Thanks to Amazon, writing fanfiction about popular television show characters just became more than a passionate hobby that earns you ridicule from friends and co-workers.

Today the online retail and digital media store announced a new publishing platform called Kindle Worlds that allows anyone to write their own, original stories based on licensed content from a number of TV shows currently airing on the CW and ABC Family — the two channels best known for angsty hour-long dramas adapted from young adult book series. Under a deal between Amazon’s publishing arm and Warner Bros. Alloy Entertainment division, fanfiction authors can publish stories about Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries within Amazon’s Kindle store. Not only that, but those authors will even earn royalties when people buy their work.

So to recap, Amazon just MONETIZED FREAKING FANFICTION. (I never thought I’d be addressing the idea of fanfiction writing as a profession, but here it is.)

Royalty rates are actually pretty reasonable under the Kindle Worlds platform. Amazon will pay copyright owners of the original work an undisclosed percentage, while the author of the new stories will get a 35 percent cut of net revenue on each sale, provided the work is at least 10,000 words. Amazon is basing net revenue on the sale price, not the wholesale price that traditional book publishers offer authors — meaning authors should get a better payout if successful. Authors of stories that are under 10,000 words can earn a royalty of 20 percent off net revenue, with most stories priced at $1 or less. And Amazon said royalty payments will come once a month.

Amazon said it plans to announce additional licensed works for the new Kindle Worlds platform in the near future. Kindle Worlds itself will launch on the Kindle store in June with more than 50 commissioned stories from bestselling authors like Barbara Feethy, John Everson, and Colleen Thompson. So even established authors wanting to write their own original stories derived from a licensed work can jump into Amazon’s new program.

Beyond the new opportunities Kindle Worlds creates for authors, Amazon also points out that this is a new revenue stream for licensed content. It allows the rights owners of those original works to generate money from good stories that they otherwise wouldn’t see if an author had to change all the names and affiliations of their story so it could legally be published. For example, as VentureBeat’s Ricardo Bilton just pointed out to me, mega-successful book series 50 Shades of Gray started as Twilight fanfiction. That said, every big book series or popular body of work (Star Trek, Star Wars) likely won’t be signing a deal with Kindle Worlds. Still copyright owners of franchises that don’t do much business with book publishing will likely be interested.

Top image via The CW

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has built a massive and fast-growing $16 billion annual revenue stream in digital content alone, Apple analyst Horace Dediu says.

The company announced that quarterly iTunes revenues topped $4 billion — including $2.4 billion in content alone — in its latest earnings report. Based on historical numbers alone, that’s a $16 billion annual run rate, thanks to Apple’s 500 million iTunes users. But since it also has grown at a fairly steady 29 percent per quarter for the past six years, it’s also an underestimate of the annual value of the iTunes ecosystem.

And it gets better as users have more Apple devices.

“Apple users spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use,” Dediu says.

Source: Horace Dediu

iTunes digital media revenue by product segment.

All of which means that Apple is still king of the mobile ecosystem, at least as far as monetization is concerned. Users have currently downloaded 49.9 billion apps, and Apple is currently running a contest which will see the downloader of the 50th billion app win $10,000 in iTunes cash. While Google Play is growing faster than Apple’s app store, Apple still leads in downloads, and it holds a 2.6-times revenue advantage.

It’s also an interesting metric for Amazon to evaluate itself by.

Amazon sells Kindle devices at or near cost in part because it hopes to make extra revenue on digital content — perhaps $3 per user per month – via its own app store and its digital media offerings, such as TV shows and movies. Its newly launched virtual currency Amazon Coins should help with that mission, and with 11 million to 12.5 million Kindles sold through Christmas 2012, and perhaps 15 million sold to date, that would translate into just over half a billion dollars in revenue.

And at Apple-like numbers of $40/user/year, it would be $600 million dollars.

All of which could help explain why Amazon is hitting digital media hard and buying technology to make all of its Kindles full-color, with responsive screens.

And why Apple, Amazon, and Google are increasingly hard-core competitors in their three-way battle to own your devices … and your wallet.

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

TORONTO–If YouTube is for video, Pinterest is for images, Twitter is for news, and Tumblr is for blogs, Wattpad is for stories.

