindle isn’t, just because of its size and its relative fragility.

However, the advantages of the Kindle are still huge, so I use it all the time. The weight, profile and contour, the small size of the data files, and ultimately the screen are all advantageous. I hate the e-ink technology’s tendency to black out between pages. But while I’m reading a single page, I’m quite happy.

Q: You’ve been a professional fiction writer for nearly 20 years. Do you remember how you felt when you first realized that someday books might be delivered in a digital format? (And were you skeptical at first?)

TSR: I read articles about the coming wave of e-books in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, way back in the ’80s. I was only skeptical about individual platforms. I hate cell phones, and I hate smartphones…

When I finally gave up my Palm, I started using the iPod Touch as an e-reader, and it worked okay, but just didn’t satisfy me as a full-time reading device… That’s still my stopgap measure when I don’t have my Kindle.

Q: I should probably ask you how you feel about the future of the local bookstore, and Amazon.

TSR: I think it’s dangerous for publishers and readers to put all their eggs in one basket. Local bookstores are cultural treasures. They’ve been beaten out of existence not just by competition from Amazon — which was explicitly devoted to putting them all out of business from the get-go — but by a community that values convenience over building local community.

However, this is not unique to bookselling. It’s the symptom of a huge corporatist migration, which is incredibly dangerous for many more reasons than just putting local booksellers out of business.

That’s a lot of what The Panama Laugh is about, in fact — the elevation of private business above community infrastructure, with catastrophic results.

Q: I’ve read it! And I was just a tiny bit disappointed that you live in Sacramento, but there’s not a scene in your novel where a zombie throng marches through, destroying all the local businesses and taking over the state legislature…

TSR: There was a first draft of the novel that was about 100,000 words, that involved a road trip from Corpus Christi to San Francisco in a Bellona Industries armored personnel carrier. Not a single word of it got used in the final draft… It involved a trip through Sacramento, including a huge zombie attack in Lathrop and a tank battalion approaching the Bay Bridge from a (fictional) Army base in Fairfield. I don’t know if it’ll see the light of day.

Q: Fair enough. But how exactly is it that you know so much about using weapons on zombies?!

TSR: I’ve always read obsessively about guns. My father — and his father — were both seasoned hunters, and I was taken to the range as a kid. But I’m not a hunter. I could never shoot a deer, or probably even a pheasant, unless I really had to. In which case I’d probably apologize to it — which might not be a bad idea. However, guns are expensive, and shooting is an expensive hobby

Q: And at the end of the book you even acknowledge a local coffee shop where you wrote the manuscript — Temple Coffee on 28th street in Sacramento. I find it almost mind-boggling that people are in there ordering their muffins and scones, and you’re writing descriptions of the writhing undead feasting on the flesh of the living…

TSR: It just never seemed that weird to me. It’s what I write about, and if I’m at home instead of in public, then like any reasonable person I go lie down and take a nap. I have to be in public when I write, because otherwise I get so isolated I can’t stave off the depression, and I never get anything written!

Q: Spoken like a man who’s just written a 315-page zombie apocalypse story. Happy holidays, Thomas!


Click here for a free sample chapter from Thomas’s new zombie apocalypse, The Panama Laugh

Thomas S Roche - author of the zombie crime novel The Panama Laugh

Amazon Announces Big Kindle Sales Figures

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Kindle gift-wrapped as a Christmas gift

Amazon won’t release specific numbers about their Kindle sales — but they made a rare exception Thursday in their special year-end press release. “2011 is the Best Holiday Ever for Kindle,” Amazon announced, pointing to the fact that this year, they’d sold “millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers.”

That’s still vague, but it reveals a big number if you parse it carefully. “Millions” has to mean at least two million, and Amazon’s apparently reporting two different numbers — one for the holiday sales of their color Kindle Fire tablets, and another one for holiday sales of their family of black-and-white e-ink Kindles. That means Amazon sold at least four million Kindles in December — a fact they confirm later in their press release. “Throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week,” Amazon announced.

Unfortunately, there’s no telling what Amazon means by “well over one million”. And it’s fun to look at other clever tricks that Amazon’s used over the years to avoid giving out a specific number. For example, last year in December of 2010, Amazon made an announcement about sales for their newly-released Kindle 3. “[I]n the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009,” the statement read — without providing an actual number!

“Amazon has a tradition of playing these stupid mind games with the press…” complained one columnist at PC World. “Amazon really took the cake for its silly numbers game last December [of 2009], when the company announced it had sold enough 8 gigabyte iPods during the holiday season to play 422 years of continuous music. The company also claimed it had sold enough Blu-ray disc players during the 2009 holiday sales blitz that if you lined up all the players side-by-side they would stretch for more than 27 miles. Huh?”

