TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

By Paul Biba

From the release:

This year’s conference will start with an overview of the children’s book world in 2010; what sold, what didn’t, and what’s still to come. We’ll go on to discuss the impact of emerging technologies on the industry and where children’s books fit into the digital landscape. Find out from experts in the fields of broadcast, social networking, education and research about how children are engaging with new digital landscapes and learn how publishers can approach the digital environment and meet audiences’ expectations from a position of strength.

Confirmed speakers: Adrian Hon, co-founder, c.e.o., and chief creative officer, Six to Start |
Fionnuala Duggan, director, Random House Group Digital | Sue Cranmer, principal researcher, Futurelab | Philip Stone, charts editor, The Bookseller | Louise Hughes, contracts director, Penguin | Mike Richards, head of marketing and publicity, Egmont UK | Divinia Knowles, chief financial officer, Mind Candy / Moshi Monsters | Katie Bell, commercial director, Stardoll | Adam Khwaja, senior producer, BBC Children’s | Kate Wilson, managing director, Nosy Crow | Justine Abbott, director, Aardvark Research | Neal Hoskins, managing director, Winged Chariot Press | Dan Martin, director of strategy, Chameleon Net | Matt Locke, acting head of cross platform, Channel 4 | Jens Bachem, managing director, Digital Outlook

You can find more information here.

By Paul Biba

Thanks to BookofJoe for the link. You can find them here.

By Paul Biba

From the press release:

The Random House Group is delighted to announce that Graham Greene’s best-loved titles will soon be available in ebook format for the first time.

Greene is one of the most versatile, prolific, popular and successful British authors of the twentieth century. By his own admission, Greene wrote both ‘entertainments’ and ‘serious novels’. An editor, essayist, playwright and novelist, Greene’s most famous works include Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958) and The Honorary Consul (1973). Many of his novels have been turned into films, including the ever-popular The Third Man (1949) and more recently a new version of Brighton Rock starring Helen Mirren and Sam Riley, which will be released in 2011.

Twenty-four of Greene’s novels will be published in ebook format on 2 October 2010 – the anniversary of Greene’s birth – along with two collections of short stories, the Collected Essays and Collected Plays and an ebook edition of Journey Without Maps. The latter will be available simultaneously as a new Vintage Classics print edition, with a foreword by Tim Butcher and an introduction by Paul Theroux. A further seven titles will be published in ebook format in 2011.

The ebooks will be available to readers across the UK and Commonwealth (including Canada) and can be read on PCs, Macs, laptops, the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices. They are published by Vintage Classics, an imprint of The Random House Group, which is also the home of Graham Greene’s print titles. …

Award-winning author Tim Butcher, who retraced Greene’s steps in Journey Without Maps for his book Chasing the Devil (Chatto & Windus) said: “Throughout his career Graham Greene was a great supporter of innovation – he was one of the first full-time film critics in Fleet Street, he embraced reading clubs long before it was fashionable and he was as happy writing screenplays as he was novels. I am certain he would have approved keenly of ebooks and been proud to have his titles published in e-format.”

By Paul Biba

From the press release:

Poole Literary Festival in partnership with the Media School at Bournemouth University has established a prize for new media writing. The prize creates an exciting opportunity for writers working with new media to showcase their skills, provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing and the future of the written word. The competition deadline is approaching rapidly, with a cut-off point of Midday (GMT – UK time) on 15 September for entries.

There are two awards, one for Best New Media Writing and one for Best Student New Media Writing. Prizes will be awarded at a prestigious Awards Ceremony on 31 October 2010. Please ensure all entries are received by the closing date. This is very important as in the interests of fairness to all entrants exceptions cannot be made for late submissions.

Entry details:

HYPERLINK “http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php” http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php

The judges of the New Media Writing Prize have a blog at:

HYPERLINK “http://www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk/” http://www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk/

Poole Literary Festival:

HYPERLINK “http://www.poolelitfest.com/index.php” http://www.poolelitfest.com/index.php

By Chris Meadows

With the launch of its UK e-book store, the controversy over Amazon’s pricing has finally jumped the Atlantic. The Bookseller reports that Amazon has priced a number of books at less than £3 ($4.67 at current exchange rates), sparking a price war in which retailer W.H. Smith dropped its own e-book prices drastically, too.

[An unnamed] senior publisher attacked the pricing strategies of W H Smith and Amazon. He said: "It’s absolutely absurd to devalue our product but I’m not surprised because our industry is populated by nincompoops."

This publisher thinks that the low pricing might actually make the agency model less attractive to publishers, since the publishers are still getting paid wholesale rates no matter how low Amazon or Smith set the retail prices. However, I’m not so sure about this—after all, wasn’t that also the prevailing school of thought in America, too before Macmillan called Amazon out early this year?