At least, that’s founder and CEO Allen Lau’s vision. But even with three billion minutes spent on Wattpad last month, 15 million monthly uniques, and 1.5 million monthly story uploads, he thinks he’s barely begun.

“We’re the top-ranked e-reading app in the all major app stores,” Lau says.

Wattpad is the largest community for sharing and reading stories online, Lau said, calling it a “library in your pocket.” Indie authors and some well-known writers post stories and books on the network, often in a serialized format, and readers get free access to read and comment on them. It’s an experience that Lau likens to watching TV episodes.

Source: John Koetsier

WattPad CEO Allen Lau

“Attention spans are getting shorter and short, so to make long-form writing work, we break it up.”

The scope and scale of Wattpad is staggering in an era during which supposedly, as Steve Jobs famously said, no-one reads anymore. Five million times a month, however, someone comments on a Wattpad story. 15 million times, someone has uploaded a story or a book to Wattpad. And those 15 million monthly unique visitors spend a massive average of 30 minutes per session reading.

The company has no monetization model yet, intentionally. And it also has no monetization model for the contributors — the authors — of those 15 million uploads. Also intentionally.

“We are still in userbase building phase,” Lau said. “Once we have that critical mass we can start monetization. 15 million is a number I should be proud of, but we are only still only one percent of where we want to be.”

Where he wants to be is similar in size to a Facebook or a Twitter: hundreds of millions, or even billions. And how he plans to get there is by doing more of what Wattpad has done to date: via indie authors and, increasingly, branded books and name-brand authors.

Indie authors like Jordan Lynde, a college freshman with 100,000 fans, close to a hundred million reads, and over 100,000 comments. Lynde posts chapters of multiple ongoing books regularly. And Abigail Gibbs, a teenager who recently parlayed her Wattpad success into a six-figure payday for a three book deal from Harper Collins.

Lau is also leveraging branded opportunities like working with the UK’s One Direction boy band. Sony, the band’s label, hired a Wattpad writer to write a five-chapter story — one for each of the singers — that reached one million reads and brought 100,000 new users to WattPad. And established authors like Cory Doctorow and Margaret Atwood have been publishing to the site recently.

That’s perhaps where the monetization will come from at some point, Lau says, who sees YouTube’s progression over the past decade as an example for Wattpad to follow.

“Over time you will start to see premium content,” he says. “Ultimately we want to create more value.”

With 15 million regular monthly readers, the reading community with investments from Union Square Venture, Khosla Ventures, and Jerry Yang seems to already be creating quite a lot.

photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via photopin cc

Disclosure: I’m in Toronto at the invitation of Ontario’s ministry of economic development, which is paying for my trip. My reporting, however, is my own.

Updated: Updated with a response from Amazon.

After successfully storming the industry with successful e-readers and a line of tablets, Amazon is rumored to be launching its first set-top box for streaming media.

The information comes from a Bloomberg Businessweek report that cites three different anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Amazon declined comment to VentureBeat about the company’s set-top box plans.

While we obviously don’t have confirmation, the notion that Amazon would make its own streaming media set-top box isn’t entirely surprising. Amazon already had a successful Android app store that it could easily parlay into a set-top box. It’s also got a streaming video service (Prime Instant Video) that’s trying to compete with Netflix in terms of a collection of unlimited movie and TV shows and iTunes when it comes to rentals and video sales. It’s also brought its Prime Instant Video service to a slew of other set-top boxes like the Roku and Xbox 360.

The report indicates that Amazon, which has toyed with the idea of producing a set-top box for years, is producing the project via its Lab126 under former Cisco head of video products Malachy Moynihan and former TiVo and Vudu engineer Andy Goodman.

Bloomberg’s sources make no mention of a price for the rumored set-top box, or even a name — although the most likely choice would be Kindle TV. The set-top box is scheduled to debut in the fall, which would be just in time for the holiday sale season.

As for what an Amazon TV set-top box might look like, I’d imagine there’s be a heavy emphasis on video. The company is currently promoting its original content and recently released 14 pilot episodes that are available to everyone. Amazon is letting people vote on the shows before deciding which will gain a full season of episodes. And while there’s never been mention of advertising during these programs (or any others that it’s currently licensing from other media companies), it wouldn’t surprise me if the company ended up adding commercials and using data from their customer’s purchasing history to determine advertising that was appropriate for each individual.

