It has been only 15 days since our last systematic look at the population of ebook price points in the Kindle Store, but there are two reasons why it makes a lot of sense to take a fresh look today: first, Amazon fulfilled its plan to restructure its Kindle Store bestseller lists and divide them into "paid" and "free" listings overnight last night; and equally important, during the past 15 days the Kindle Store catalog has experienced its most explosive growth ever, averaging over 5,000 new titles per...

File this one under "Go figure." This is a story about a traditional paperback version of a book about an ebook reader ... translated into a language that does not even render on the ebook reader ... by an author with zero name recognition in the country where the translated book is to be sold ... at a time when the company that manufactures and sells the ebook reader has not even committed publicly to a Japanese version of the ebook reader. I'm no Joe Konrath, but it is a story that is turning out well in its own way. One Friday morning in...

The waves of change continue in the Kindlesphere. In the next few weeks we expect to see the launch of the Kindle Apps Store, the rollout of new accessibility features including what Amazon calls "audible menuing," big changes in royalties and publishing features for Kindle authors and publishers, and a completion of the rollout of version of 2.5 of the operating software for the latest generation Kindle and Kindle DX. Many of us are watching with great interest for the denouement of the negotiations/controversies/conflicts that's currently keeping new Penguin titles out of the Kindle Store and all Random House titles out...

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...

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...

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...

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....