Could this be a watershed moment? Apple's iBooks Store has just fallen from the top rung among free iPad Apps in Apple's Top Charts listing. Beatweek Magazine called attention to the iBooks' slippage, in which it has been supplanted an utterly lovely ambient app called Pocket Pond (see screen shot at the right, but it is just the beginning). As the screen shots at the end of this post attest, Pocket Pond is the new #1 free app for the iPad, iBooks has fallen to #2, and the Kindle Store has climbed from the mid-20s to #13 in recent days. Naturally, after...

It's been exactly a month since we last took a systematic look at the population of ebook price points in the Kindle Store, so it seems a good time for a fresh look after five weeks of experience with the agency model. under the agency model, we were told, some of the big publishers were colluding with Apple to take retail ebook pricing out of the hands of retailers such as the Kindle Store and replace Amazon's standard of $9.99 as a price for newly released ebooks with a 30% to 50% increase to price points between $12.99 and $14.99. The...

We won't jump the gun on what we find on the Amazon website (at least in this case) until an announcement is made, but it is too pretty a picture not to share a screen shot from a page that is, after all, now available to any of Amazon's 114 million customers. Back on March 15, in a post entitled What's in Store for the Kindle in 2010 and Beyond?, I shared a numbers of ideas for new Kindle initiatives, including this one: Re-integration of Kindle content with Amazon Associates: Originally, beginning with the Kindle launch in November 2007, Amazon paid a...

Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from Stephen Windwalker's Kindle Nation Daily. For the full text go here. PB ... It is stunning news that the Nook outsold the Kindle in March, after a November-December Nook roll-out that was the second coming of the Ford Edsel. Only one problem: it didn't happen. The report on which these Nook-beats-Kindle stories are based is a report from PVI, the Taiwan-based company that provides e-ink displays for both devices. PVI said that it had shipped more manufacturing units of the Nook than of the Kindle to the U.S. in March. Well,...

Since I posted my article on the OS 4.0 event yesterday, which mentioned that Steve Jobs claimed 600,000 iBooks e-books had been downloaded so far, a number of people have been chiming in on the comment thread questioning the usefulness of those numbers. Brad Stone at the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has taken notice as well, puzzling over how many of those books are public domain titles. He does answer one question some people had: An Apple spokeswoman at least clarified one question: she said the number did not include the free copy...

Originally posted at Kindle Nation Daily 3.17.2010 I've been a David Baldacci fan for over a decade, and I've easily read over half of the books he's published since his stunning 1996 debut with Absolute Power. From everything I've heard he's a decent guy -- among other things, in addition to spinning a great yarn, he's a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and he funds his own literacy foundation, the Wish You Well Foundation. I'd love to keep reading his books on my Kindle, and I probably will do so. Since I and many other Kindle Nation readers...

I’ve found some good blog responses to John Sargent’s post about Macmillan’s agency pricing model, which we reprinted the other day. In his Kindle Nation Daily blog, Stephen Windwalker praises Sargent for at last addressing the general public rather than just the industry insiders at whom his earlier entries were pitched—even as he remains critical of Sargent’s message. I had been critical of Sargent previously for addressing his earlier comments only to authors and literary agents, and consequently trying to position them to speak up on his and his company's behalf, and this new...

Motoko Rich, in a piece for the New York Times today, has done a well-researched and elegantly tidy job of illuminating and calculating the costs involved for publishers in publishing books in traditional hardcover as well as ebook format. It's well worth a look if you've been wondering what the real numbers are behind the recent ebook pricing controversy. Here's how her numbers play out for a $26 hardcover: $26.00 Suggested retail price $13.00 Wholesale proceeds to publisher $3.25 Production, storage & shipping $0.80 Pre-press: cover design, typesetting and copy-editing $1.00 Marketing $3.90 ...

Publishing and ebook bloggers and pundits are claiming that Apple has created an uneven playing field between the iBooks App it will soon roll out for its iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices and the Kindle Apps that are available alongside for buying and reading books from the Kindle Store on the same devices. According to Jay Yarow at the Silicon Valley Business Insider, customers using the Kindle for iPhone App "have to leave the app to buy e-books," whereas "the iBookstore will let you seamlessly buy books from within the iBooks reader app, with the iTunes account it's already...

Wonpyo Yun, a reporter for the Daily Princetonian, has the scoop on an official Princeton University announcement of the results from the Kindle DX pilot project on which the Ivy League school partnered with Amazon last semester. Yun's report suggests that the New Jersey university's report will lead with the positive by touting cost savings and the fact that use of the DX "reduced the amount of paper students printed for their respective classes by nearly 50 percent." But it also makes clear that the Kindle DX pilot project was something less than a love fest. (Update: here's a link to the...

Stephen Windwalker has been interviewed by Len Edgerly on Len's Kindle Chronicles blog. Len always does an excellent interview and you should go and check it out every Friday. Hid blog, by the way, is always full of interesting information and is to be recommended, no matter who he is interviewing....

Just to prove to you, our readers, how unbiased I am, I'm publishing this news item. I, personally, consider baseball to be one of the most boring of all human pursuits, but evidently Stephen Windwalker, of Kindle Nation, does not. As a matter of fact he says: For people who share my addiction to a lovely slow-paced game with its own statistics and literature and economic craziness, all over New England and probably in many other communities around the world, the icy sludge of winter will begin to thaw, our skies will brighten, and our hearts will warm a...