Illustration by Tom Cheredar

In what’s surely a win for lovers of long-form journalism (or needlessly long, rant-filled blog posts), Amazon has just rolled out a new “Send to Kindle” button for online publications to embed into their websites.

Previously, to gain this kind of functionality you needed to install a browser plug-in to send articles or links to your Kindle device, which was a bit clunky at times but got the job done. Now all you need to do is click the “send to” button on the website to transfer over those articles — both to your Kindle devices or any of the Kindle Apps. Clicking the “Kindle” button on a website will prompt you to sign in to your Amazon account and then ask you to determine which devices you want to read the article on. (As shown in the screenshot, I can choose between sending it to my iPad or Nexus 7.  Kindle Fires and Kindle Readers should also pop up in the list of options for those that own them.)

The button itself was built specifically for websites and WordPress blogs, and a handful of sites are already using it, including The Washington Post, BoingBoing, and Time. Amazon is allowing  publishers some degree of customization over how the button looks, probably so that it fits with the overall design.

While this move is wonderful for readers, I have to wonder what the long-term implications will be for allowing people to strip out all the advertising from the website in order to rip the content onto the device of their choice. Of course, there are already a ton of other “reader” features that are automatically built into browsers, devices, and applications, so this may be a moot point. (There’s also something good to be said for publications that make it easier for their audience to interact with products/content.)

Do you plan on using the “Send to Kindle” button more often? Let us know in the comment section below.

“Our goal is to make Cloud Player the most widely compatible cloud playback solution available, giving our customers the capability to buy their music once and enjoy it everywhere,” said Steve Boom, Amazon’s well-named VP for digital music.

Sounds familiar?

It should, because Apple has said similar things on multiple occasions. The difference is that Amazon actually has the capability to make it happen, as it not only has its own devices but also builds software for other company’s devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, and more.

Cloud Player stores all your Amazon music purchases and up to 250 imported songs or free. If your music library is larger — and whose isn’t — you can import up to 250,000 songs into Cloud Player and store them for $25 per year in a feature similar to Apple’s iTunes Match.

You can safely bet that Cloud Player will not be music-only for long, as Amazon continues to invest in digital content of all kinds.

But Amazon isn’t exactly doing the happy dance today. Like all software companies, it has glitches, and one in its ubiquitous Kindle iOS software is causing an annoying issue for iPhone and iPad users: It’s deleting their book libraries. Amazon acknowledges the issue, and it says that it does not currently recommend that users install the update.

Getting all your books deleted is not necessarily catastrophic — users can simple resync with Amazon, presumably when an app update-to-the-update is released, to redownload all their content.

But it is annoying and time-consuming, and it could be seriously dangerous for those users who have sent PDFs and other documents to their Kindles via Amazon’s send-to-Kindle functionality. If you don’t have backups for those files, it’s possible you’d lose them for good.

The issue? Amazon issued a statement to The Verge:

“We have identified an issue with the app update that may cause your app to become deregistered. To register, enter your Amazon account e-mail address and password and all your Amazon content will be available in the cloud. We have submitted an update fix for this issue and are working with Apple to release.”

photo credit: AJC1 via photopin cc

Matt MacInnis has an ax to grind with a certain digital publishing giant, and he isn’t trying to hide it.

The founder and chief executive of the digital book company Inkling calls Amazon’s e-books “glorified $10 text files.”

While he acknowledges Amazon’s place in popularizing e-books, he also believes the company has been holding back digital publishing for years. Now, after helping to popularize digital textbooks and digital travel guides, MacInnis thinks he finally has the tools to make Inkling a threat to Amazon.

Today the company is announcing Inkling Habitat, a cloud-based collaborative publishing environment that lets anyone make professional-looking digital books.

“We’ve been working over the last three years on a whole set of problems to move the industry forward. … Looking at the current model that exists today [the Amazon model] is cringe inducing,” MacInnis told VentureBeat in an interview on Monday.