And other publishers claimed they did not expect the low prices to set future expectations. Again, I wonder where these people have been while American publishers and authors have been scrambling to raise prices and then accusing unhappy consumers of having an “astonishing […] sense of entitlement” when they protest. It seems pretty clear some expectations were set over here.

I find it interesting that Amazon is going so low. £3, the equivalent of $4.67, is less than half the $9.99 price that got Amazon into so much trouble over here—even more unusual given that prices tend to be higher in general in the UK. It’s no wonder that UK publishers are going ballistic.

By Chris Meadows

The UK e-book price of the last Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, has been “defanged” by consumer protests. The Bookseller reports that publisher Little, Brown is dropping its e-book price from £13.99 ($21.79 at current exchange rates) to £4.49 ($6.99).

Graeme Neill of The Bookseller writes:

Publishers have said they want to see e-books priced at close to parity with the prevalent print edition, but the publisher has been criticised by customers on Apple’s iBookstore for its pricing of Breaking Dawn, with the Kindle edition available for £3.59 [$5.59], and the hardback priced at £7.49 [$11.67] on Amazon, and on Waterstones.com for £8.29 [$12.91].

The suggested retail price for the paperback version of the book is £7.99 ($12.45) suggested retail—considerably more expensive than the e-book, and even more expensive than Amazon’s price for the hardcover.

I agree with the vampire fans that high e-book prices “suck”. Hopefully publishers will follow suit with other e-book markdowns, rather than “bleeding consumers dry.”

By Paul Biba

Two days ago we reported that W H Smith had cut the price of its top 100 ebooks by 65%. Now they have dropped prices on all their ebooks by 50%. Says The Bookseller: Among the titles highlighted on its homepage are Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard’s memoir, Totally Frank (HarperCollins), on sale at £3.75, Loose Women panellist Carol McGiffin’s memoir Oh Carol (Hodder and Stoughton), at £8.50, and Hugh Ambrose’s The Pacific (Canongate), on sale for £10.

Evidently in response, Amazon UK has dropped the price of Frank Lampard’s memior, Totally Frank, to £3.73 from £4.86, undercutting W H Smith’s price of £3.75.

The same book is carried at the iBookstore at £6.99 and at Waterstones for £6.01.

Of course, given the agency pricing deal here in the US, the US consumer is screwed and can not be given the benefit of competition.

By Paul Biba

Ebook Newser is reporting this. WH Smith is offering 66% off its top fiction ebooks. (Look at the prices for each book, not the big 35% off sale sign.)

The campaign went live on WH Smith’s e-book today [Friday, 13th August]. Among the titles on sale are Stephenie Meyer’s The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which is priced £4.07, and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, priced £2.78, says The Bookseller.

The WH Smith site is here.

By Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation

This isn’t scientific, but it certainly communicates the basic truth of the matter as of August 5.

As of 4:30 pm Eastern time today, August 5, a US Kindle customer could have purchased the top 25 bestselling books in the US Kindle Store sales rankings for a grand total of $252.10.

Over in the UK, at exactly the same time, a UK Kindle customer could have purchased the top 25 bestselling books in the UK Kindle Store sales rankings for a grand total of £99.13, which is the equivalent of $157.58 in US dollars.

The books that make up the two lists, of course, are not exactly the same, although there is a fair amount of overlap. In general terms, the average of $10.08 for US Kindle Store bestsellers and $6.30 as the dollar equivalent of the average for UK Kindle Store bestsellers summarizes the overall pricing scheme quite well.

The difference between $252.10 and $157.58 is $94.52, and it means that US Kindle customers pay 59.98 per cent more for our Kindle bestsellers.

But we’ve got the agency model, and the Brits don’t! So there….

Oh, one more thing.

21 of the top 25 UK bestsellers have text-to-speech enabled, compared with 10 of the top 25 in the US.

Via Kindle Nation Daily

By Chris Meadows

Something we apparently missed mentioning in the rush of the other Kindle 3 news is that Amazon has also announced a Kindle e-book store specific to the UK will be launching at the same time as the two new Kindles launch over there, making the UK the only country apart from the US to have a native Kindle e-book store of its very own.

The wi-fi and 3G Kindles, $139 and $189 in the USA, will be £109 ($171 at current exchange rates) and £149 ($234) respectively. A bit more expensive than the US, but not the “equal numeric values, just change the currency signs” prices a commenter to another TeleRead story put forward as a rule of thumb either.

More interestingly, The Bookseller reports that Amazon, not the publishers, is going to be setting the prices for that e-book store. (It’s kind of sad when a retailer actually getting to set its own prices is considered “interesting”, but that’s Agency Pricing for you.)

It is not clear whether UK publishers will pressure Amazon to adopt the agency model there as well. (Though given that they’re mostly owned by the same megaconglomerates, you would think it would be a foregone conclusion.)