And this year, Amazon released a press release with some even stranger comparisons.

“Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough cameras for every fan at the next 10 Super Bowls to snap their own shots of the winning touchdown.”

“Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough toys in 2011 to give a toy to every resident of Chicago.”

“[Third-party sellers] sold as many Lalaloopsy Dolls as there are lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York City.”

I love Amazon, and I love my Kindle — but it’s for that reason that I wish Amazon would tell us how many other people have actually bought a Kindle! “Reading Amazon’s press releases on Kindle’s greatness is like having a discussion with a kindergartner or a politician,” complained one analyst at The Motley Fool. “They all tell you what they think you want to hear in glowing superlatives, but lack the details you really need to know before drawing your own conclusion!”

But at least Amazon’s press release this morning also reported an interesting phenomenon that I’d also noticed earlier this month. “[T]he #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were both published independently,” they announced, and both ebooks came from authors using Amazon’s “Kindle Direct Publishing” program for self-publishing ebooks. Amazon’s CEO called it “a huge milestone for independent publishing,” congratulating the two authors, and delivering a message for anyone who got a Kindle for Christmas. “We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle…”

The 30 Most Useful Kindle URLs

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Digital Publishing vs. the Gutenberg press

Once a year, I assemble my “master list” of shortcuts to the 30 most useful pages for Kindle owners – like all of the free ebooks and blogs that Amazon’s making available. But instead of trying to memorize a bunch of complicated URLs, I’ve created these shorter, easier-to-remember addresses that still lead to the same pages.

And all 30 of them start with TinyURL.com …

FREE EBOOKS

https://www.tinyurl.com/100freekindlebooks
Amazon’s 100 best-selling free ebooks are always available on this list (which is updated hourly!) And of course, the other side of the page also shows the 100 best-selling ebooks which are not free…

BARGAIN EBOOKS

tinyurl.com/399books
Every month, Amazon picks 100 ebooks to offer at a discount of $3.99 or less. There’s always a new selection on the first day of the month, so if you visited the page this Saturday (December 31st), you’d see December’s 100 discounted books — and then on Sunday (January 1st), you’d see an entirely new selection!

If you’re in England, Amazon’s created a different page for their bargain ebooks — go to tinyurl.com/399booksEngland

And if you’re in France, there’s also a different URL for your (English-language) bargain ebooks — it’s at tinyurl.com/399booksFrance

tinyurl.com/DailyKindleDeal
In addition, Amazon’s also created a special “Daily Deal” page, where they pick a new ebook each day to sell at a big discount for 24 hours. Past deals have included a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night — and I’m always surprised by the variety. For Christmas, Amazon discounted five holiday-themed romance novels to just 99 cents each, and they also slashed the price on “Call Me Mrs. Miracle” (from $12.99 to just 99 cents). Once they even discounted So Now You’re a Zombie: A Handbook for the Newly Undead!

You can also see past “Daily Deals” on their Twitter feed at twitter.com/kindledailydeal — or on Facebook at facebook.com/kindledeals. And there’s also a new web page where they’re archiving the deals at http://thekindledailydeal.com/

MORE EBOOK LINKS

tinyurl.com/2011Amazon
What were Amazon’s best-selling books for 2011? This URL takes you to a special Amazon web page where they’re all listed — 25 to a page — along with a link to a separate list for the best-selling ebooks of the year. The #1 best-selling print book was the new biography about Steve Jobs (followed by “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever.” ) But the #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks were The Mill River Recluse and The Abbey — neither of which was even available in print!

AMAZON’S CUSTOMER SUPPORT

tinyurl.com/kindle-cs
Amazon’s Customer Service has drawn rave reviews. (If your Kindle is broken, Amazon will usually mail you a replacement overnight!) This page collects all of Amazon’s support URLs. And at its far left, there’s a special link labelled “Contact Kindle Support,” which leads to the support phone numbers for 10 different countries, as well as an online contact form.

tinyurl.com/ReturnAnEbook
Amazon lets you return any ebook within 7 days, no questions asked. Just remember this address — tinyURL.com/ReturnAnEbook — and you’ll always be able to get a refund if you’re not satisfied with your purchase.

MY EBOOKS

It’s my list, so of course it includes shortcuts for two very special ebook projects that I worked on this year…

TinyURL.com/TurkeyBook
“For Thanksgiving, try this game. Find the guilty turkey’s name!”