With Inkling Habitat and the recently-launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which allows search engines to index entire digital books and lead consumers to purchase them, the company aims to show publishers how they could be better off outside of Amazon’s walled garden. (Amazon’s Kindle books aren’t indexable by Google and other search engines, which makes them practically invisible.)

The announcement comes only a few hours after competitor Kno announced a new product to turn PDFs into interactive e-books.

It makes sense for the CEO of a digital publishing company to view Amazon as a rival, but MacInnis’s tone now feels far more aggressive than in the past — perhaps born out of confidence. He tells me that he’s “blown away” by the results of Inkling’s Content Discovery Platform.

“The conversion rate is so good we’re scared it’s not real,” MacInnis said. “We’re basically killing the traditional model of conversion rates. … Publishers love it since it give them an end-run around Amazon, and people love it since they can search for content on Google like they do every day.”

Now with Inkling Habitat, even more publishers will be able to create professional-quality digital books on Inkling’s platform. Most important, they will also be able to reap the benefits of the insane conversion rates the company is seeing via Google. So far, all of Inkling’s publishing partners have approved Google’s indexing, except for the higher-ed publisher Pearson.

Feature-wise, Habitat lets publishers collaborate on a digital book from anywhere in the world, it lets them integrate a wide variety of media, and it also lets them easily publish to multiple platforms with a single click. While digital publishing software like iBooks has remained fairly traditional — with all of its files sitting on your desktop, and most of the creation work left up to a single person — Habitat is built for a more modern publishing environment that’s collaborative and readily accessible anywhere.

So what took so long for Inkling to allow search engines to index its wares? MacInnis explained that the company has actually been working on it for years, but there were five big reasons it was difficult:

1. Inkling needed to have a secure web reader (which launched last year).
2. It needed to let people access content without logging in.
3. Inkling needed to offer structured content, and not just have the books appear as a bag of words.
4. It needed to be able to sell the content in parts — for example, chapters or portions of books, as well as the entire book.
5. Finally, Inkling had to have the contracts and digital publishing rights in place to make such a deal with Google.

Almost four years since Inkling’s launch in 2009, the company finally had all the pieces in place to open up its content and fully realize the potential of its platform.

San Francisco, Calif-based Inkling has raised a round of $17 million in 2011 from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education, and Sequoia Capital.

Shares went as high as $289, bouncing up from $261 before the release. For the quarter, revenue was up substantially to $21.27 billion, a 22 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2011, but revenue decreased 45 percent to $97 million.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos largely credited the strong earnings increase to ebooks, which he said is now a multi-billion dollar category for Amazon — and growing at 70 percent annually. Physical books, in contrast, are slowing. While still growing, Bezos said the growth rate is down to 5 percent, which Bezos said is the lowest growth rate in Amazon’s 17 years of existence.

And one which seems likely to reverse into a decline in 2013, given the growth of ebooks and Amazon’s tablet sales.

Amazon said that its tablets have held the top four spots on the retailer’s sales charts ever since they’ve launched, and that its flagship device, the Kindle Fire HD, is the most popular item in the store. While the reality is that there’s a lot a retailer can do to influence what is most popular and what sells well — and Amazon certain has done that, positioning the Kindle Fire HD front and center on its home page even today — the reality is that the Kindle family, with price points from $119 to $299, is a pretty solid entry-level tablet device.

Source: Amazon

Digital sales at Amazon

However, the company still refuses to release actual sales data on the Android-based tablets — although third-party data suggests Kindle market share is growing fast and total device sales were likely between 10 and 12 million as of the end of 2012.

Digital media seems to be the future at Amazon, and the company reported increases in the amount of content available as Prime Instant Video now has 36,000 titles for viewers to choose from, and 23 million movies, TV shows, apps, books, and more in Amazon’s overall catalog. Amazon recently released a new mobile web store for digital music specifically for iPod and iPhone, clearly competing with digital music incumbent Apple.

Those popular Kindles have helped 23 authors who publish on Kindle to sales exceeding 250,000 in 2012 alone, and 500 books published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform have reached the top 100 Kindle books bestseller list.

