On The Bookseller, Martin Latham posts a brief complaint about the production quality of hardcover books these days. Today’s mass-market hardcover books, he notes, tend to be cheaply and poorly made, and will by and large not age into beautiful antiques such as a 1623 Shakespeare folio Latham describes. Latham talks up a £30 (US$46) book on maps that includes removable fold-out maps bundled in pockets, and a few other beautiful books. Of course, e-book fan that I am, I can’t see myself buying any of those, and wonder just how many people in today’s recession, price-sensitive economy would...

Amazon has a press release out (found on Engadget) indicating that it is now selling 105 Kindle e-books (not counting freebie downloads) for every 100 print books it sells in the US. It also reports that the ad-supported Kindle With Special Offers is the current best-selling Kindle device. Meanwhile, FutureBook reports that for every 100 hardback books Amazon has sold in the UK, it has sold 242 Kindle e-books. (There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent comparison to all print titles such as the one on the US press release, however, making it hard to make a comparison.)...

Last week I covered John Blake’s idea of delaying e-books in order to save print bookstores. On FutureBook, Rhian Davies has also responded with an interesting post referencing Theodore Levitt’s paper on “Marketing Myopia”—the source (or at least popularizer) of that anecdote we often hear about railroads thinking they were in the railroad business when they were really in the transportation business. Thirty-six years ago, Levitt pointed out that industries needed to focus on the customer, rather than the product, and some industries still haven’t learned that lesson even today. Today we have the ereader, be it Kindle or other device.  Like...

Windowing—the practice of releasing some book formats first and others (such as e-books) later—has been poorly received in the e-book world, even though it’s an extension of the long-held practice of separating hardcover and paperback releases in order to make the most money possible out of those willing to shell out for a hardcover book. Now, in a blog on The Bookseller, bookseller Martin Latham wonders whether it might not be time to get rid of the hardcover/paperback windowing practice. He points out that all the marketing dollars associated with a book are spent to drive the hardcover release,...

The big news this week in eBookland was Amazon’s announcement that ebooks outsold hardcovers 1.8:1 in the last quarter. That set tongues awaggin’ and has prompted hundreds of articles, blog posts, and comments, now including this one. So that raises the question: Who’s on first? One of the best comedy routines of all-time was Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine and Amazon’s announcement brought the routine to mind after many years of having been forgotten. For those of you unfamiliar with the routine, here it is: Isn’t this really the story — and value — of Amazon’s announcement? As many...

Found via Nate’s Ebook News: Ben Bova, author of the Cyberbooks e-book satire novel (which recently became available as an e-book itself), has an editorial in a local Florida newspaper about the current e-book situation. Given that he was one of the first recent SF writers to consider the idea of e-books seriously, it is interesting to see what he has to say. Bova writes that his premise in Cyberbooks was that “electrons are cheaper than paper.” Ninety percent of a book publisher’s expenses are the cost of hauling paper across the countryside: from...