I wrote a special “mystery poem” that was finally published in November as a funny, illustrated ebook. There’s cartoon-y pictures which show four turkeys in a farmer’s pen on Thanksgiving Day. The farmer’s approaching with an axe — but one of the turkeys has a plan to escape! (“Can the farmer figure out which one? And can you?”) The short “Turkey Mystery Rhyme” is only 99 cents — a real bargain for a fun, holiday smile.

tinyurl.com/OurFunnyDog
Lucca is a cuddly Cocker Spaniel dog who was rescued from an animal shelter, and he now adores his new family — my girlfriend and me! Since I released this ebook just before Christmas, my girlfriend’s been telling her friends how she received “the best present ever” — this short collection of funny photos of her dog, along with sweetly humorous captions that tell the story of his life. (Like the day he met that white cat that moved in downstairs…) If you want to preview a “sample chapter first, go to tinyurl.com/GoodReadsDog — but the whole “short picture scrapbook” is only 99 cents, and it offers a nice peek at a very wonderful dog…

FREE KINDLE BLOGS AND MAGAZINES

tinyurl.com/freeAmazonblogs
Amazon actually publishes six free blogs for the Kindle — and you can find them all at this URL. Besides their Omnivoracious book blog, there’s also a blog about food (and fine dining) called “Al Dente,” and a blog about movies and TV shows called “Armchair Commentary”. If you’re into automobiles, Amazon offers the “Car Lust” blog, and there’s even a blog called “Toy Whimsy” with reviews and information about — what else? — toys!

They’re all available at the URL — but you can also get all of Amazon’s free blogs delivered to your Kindle in just one big super-subscription. Just look for the Amazon Daily blog — which is a great way to try them all out and see which ones you like best!

tinyurl.com/FreeSciFiMag
Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine has been publishing short SciFi stories and commentary for over 60 years — including the works of many famous authors. In 1978 they published Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” short stories, and in 1959 they ran Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” as a serial. (They also published the novella “Flowers for Algernon” and short stories by Harlan Ellison, and even published a short story by Kurt Vonnegut in 1961, which later appeared in his collection “Welcome to the Monkey House.”) Amazon’s now offering free Kindle subscriptions to a special “digest edition”. (The print edition, published six times a year, is a massive 256 pages.) The digest includes all the editorial content — editor’s recommendations, the “odd books” section, film and book reviews, plus cartoons and “Coming Attractions” (highlights of each issue) — along with one short story. (And if you want the full 256-page version sent to your Kindle, you can subscribe for just 99 cents more.)

A VERY SPECIAL KINDLE BLOG

tinyurl.com/MeAndMyKindle
It’s my blog! (That’s the URL for its page on the Kindle Store.) If you want to tell your friends how to find me, this URL makes it easy to remember. Just practice saying “TinyURL com/MeAndMyKindle” and soon we’ll all be sharing the latest Kindle news together.

FREE AND DISCOUNTED MUSIC

tinyurl.com/KindleChristmasSong
It’s that cute song from Amazon’s 2010 Kindle Christmas ad. (“Snowflake in my pocket, let’s take a sleigh ride on the ice…”) At this URL, you can download a free mp3 of the song “Winter Night” by Little &Ashley.

tinyurl.com/25xmasMP3s
Amazon also released 25 free Christmas songs as part of a special promotion in December. Their “25 Days of Free” page features 25 different mp3 files that you can download for free — each one with a different Christmas song — and right now they’re still available online. There’s songs by Bing Crosby, Mannheim Steamroller, the Irish Tenors, and Celtic Woman — plus songs by more modern artists like Brian Wilson, and Macy Gray. And there’s even some Christmas songs by groups like the Flaming Lips, Shonen Kinfe, and even one by Twisted Sister.

tinyURL.com/AmazonXmasMP3s
Amazon’s also offering discounts if you’d like to buy a whole album’s worth of Christmas songs by your favorite artist. This page offers Christmas albums that have been discounted to just $4.99, including a great selection of both traditional and modern recordings. There’s Christmas with the Rat Pack (and A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra), Bing Crosby’s I Wish You a Merry Christmas, and an expanded version of Vince Guaraldi’s music for “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” But there’s also Christmas albums from Weezer, Christina Aguilera, Zooey Deschanel’s band “She and Him,” and even the cast of Sesame Street — plus some performers you wouldn’t expect, like Bob Dylan (and of course — the Twisted Sister Christmas album).

GAMES

tinyurl.com/allkindlegames
Amazon has a web page devoted just to all the games you can play on your Kindle. (There’s over 200 of them!) It’s fun to see all the colorful game “covers” collected together into one magical toy store-like page.

And there’s also a list of the 100 best-selling games for the Kindle — plus a list of all “Hot New Releases” — at tinyurl.com/TopKindleGames. (For the Christmas season, Amazon’s 25 most-popular games are still on sale for just 99 cents each, including Scrabble, Monopoly, and the new Kindle version of Battleship!)

tinyurl.com/kchess
Here’s the shortcut to a free web page where you can play chess against a computer. But you can also pull the page up in your Kindle’s web browser, so I named the URL “KChess”!