Image credit: Jennifer Van Grove

• Sales: up 22 percent to $21.27 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, the company reported, or 23 percent higher if difference in foreign exchange rates are excluded.
• Net income: down 45% to only $97 million, or $0.21 per share, compared with $177 million in 2011.
• Versus the predictions: Wall Street predicted earnings of 27 cents a share, down from 38 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2011, and total revenue of $22 to $23 billion. Sales were expected to jump up from the third quarter, of course, due to the holiday shopping season.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said in a statement. “After 5 years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5%. We’re excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever expanding ecosystem and selection.”

• Kindle Fire HD: It was the most popular item: top selling, most wished-for, and most-gifted. “At year-end, Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle held the top four spots on the Amazon worldwide best seller charts since launch,” Amazon said in a statement.
• Kindle authors: 23 Kindle Direct Publishing authors have sold at least 250,000 digital copies copies sold mark in 2012.
• Kindle books: More than 500 KDP Select books have reached the top 100 Kindle best seller lists globally.
• Amazon’s digital library: Now includes 23 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, games, and apps — up four million items from 2011.
• Amazon Prime Instant Video: licensing agreements with movie studios now give Amazon 36,000 movies and TV show episodes to show.

The past few quarters have not been stellar for Amazon (Q3 2012: $274 million net loss;  Q2 2012: $7 million income) but investors seem to like these results, as the company’s stock is up 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Source: Amazon

Amazon net sales, Q4 2011 to Q4 2012

photo credit: brianjmatis via photopin cc

Amazon wants to make its future devices a lot more friendly to the vision-impaired.

The company announced today that it’s picking up text-to-speech software maker Ivona Software, which already provides the technology for the Kindle Fire’s Voice Guide and Explore-by-Touch functionality. The visually impaired can use these features to navigate their devices by sound and give aural feedback based on what users are doing onscreen (similar, in a way, to Apple’s own Voice Over).

So, what’s the point in acquiring the company? As Amazon says in the statement announcing the acquisition that it’s all about future products (emphasis added).“The Ivona team shares our passion for innovation and customer obsession, and we look forward to building great products to deliver world-class voice solutions to customers around the world.”

One of those products, potentially, is the Kindle smartphone Amazon is rumored to be working on. A heavily integrated voice services suite would  be a great asset to the device, especially if Amazon worked with Ivona to develop some Siri-like applications for the company’s software.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but its possible we’ll get a better idea of what Amazon spent when it reports its earnings next week.

He’s built and sold three companies, invested in dozens more as a venture capitalist, still runs a few startups fairly actively, and worked for Apple in the early breakout years of its 1984-style fight against Big Brother (aka IBM). But he’s also a prolific writer, with books like The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries that have been must-reads for founders and intrapreneurs for years.

Put the two together, and you’ve got someone who budding authors should listen to about what it means to write  books in 2013. Especially if you actually want to sell any.

Kawasaki put all that entrepreneurial and authorial perspective into his latest book, Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish Your Book. APE came out recently on Kindle and is launching in dead tree format tomorrow. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and spent some time chatting yesterday with Kawasaki about the changes he’s seeing in writing and publishing.

Short version? We ain’t in Kansas anymore.

VentureBeat: What’s your main reading modality today?

Kawasaki: I use a Nexus 7, with the actual books in Kindle Reader. For me the 7″ format is the largest format that when I fall asleep and it hits my face, it doesn’t hurt. Full-size tablets … not so much.

VentureBeat: Talk to me about the timing of the book … author, publisher, entrepreneur. There’s something going on here that’s new.

Kawasaki: I had a very bad experience … I recently self-published a book called What the Plus. I had this idea that self-publishing was easy — bring your Word file to Kindle and you’re done – but, especially if you’re writing nonfiction and have tables, bullets, lists, images … it’s extremely non-trivial.

So I thought that if I, with with my background in technology, was having a hard time, others would too. And I wanted to help.

VentureBeat: Of course, it’s not just the technical bits … you’ve got three parts there — author, publisher, and entrepreneur. Is the entrepreneur piece the toughest for most authors?

Kawasaki: For a novelist the publishing is not hard. For nonfiction it is, but even then you can find someone who can do it.

But the marketing part … I guess you could hire someone, but it takes nine to twelve months of concerted effort to build a platform. Which means having lots of followers, and fans, and subscribers … and that has to be started the moment the you begin.

