Amazon has realized it was silly in a competitive world to offer international Kindle for $20 more, while keeping US-only Kindle going. So now the have reduced the price on the international model to $259, and will no longer sell the US-only model. Buyers who already paid more are being issued $20 reunfds. Separately, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener confirms the obvious–that SuperKindle will acquire the same international capability “sometime next year.” Meanwhile, the promised offers bundling SuperKindle with newspaper subscriptions are just beginning–but it’s hard to see the value proposition for customers. In the Washington Post’s trial offer, SuperK is […]
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Barnes & Noble's Nook: The Takeaway
As you probably know, Barnes & Noble officially debuted their new ereader Nook, which corresponds directly to the leaked details: an E-Ink screen for reading plus a color LCD mini-touchscreen for browsing, a pop-up keyboard, and some day Android apps and more. It’s priced to match Kindle at $259, but unfortunately will not ship until November 30, cutting it close to the holidays. (The company can only bring itself to say “late November,” but that’s the reported ship date from a customer.) Although they are obviously following Amazon’s lead the company kept insisting it’s the real innovator. CEO Steve Riggio […]
HP's BookPrep Adds Another Log to the Content Explosion Fire
Earlier this year when the University of Michigan announced that they would sell over 400,000 public domain books scanned from their collection in a partnership with BookSurge/Amazon, they made it clear this first agreement was a nonexclusive relationship. Now Hewlett Packard has officially announced their BookPrep service, which prepares scanned books for print-on-demand and online viewing, which even includes “a rich set of predefined cover templates.” The University of Michigan is one of HP’s partners, helping to drive the availability for sale of almost 500,000 public domain books and counting. HP says their process “significantly drives down the cost of […]
Briefs: Target Joins Price War, and BN Prepares Nook
A couple of noteworthy but ultimately short stories. Target joined the pre-order bestseller price war, though in more limited fashion. They’re matching Walmart.com’s $8.99 offer with free shipping included, but on just six November pre-order titles. Boulder Bookstore buyer Arsen Kashkashian has suggested via Twitter that fellow indies cancel their publisher pre-orders on these deep-discounted forthcoming titles and take advantage of their competitors’ loss leaders. Bookstores will save money, he reasons, while helping Amazon and Walmart.com lose more. And Barnes & Noble’s afternoon media event suffered another pre-announcement leak–this time from the bookseller itself. An ad in next Sunday’s NYT […]
Internet Archive Proposes Universal Book Search Plan
Searching for and within books on the internet is pretty much of a mess right now, and only getting messier. While Google aspires to serve and protect everyone’s ebook files from the cloud some day, so far even the search giant has favored the proprietary rules of Google Book Search over truly becoming the “Google of book search.” Into that void steps one of Google’s primary antagonists of the moment, the Internet Archive. Leapfrogging their own work-in-progress database the Open Library, the IA has been debuting their concept for BookServer, envisioned as “a new architecture using common open standards that […]
Another Week of eNouncements
As Kindle International starts shipping, Plastic Logic issue a vapor release telling the world that they will finally announce pricing and confirm productions details on their new e-reader January 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show. In the meantime, they have given It a name: “Que” (full name: Que proReader.) AT&T is their wireless service provider. iRex announced that they are working with NewspaperDirect and LibreDigital to make a wealth of newspapers and magazines available–both as single copies as well as by subscription–on their about-to-release unit. North American ceo Kevin Hamilton tells PaidContent about a third strategy they are working on, […]