KINDLES ON TV

tinyurl.com/DoorstepAd
Amazon’s latest ad shows a woman arriving home and discovering that Amazon’s delivered her new Kindle Fire tablet. The ad’s official name is “Placing the Things You Love at Your Fingertips,” and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube if you point your computer’s web browser to this URL.

And you can watch all of Amazon’s Kindle TV ads at YouTube.com/Kindle

tinyurl.com/KindleFireSong
Their was a spectacular new TV ad when Amazon announced their new Kindle Fire tablets. It showed the evolution of print from a quill pen dipped in ink to Amazon’s latest full-color multimedia touchscreen tablet. But I loved the song they played in the background, by a new Louisiana-based band called the Givers. (“The words we say today, we’ll say… we’ll see them again. Yes, we’ll see them again…”) I’d called it an ode to all the self-published authors who are finding new audiences on the Kindle — and at this URL, you can hear the entire song on YouTube!

tinyurl.com/SheBuysAKindle
This summer Amazon also ran a fun series of TV ads where a blonde woman insists she prefers things like “the rewarding feeling of actually folding down the page” of a book instead of reading a Kindle — though each ad invariably ends with her borrowing her friend’s Kindle instead.

But in September, when Amazon announced their new line-up of Kindles — including one for just $79 — they released one final ad where that blonde woman finally buys a Kindle for herself. To watch it on YouTube, point your computer’s browser to tinyurl.com/SheBuysAKindle

tinyurl.com/AmyRutberg
Before she became “the woman from that Kindle commercial,” actress Amy Rutberg appeared in a zany stage production called “The Divine Sister.” Playbill (the official magazine for theatre-goers) had her record a backstage peek at the theatre and its cast for a special online feature — and it’s a fun way to catch a peek at another part of her career. That URL leads to the video’s web page on YouTube, and there’s also a second part which is available at http://tinyurl.com/AmyRutberg2

tinyurl.com/StewartBorders
On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a special segment this year when Borders bookstores announced that it was going out of business. (“Books! You may know them as the thing Amazon tells you ‘You might be interested in’ when you’re buying DVDs…”) Correspondent John Hodgman delivered some silly suggestions about how bookstores could re-vitalize their business model — like offering in-store appearances where customers could heckle authors while they’re writing novels. Or, simply converting bookstores into historical tourist attractions demonstrating the way books used to be sold in the 20th century.

MISCELLANEOUS

tinyurl.com/kindlemap
Ever wonder where all the Kindle owners are? Someone’s created an interactive online map, where Kindle owners can stop by and leave “push pins” showing their location! There’s big clusters on the east and west coast of America (though you could still leave the first push pin for Montana or Nevada!) It’s an adapted version of one of Google’s maps of the world, so you can also spot “Kindlers” in Iraq, Romania, and Ethiopia. And if you click on the push pins, you’ll find the Kindler’s name and sometimes a comment. (One Kindler in Spain simply posted: “Tengo un Kindle DX!”)

Amazon Announces Strange Sales Milestones

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Steve Jobs biography is a rising sun over Mount Everest

If you bought a copy of the book Steve Jobs, you’re part of a very strange milestone. It was Amazon’s #1 best-selling book this holiday season, and today Amazon announced their customers “purchased enough copies…to create a stack taller than Mt. Everest!”

It’s an annual Amazon tradition — the fun (but nearly-meaningless) statistics about their massive holiday sales. For example, “The cumulative weight of the Bowflex 552 Adjustable Dumbbells purchased by Amazon customers would outweigh more than 70 adult elephants.” And “If you unfolded and stacked each pair of jeans purchased by Amazon customers this holiday, the height would be 2,500 times taller than the Statue of Liberty.”

But they’ve also included some real information in their annual press release. For example, Amazon’s announced their best-selling books for this year’s holiday season.

    “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
    “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever”
    “11/22/63” by Stephen King

And they’re also releasing a separate set of figures for the holiday best-sellers in Kindle ebooks!

    “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
    Catching Fire” by Suzanne Collins
    The Litigators” by John Grisham

It’s also interesting to hear stories about Amazon’s luckiest customer, who placed an order at 2:35 on Saturday afternoon — the day before Christmas — and actually received their order on the same day, just 3 hours and 40 minutes later! They’d ordered a rechargeable pack of batteries, and they shipped it using Amazon’s “Local Express Delivery” service. It offers one-day shipping for $10 in ten different cities — or just $3.99 if you’re just purchasing a gift card. (And it’s just $3.99 to deliver any order if you’re a member of Amazon’s Prime shipping program.) Not every item is always available for one-day shipping — check its “product description” page on Amazon.com to make sure. But here’s a list of the 10 cities where Amazon’s now offering the one-day shipping option — grouped by the cut-off time for placing your orders (using their local time).