VentureBeat: And on the publishing part …

Kawasaki: I really want authors to understand that traditional publishers used to provide two to three main sources of benefit:

First, they were a filter of what was good. Someone smart and talented picked what was good from what was crap, so the best stuff came to market. (I no longer believe that’s true, by the way. Now people go to Amazon, see 4 stars, click, and the book is bought.)

Second, they were very good at getting dead trees to retailers. The only problem is, there are far fewer retailers now.

So for an author today, you have to question whether it’s worthwhile to go through this rigamarole of finding a publisher — which takes maybe six months — and then be forced to wait another 12 months while your book winds its slow way through the massive publishing machine.

Now, maybe plan A is to find a traditional publisher, get a big advance, and and editor, and write the book. Almost no-one can do that. Plan B is to write it, upload it to Amazon, and make $2 out of every $3 the book takes in.

Plan C — which is a great plan, by the way — is to do plan B, and then, when your book is successful and being downloaded, go to plan A.

VentureBeat: You’ve done all three. What are you seeing with sales of your own books … digital vs paper?

Kawasaki: I’ve written 12 books now, and the best data I have is with Enchantment, where the ratio of print to ebooks is two to one.

There is a myth that more ebooks are sold than paper books, but generally speaking the total U.S. market for books is about $25B, and roughly 10 percent is ebooks. The place where ebooks really dominate is adult fiction.

I think that it will be 90 percent ebooks someday … but that’s not true today.

Venturebeat: Amazon is so dominant in digital publishing. Should you just focus on Amazon?

Kawasaki: For a novice author, the answer is probably yes: Amazon is roughly 80 percent of the action. The Nook, Apple’s iBooks store, and Kobo is the rest.

Plus, you do get some significant benefits if you go exclusive with Amazon, like the Kindle Direct Publishing program. It’s much simpler … if you’re successful, then go to the other platforms.

VentureBeat: About print … it seems sometimes that the book is the artifact, the souvenir, while authors are making much more revenue around it in terms of speaking, consulting … is that a good reason to write a book?

Kawasaki: I say it’s bad reason because it’s unlikely that most authors will make significant money.

I also believe that it’s bad karma. A book is an end in itself … if you think of a book as a means to an end, I just think that’s bad karma. For example, in a marketing sense, if you pretend you are on Amazon, and you’re seeing books by famous authors and you see your book — the Shmoe Way by Joe Shmoe from Schmoe Publishing — you have to ask why should anyone give a shiitake about my book?

No-one wakes up in the morning and says I’m going to give Joe more money, more business, more speaking opportunities. They don’t buy it to help you.

So the only way the book is successful if it’s helpful.

VentureBeat: One of the problems authors face when they publish themselves is pricing … how much is my baby, the book I’ve been working on for so many months, worth?

Kawasaki: Well, first you have to understand that pricing is witchcraft, not science. But there are some guidelines.

If you’re a novice novelist, go $0.99. After you’ve built some track record, you can bump it to $2.99.

For a non-fiction book, the sweet spot is $9.99. A hardcover would be $26, and you have to be lower to make people feel they’re getting a good deal when buying digital. But anything less, and people start thinking: how could it be worthwhile?

But there are some exceptions — if you’re an iOS developer and you write a book that’s going to help someone build the next Instagram … that book can cost $99.

(Laughing)

Try that the traditional route: go to a New York publisher and tell them you have a $50 iOS book … and then it takes 12 months to get it out, and it’s out of date before it’s ever published. Not going to work.

VentureBeat: Is today the best time ever to be an author?

Kawasaki: I don’t know if it’s the best ever in financial sense … but I would make the case that it’s the best ever in terms of independence. Today, publishing is pretty democratized.

photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

According to a new report, advocates of the printed page are an increasingly rare breed.

Just a few years ago, it seemed implausible that people would embrace a Kindle or Nook and forgo the familiar experience of reading a physical book. It urns out that we like the flexibility and lower prices of an electronic book, and device ownership subsequently skyrocketed to meet the demand.

Sampling 2,252 people, the report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that ebook reading is up. The number of those who read ebooks jumped from 16 percent of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23 percent in 2012.