By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller reports that Bloomsbury is going to digitize and e-publish the million-page personal archive of World War II prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. The archive reportedly includes “drafts and notes for his speeches, and key correspondence and papers."

The article does not mention whether this archive includes any books, either public-domain or still under copyright. It’s hard to imagine any single person’s archive being a million pages in size without them—but then, it’s hard to imagine it even with them. If any are included, I wonder what copyright issues Bloomsbury would have to clear?

The archive will be sold worldwide, “with prices appropriate for the broadest possible market,” in versions customized for institutions, schools, and individuals. Academic publisher Frances Pinter notes that Bloomsbury plans to publish more 20th-century historical publications, including further archives.

I wonder if it will include anything about the Daleks?

By Chris Meadows

On the Press Gazette blog, Dominic Ponsford notes an interesting fact about the Financial Times’s paywall, which has come in for relatively less press attention than the London Times’s (perhaps due to lacking the polarizing figure of Rupert Murdoch to act as a focus).

Although (or perhaps because) the Financial Times‘s paywall is considerably less rigid than the London Times’s (allowing visitors from Google, and letting unpaid subscribers read up to 10 articles per month), the Financial Times seems to be experiencing considerably more success, recently claiming to have 149,000 paying digital subscribers. Ponsford writes:

The beauty of the FT’s system is that it keeps reminding casual readers it is there by remaining part of the web ecosystem while forcing those who become devoted readers to cough up some money.

Ponsford also attributes its success to the specialist nature of the site attracting people who were more likely to have enough disposable income not to find the subscription fee an undue imposition, and the way the Financial Times adds value that the London Times does not.

It’s hard to know quite how to feel about this. I’m not exactly a non-partisan observer; I’d like paywalls to fail and fail hard. But perhaps if some of them must be successful, it’s good that the milder ones are successful in ways that show why the really hard-line ones are mistaken in their outlook.

By Chris Meadows

I reported in February that the BBC’s plans to launch smartphone apps based on its news sites had caused some controversy among British newspaper publishers. The publishers were upset because they already regard the BBC as a publicly-funded competitor to their private businesses, seeing it as unwanted government competition to private industry. They thus protest anything new that the BBC does, fearing it might negatively affect any similar efforts of their own.

In response to their concerns, the BBC elected to delay the release of the apps until the BBC Trust had the chance to consider them further.

Now, according to Paid Content, the BBC Trust has ruled that the BBC smartphone applications can go ahead as planned. The Trust found that such apps do not represent any significant change from the way the BBC already makes its content available free over the web.

Personally, I also feel the impact of the apps will be limited because smartphones and tablets—especially the iPhone and iPad—already have perfectly serviceable web browsers, and it’s a lot easier to go to a website as part of your normal browsing experience than it is to close the browser and tap a separate icon to launch an app that may not even have as much functionality as a well-constructed website to begin with.

By Paul Biba

According to The Booksellser, Hachett UK says that ebooks are about 8% of new title volumes sales in publication month. Year to date Hachette’s ebook sales are 5 times what they were in 2009.

Although this is still far off the figures quoted by Amazon, it seems likely the gap between digital and print is closing: in the first quarter of 2010, hardbacks accounted for 20.3% of the UK print market by volume, according to Nielsen.

“As we see in the US, things are changing rapidly,” said Walkley [of Hachette], adding he “certainly” believed e-books would outsell hardbacks in the UK. Much depends on the book and the author and, in some cases, the genre—some authors already have big bestsellers in e-books in the US and it will happen in the UK

too.”

By Chris Meadows

Beehive City has some interesting figures, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on those figures, relating to the Times and Sunday Times’s paywall, and the number of new digital (web and iPad) subscribers the paper has been picking up as opposed to print subscribers it has been losing.

Out of the 150,000 people who registered for the Times’s site while it was free-but-registration-required, only 15,000 paid for the service after the wall went up. And 12,500 people have paid for the Times’s separate $10 iPad application. (It’s not entirely clear where these figures came from, but Beehive City seems to believe them.)

Beehive City calculates that, between the two papers, circulation fell by 45,448 people last year, meaning that new digital subscribers plus iPad subscribers combined amount only to a bit more than half of the total loss the papers took last year.

And given that digital subscribers pay considerably less per month for the paper (the Times takes in £7 out of the £10 that they charge for the iPad app, and website readers probably only pay a little more on average), the monetary difference is even more pronounced.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller reports that as the e-book market grows, some publishers in the United Kingdom have complained that there is no bestseller list for e-book sales specific to the UK. Nielsen can provide a global chart, but not something more focused.

A Nielsen representative said that Nielsen Bookscan “is currently building a global e-book panel” but could not provide a launch date.

Bowkers’s sales figures for the US show that year-to-year e-book sales more than doubled in the first quarter. Apparently this sort of information is not available broken down specifically for the UK, however.