    1 p.m.
    Seattle

    11:00 a.m.
    Las Vegas:

    10:30
    Baltimore
    Boston
    Washington, D.C.

    10 a.m.
    New York City (and parts of New Jersey)
    Philadelphia

    9:30 a.m.
    Phoenix

    7:00 a.m.
    Chicago
    Indianapolis

Interestingly, the cut-off time for Seattle is supposed to be 1:00 p.m. But apparently the luckiest customer of the year placed their order more than 90 minutes later — and still received their batteries on the same day!

And if you look carefully, you can even extract some real numbers from the rest of Amazon’s descriptive statistics. For example, “Amazon customers purchased enough sweaters to outfit each of Santa’s reindeer during Christmas Eve deliveries for the next 14,000 years.” It’s like one of those “story problems” that high school students dread in their math class. (Eight reindeer — plus one more, if you count Rudolph — would need nine sweaters for Christmas Eve, so if Amazon outfitted them for the next 14,000 years, that’d be nine times 14,000 — or 126,000 sweaters….) That doesn’t seem like a lot of sweaters, until you remember that they were all purchased online at Amazon.com. Though there’s still no way of knowing which sweaters, or how much they cost.

It’s as though Amazon is sending reporters on a fun scavenger hunt for their actual sales figures. They’re reporting that “Amazon customers purchased enough HeatMax HotHands Handwarmers to give a pair to each resident of Iceland.” According to Wikipedia, the population of Iceland is about 320,000, so that’s also the number of handwarmers that were sold — 320,000. But they’re distributed in boxes of 10, boxes of 40, and also individually, so there’s still no way to calculate how many boxes were actually sold. And it could be as low as 8,000 boxes, representing sales of just $160,000…

Here’s two more “math puzzles” from Amazon — some interesting sales milestones from the great holiday shopping season of 2011.

“Amazon customers purchased enough copies of Just Dance 3 to give 15 copies to each person who participated in setting the world record for simultaneous dancing.”

“Amazon customers purchased enough Rory’s Story Cubes to give a cube to each person watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop live at Times Square.”

But there’s one question that even Amazon can’t answer. They announced’d their customers “purchased enough copies of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs book to create a stack taller than Mt. Everest.”

So how many ebook versions would they have to sell to reach the top of Mt. Everest?

My Interview with a Best-Selling Author!

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Kindle blogger Michael Gallagher

He’s written one of the 100 best-selling ebooks for all of 2011 — and he also writes Amazon’s #1 best-selling blog! (In fact, it’s been one of Amazon’s 100 best-selling blogs for over two years…) Michael Gallagher writes the blog “Free Kindle Books Plus a Few Other Tips,” but he’s also adapted it into one of the year’s top 100 ebooks! And as a Christmas gift, he’s agreed to share his story here in a special Christmas interview.

“Actually, I’ll be the first to tell you I didn’t know this version of the book was sitting at #72 for 2011 until I saw your email!” he told me earlier this week. “I am surprised, and my first smart*&% comment was ‘that’s worse than last year!'” Gallagher is regularly updating his 21-page ebook, so this really makes the second year that it’s appeared on Amazon’s list of the year’s best-selling ebooks. “Last year for the full year was #53, and was significantly helped by a few million people opening up Kindles under the tree on Christmas Day! ” he explained. “The week of Christmas in 2010, the sales for that week accounted for 50% of the total year’s sales. Not that I sold a million copies, but it was significant to me.”

His author’s page on Amazon describes him as “an obese, gray-haired, and desk-bound guy in Texas who spends way too much time with his Kindle.” But like the Ghost of Christmas Future, Michael Gallagher now has a prediction for all self-published authors. “If the last two years’ worth of history holds true, not only me but every other author should have a surge in sales from about the 24th of December to the end of the first week of January.” The holiday apparently brings a special gift to anyone who’s self-publishing on Amazon — new sales from enthusiastic new Kindle owners! And Michael agreed to answer a few questions from his unique perspective as one of Amazon’s 100 best-selling authors of the year.

Q: There’s one question I’ve been dying to ask you: how many ebooks did you sell?

A: I won’t share the exact number of copies sold of that title because there are a lot of copycats who picked up on the ranking of last year and have their competing products out there – and it’s certainly not rocket science on what I did – and I certainly don’t need other competitors but I will tell you this: the number of sales so far through the end of November of that one title equals all of 2010.