The report demonstrates that reading, in general, is still a popular American pastime. The number of book readers has remained relatively steady, dropping slightly from 78 percent in 2011 to 75 percent in 2012. The survey found that book readers consumed an average of 15 books this year on any medium, whether it’s audio, print, or digital. Fourteen percent of the respondents read 21 or more books. Women tend to read more — they get through about 17 books a year, while the average for men is 13 books.

Print publishers and libraries were given cause for optimism this summer, pointing to a protracted dispute between the government, Apple, Amazon and publishers, over the pricing of ebooks. This gave them a bit of breathing room to compete with Amazon, the undisputed leader in the ebook space. Amazon has dominated the market since its release of the Kindle in 2007, which set off the surge in digital reading.

This year, traditional groups grasped that ebooks are not a passing fad, and responded accordingly. Public libraries increasingly stocked their shelves with ebooks, a move which seems to be paying off. About 5 percent of the population rented an e-book from a public library this year (a slight increase from 2011), and a higher percentage of respondents said they were aware their local branch carried ebooks, from 24 percent in 2011 to 31 percent in 2012.

Image credit: patrisyu // Shutterstock

Advertising and analytics company Chitika released its December 2012 tablet market update, and the numbers aren’t great for any tablet that doesn’t start with the letter I.

“For every 100 iPad impressions, other tablets have 14.75,” Gabe Donnini, Chitika’s data solutions engineer, said today. “Eighty-seven percent of the tablet web traffic in North America is generated by iPad.”

The biggest chunk of that non-iPad traffic comes from the Kindle, with 4.88 pageviews for every 100 on the iPad. Kindle did grow a very healthy 20 percent month-over-month, however, compared to Chitika’s November statistics. These 4.88 pageviews translate into a 4.25 percent share of all tablet web traffic.

After Kindle, Samsung’s Galaxy has 3.04 pageviews to every hundred on an iPad. Google’s Nexus clocks in at 1.22 pageviews for every 100 on an iPad, and the Nook and Playbook are both under one. All Android tablets together have only  about nine web pageviews to every hundred on an iPad, if you don’t include the Kindle, or 14 if you do. And the Microsoft Surface, which was of course just released earlier this year, has only .22 pageviews for every hundred on an iPad.

This is not an impressive performance in a tablet market that is now almost three years old, based on when the first iPad was released.

Of course, the big question is: Will this change after the holidays? In other words, was it an iPad Christmas, or did more millions unwrap Android tabs this holiday?

“We’re in the process of generating a new report right now to compare pre-holiday and post-holiday traffic,” Donnini said. “We want to see who won the battle for market share … and see what people got on Christmas.”

That report will be coming out shortly, and we’ll have those details on VentureBeat.

photo credit: albyantoniazzi via photopin cc

Amazon has released a large amount of data about online sales in 2012, with lots of factoids and vague figures for digital downloads, purchases, and product shipments. And the biggest piece of data revealed by the company was the number of packages it sold on the peak day of 2012.

On Nov. 26, Amazon sold 26.5 million items worldwide across all product categories. That equates to a whopping 306 items per second, a new record, according to the company.

Amazon also shed some insight into ebook purchases for the year. For instance, it revealed that 23 of its self-publishing (Kindle Direct Publishing) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their respective books in 2012. And the most gifted ebook sold during the holiday season? That would be number wizard Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t.

Ultimately, there isn’t much useful information for shareholder to determine how well Amazon is doing in regard to its digital purchases. But the new data did share lots of information about physical product shipments. (Amazon customers purchased enough copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James, including Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed and the trilogy box set, to create a stack 445 times taller than the Seattle Space Needle.