Q: eBook sales really seem to be increasing. It seemed really significant to me that this year the #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions. Since you’re one of the year’s 100 best-selling ebook authors, I wanted to ask: do you have any official pronouncement on what lesson we should learn from this year’s best-sellers list?

Q: As far as an “official pronouncement”… the Kindle publishing platform for independent authors truly levels the playing field. Good books will rise to the top as word-of-mouth, the Amazon customer review/rating system, Kindle Discussion forum and blog posts, and good old-fashioned guerrilla marketing on Facebook, Twitter, etc. can equal and in some cases more than offset what the Big Six publishers can do. Of course, the Big Six are still there and will continue to be there, but small guys who have a good story to tell – yet may get shunned from the large publishers because they already have a stable of successful authors – can make it.

Q: You don’t just have the #1 best-selling blog for the Kindle. You’ve got five of the top 100 best-sellers, including Trivia of the Day, Bible Verse of the Day, and Kindle Books for a Buck (or Less). What’s it been like, publishing multiple best-selling blogs on Amazon?

A: Overall, the blog experience has been fun — I’ve “met” a lot of interesting people and characters, picked up more free books than most people can read in a lifetime, and learned more than enough about the Kindle than you can imagine. However, there is a certain level of disappointment as there is a real lack of support for blog publishers from Amazon. Granted, most of the blogs aren’t generating money for themselves or Amazon, but I think a lot of that has to do with no promotion from the Amazon side. I have seen membership for most of my blogs decrease for the last two months, when they had done nothing but increase each month for the previous 18 months. With the launch of the Kindle Fire and blogs not having a subscribe option, although you can certainly subscribe via the Pulse app on the Fire, I wouldn’t be surprised if this time next year Amazon drops the blog component – that would be a loss of some serious money for people in the Top 20 or so blogs.

Q: Well, whatever happens, when they write the history of the Kindle, they’re going to have to mention Michael Gallagher, the Kindle’s #1 best-selling blogger. Thanks for paying me a visit – and happy holidays!

A Very Special eBook – about My Dog!

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Funny free Kindle ebook about our dog

My girlfriend actually cried when I showed her her birthday present this year. I’d written her a Kindle ebook about her dog!

I’d told her I’d hidden her present somewhere in the apartment — not in the kitchen or in the living room, but somewhere close to the bed. “Is it on your nightstand? Nope, there’s nothing here but your Kindle… But let’s turn it on anyways and take a look. Well, there’s nothing here on your home page. But maybe we need to look in the Kindle Store…”

I’d told her it was a scavenger hunt, and the first clue would come up when she typed in her dog’s name. So she did — and there he was! She saw a picture of her own dog staring back at her — as the cover of a Kindle ebook.

She sat there, stunned. Smiling, but stunned. Her eyes moistened. She didn’t move for a few seconds. I think she thought that I’d hacked into Amazon’s Kindle store somehow, and pasted her dog’s picture onto one of their ebooks. But then she pressed the button that brings up the ebook’s description on Amazon.com.


Lucca is a cuddly Cocker Spaniel dog who belongs to a woman named TC. “I love TC very much,” reads the caption on one photo. “And she loves Lucca….”

Since I’d wanted to give her a special gift, I watched her face nervously to see her reaction. She’d started to read the rest of its page on Amazon, but then got too excited, and just downloaded the ebook straight to her Kindle. And when she opened it, every page seemed to dazzle her.

Dedicated to TC

with love

on a very special birthday



“TC says Lucca is the best dog in the world.
He cuddles with you on the couch while you’re watching TV…”

Last year TC had given me a smartphone for Christmas with a built-in camera, and I’d used it all year long to snap photos of her dog. (There’s 32 of them in the book.) Whenever Lucca did something cute, there was that camera in my pocket on the Christmas-gift smartphone. And that spring when our dog became friends with the cat downstairs, I was able to get some great pictures.

Dog Lucca and cat Finch become friends

You can see those pictures in color if you download the book to your smartphone (or to your Kindle Fire tablet). But the dog’s charm always jumps out from his shaggy face, even on a regular black and white Kindle. If you want to see a preview, just point your computer’s web browser to tinyurl.com/GoodReadsDog – but the whole ebook is only 99 cents, so you could just download the whole ebook to your Kindle (or to one of the free Kindle apps), and then give our dog a look, from this special URL.

http://www.tinyURL.com/OurFunny Dog

TC never did read the rest of the book’s description at Amazon, but I think she would’ve liked it. (“This ebook collects pictures with clever captions into a quick look at the life of a very happy pet dog…Our Dog Lucca takes you on a visit to that happy house where Lucca lives – and introduces you to a very charming dog.”) It’d feel a little weird to be making our pet dog into something famous, so if it became popular we’d probably donate most of the proceeds to an animal rescue shelter. Lucca is a “rescue” dog, and sometimes we wonder if that’s made him extra sweet.

But as I walked past our Christmas tree, at least I knew that Lucca had helped make my girlfriend’s birthday feel magical.

Download the ebook to your Kindle and see the dog ebook that made TC smile

http://www.tinyURL.com/OurFunny Dog

Funny free Kindle ebook about our dog

Amazon Announces Last-Minute Christmas Specials

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Amazon offers free shipping on Kindles for Christmas

There was some real excitement right around Christmas time. It’s easy to buy a new Kindle, now that the cheapest Kindles cost just $79. And on December 21st, until 8 p.m. (in Seattle), Amazon offered free two-day shipping on any Kindle, so it’d arrive just in time for the holidays!

“[W]e’re making it even easier to give a new Kindle this Christmas with free two-day shipping,” an executive in Amazon’s Kindle department bragged (adding “The new Kindles are hands down the best gifts you can give this holiday season…”) They offered the free two-day shipping to any address in the (continental) United States for any of the new Kindle models — including the color touchscreen Kindle Fire tablets, the Kindle Touch, and the new $79 Kindle. And of course, Amazon’s announcement also reminded you that you can “gift” an e-book, and schedule it’s delivery for a specific day — like Christmas. And they offered one more helpful suggestion for how to spend money at Amazon. “For $79, customers are buying multiple Kindles to use as stocking stuffers!”

But there’s also some deals that lasted even after Christmas at Amazon. I see some of the best games for the Kindle have gone on sale now for the ultra-cheap price of just 99 cents! For example, last week Electronic Arts released a slick new Kindle version of the classic game, Battleship. They’d originally priced it at $4.99 — but right now, it’s available for just 99 cents! (Just point your computer’s web browser to tinyurl.com/KindleBattleship

And it’s not the only great game that’s suddenly lowered its price. In fact, every game from Electronic Arts is now specially priced at just 99 cents. (Point your browser to tinyurl.com/MoreEAGames .) There’s even a master game pack that’s called “POGO Hearts, Spades, and More” which also includes Euchre, Gin, and Canasta in a single download. Here’s a list of the other EA games which are currently on sale for just 99 cents.

    Yahtzee
    Scrabble
    Solitaire
    Monopoly
    Trivial Pursuit
    Texas Hold’em
    Sudoku

But it gets better, because Amazon’s announced their list of the best games for all of 2011 — and all of those 25 games are on sale now for just 99 cents! That includes Mobigloo’s version of Mahjong Solitaire — which normally costs $3.99, and which Amazon named the #5 best game of the year. (Mobigloo’s Jewels — normally $1.99 — also grabbed the #3 on Amazon’s “best games of the year” list.) But it was EA Games that took four of the top ten slots on the list, including the #1 spot (for Yahtzee) and the #2 spot (for Scrabble).

To see the complete list, just point your computer’s web browser to tinyurl.com/Best2011Games. There’s New York Times crossword puzzles, many variations on Sudoku, and several apps with calendars, calculators, or Yoga poses.

And surprisingly, you can even get a discount on SpongeBob Squarepants’ Treasure Quest – since Amazon’s declared it the #16 best game of the year!

Did the Kindle Skew Amazon’s Year-End Best-Seller List?

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Covers of Amazon 2011 Best-Sellers

Amazon’s released one more fascinating year-end list about their top-selling books. It’s the ten titles which sold the most in 2011 if you combined both their print and their Kindle ebook sales.

 1. “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
 2. “Bossypants” by Tina Fey
 3. “A Stolen Life” by Jaycee Dugard
 4. “The Mill River Recluse” by Darcie Chan
 5. “In the Garden of the Beasts” by Erik Larson
 6. “A Dance with Dragons” by George R.R. Martin
 7. “The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain
 8. “The Litigators” by John Grisham
 9. “The Abbey” by Chris Culver
10. “Inheritance (The Inheritance Cycle)” by Christopher Paolini

And this list proves again that ebooks are exerting a huge influence on Amazon’s total book sales. Even with no print sales whatsoever, two ebooks still crashed into the top 10 — The Mill River Recluse and The Abbey (in the #4 and #9 slots, respectively).

Amazon apparently isn’t displaying those results on their web site, but they’d announced the rankings in a special press release on Monday. “We’re really excited that Kindle Direct Publishing authors have taken two of the top spots this year for book sales overall,” added the Senior book editor at Amazon.com. “After the year of recommending books to our customers, it’s always fun to see what books really resonated with them. We chose ‘Steve Jobs’ as one of the Top 10 best books of the year, and even though it was published in October, the sales have been phenomenal in both formats.”

In fact, the biography about the founder of Apple became Amazon’s #1 best-seller for the entire year (both for print sales and for combined sales of print and ebooks). But it seems to be the exception, since for most books, their print sales exerted a much smaller influence on their final year-end rank. Just look at a new chart on the internet at tinyurl.com/2011ranks . For five more of the best-sellers, you can see “book” icons hovering much higher up on the graph — indicating its print sales earned a rank much further away from the top 10. (Besides the two ebook-only best-sellers, where book icons don’t even appear!)

For example, Tina Fey’s biography only ranked #7 among printed books. But it shot up five more ranks — to the #2 slot — if you included its ebook sales. What’s really interesting is that it didn’t even appear on Amazon’s list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year! It looks like Amazon sold so many ebooks in 2011 that there were lots of high-selling books, even beyond the first 100. (The same is also true for George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, which was the #5 best-selling printed book. It was also able to claim the #6 slot for combined sales even though its ebook sales didn’t even appear in the top 100.)

And eBooks also influenced the ranks of two books which had barely made it into the top 20 for printed books — The Paris Wife and John Grisham’s The Litigators. When you included their 2011 ebook sales — #4 and #8, respectively — both books rose into the top 10! Of course, the opposite is also true. Inheritance only reached the #37 spot on the ebook best-seller list for the year. But in print, it was the #3 best-seller, which gave it the #10 spot on the best-seller list for both formats.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the world of book publishing really is starting to change. If you wanted to make Amazon’s list of the ten best-selling books of 2011 — you had to sell some ebooks to Kindle owners!

Four MORE Free Christmas eBooks

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A Christmas Carol original book cover illustration

I’ve already written about how much I enjoy reading special Christmas ebooks on my Kindle each year. I’ve done a little research through Amazon’s site, and each year it’s full of fun surprises. It’s just delightful when you discover a new ebook about Christmas especially when it’s by an author that you already know. And yes, it turns out that some of the greatest authors in history have written Christmas stories — and they’re all available for free in Amazon’s Kindle store!

A Christmas Carol by Charlies Dickens
It’s not just a story about Christmas. It’s partly responsible for the way that way celebrate it. The story by 31-year-old Charles Dickens “was one of the single greatest influences in rejuvenating the old Christmas traditions of England,” according to Wikipedia, which notes it was published just as new customs were established like tree-decorating and Christmas cards. The book helped to popularize these traditions, though ironically, the story was immediately pirated after Dickens published it, and he realized almost no profits from the story himself!
I’ve enjoyed the way Charles Dickens writes, with simple yet very moving stories — and I’m not the only one. On Amazon’s list of the best-selling free ebooks, A Christmas Carol is currently #11. And interestingly, it turns out that Charles Dickens followed this up with even more Christmas stories — including The Cricket on the Hearth, The Chimes, and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.

All there stories are available for free in Amazon’s Kindle store.

Old Christmas by Washington Irving
He was America’s first internationally popular author, and he wrote two timeless stories — Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But he also fathered many of our Christmas traditions. At the age of 29, when he was starting his career in 1812, Irving added five nostalgic Christmas stories to a collection of writing, and for one dream sequence, imagined what would happen if St. Nicholas flew over the forests in a flying sleigh. That’s believed to have inspired many of the subsequent stories about Santa Claus and his flying reindeer!
And the stories had an even greater impact. Irving also researched holiday traditions as far back as 1652, and according to Wikipedia, and his popular stories “contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States.” Even Charles Dickens himself said that Irving’s stories influenced his own famous novella, A Christmas Carol.

A Visit From Saint Nicholas by Clement Clark Moore
Here’s something fun to download: the original text of “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” (One historian called it “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American,” according to Wikipedia.) But you can only find the free ebook if you search on its original title — “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”. If you search for its first line — “Twas the Night Before Christmas” — Amazon’s Kindle Store will only show paid versions

There’s some interesting trivia about this story. In its first printing in 1823, Santa’s reindeer were named “Dunder” and “Blixem,” which are the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning.” But over the years their names changed into the more familiar-sounding “Donner” and “Blitzen”!

Christmas Eve by Robert Browning
He’s one of the most famous poets of the 19th century — and he in 1850 wrote a stark but thoughtful poem about visiting St. Peter’s church in Rome. It ultimately turns into a discussion about the nature of faith, but it was the first poem he published after his marriage, according to Wikipedia, and gives rare hints about the famous poet’s own religious views. One reviewer on Amazon described it as “A strange flighty trek in and out of trances and chapels to see rainbows and versions of God.” But another reader complained that they’d found it difficult to even read the poem, because the ebook wasn’t formatted properly.
“Who in their right mind eliminates line breaks and thinks they can get away with it?”