We’ve pulled out the interesting bits from Amazon’s press release and pasted them below. And as always, let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Amazon 2012 purchase data:

• Cyber Monday 2012 was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales worldwide.
• Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for digital downloads
• The most gifted Kindle book during the holiday season was The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver.
• The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now has over 250,000 books (up from 75,000 in 2011).
• More than 175,000 exclusive books were added to the Kindle store in 2012.
• 23 Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their books in 2012.
• Top KDP authors include Hugh Howey, author of the New York Times best-seller Wool, Stephanie Bond, author of Stop the Wedding!, Barbara Freethy, and CJ Lyons.
• Sales of apps and games during the holiday period alone were up more than 250 percent over the same period last year.
• The Amazon MP3 store has sold enough music for everyone at Woodstock ’69 to jam out to another three days of music for peace and love.
• On its peak day, Amazon’s worldwide fulfillment network shipped over 15.6 million units across all product categories.
• On the peak day, Nov. 26, customers ordered more than 26.5 million items worldwide across all product categories, which is a record-breaking 306 items per second.
• Amazon customers added more than 15 million toys to their Wishlists this holiday season.

Apparently, Amazon isn’t cool with any self-published book with the appearance of copyright infringement — specifically, something related to Star Wars.

This is what happened to Gib Van Ert’s memoir “A Long Time Ago: Growing up with and out of Star Wars” yesterday. Amazon yanked the ebook due to an “unspecified trademark issue,” according to the author. The book isn’t telling a story about the characters in George Lucas’s series of films or even the “expanded universe” characters that appear in various sanctioned novels, video games, and graphic novels. It’s about someone’s life experiences and how Star Wars affected them.

“[Amazon's] emails are vague, but they seems to being saying that I have to have Lucasfilm’s permission before selling on their store a book that talks about Star Wars,” Van Ert explained. “It’s a crazy position – Star Wars is a massive pop, cultural, and generational phenomenon, as my book tries to explain through a personal narrative.”

What’s more puzzling about this situation is that Amazon continues to sell the print version of Van Ert’s book, as BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow points out. The only real explanation is that Amazon has some sort of system in place that automatically flags content that may be in violation of infringement — much in the same way that Google has set up a system for media company’s to do with search engine results and infringing videos on YouTube. The real question is whether Amazon also permits its self-published authors to challenge the claim, and how long it would then take for the book to reappear in the ebook store.

It makes sense that Amazon wants to grow its self-publishing business, which is more lucrative for both authors and Amazon than going through a publisher. But an automated copyright infringement system isn’t the way to go, if that’s indeed what’s currently in use. We’re reaching out to Amazon for more information about how it flags ebooks, and will update this post with any new info.

Image via Lucasfilm

He’s also the author of a chart-topping Amazon book that sold 40,000 copies in its first eight weeks of publication — and shot to the top spot in Amazon’s science fiction charts — by following a very strategic publishing and publicity model, which he shared with me when we chatted a few weeks ago.

This is a hot topic right now. Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki just published APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur), which gives step-by-step instructions on how to self-publish. And an astonishing 27 of the top 100 books on Kindle are self-published.

Here’s how Mather did it.

“I have a background as an entrepreneur and as I was writing the Kindle came out and I wanted to try it,” Mather said. “Traditional publishers have the connections into the bookshops, and pay for printing … but now creators can access the market directly.”

Mather had started writing his novel in 2010, and by 2012 had 150,000 words and 600 pages of The Atopia Chronicles. But he didn’t just throw the novel into the massive Amazon ocean of titles and hope for the best. Using his background in startups and his savvy as an entrepreneur, he created an 11-step program to market and launch the book.

“If you go the self-publishing route, it’s definitely the year to get started,” he told me. “But you need to start with good reviews and get early sales … if you start to become popular, you get into the recommendation system, and the system feeds itself.”

So Mather created the Shakespeare system, an 11-step process to get to number one. Briefly, it outlines the key tips to getting attention, getting reviews, and getting sales:

1. Serialize
   Attention spans are short and readers don’t necessarily trust a new author. Consider breaking your novel into smaller, bit-sized chunks
2. Hook
   The first part of your story needs to be punchy and leave the reader wanting more.
3. Amazon only
   Focus only on Amazon first, because it’s the biggest and sells the most. By focusing, you can promote better, and you can move up rankings quicker. After some success you can consider other platforms.
4. Key networks
   Promote the book in your personal networks. Ask people to re-post your free book offers. Email people. Share it on LinkedIn. Email top-selling authors, and ask them to review your book or even share it with their audiences.
5. Empathy
   You must create a character that people can connect with
6. Select Program on Amazon
   Choose the Amazon Select Program because you can offer your book for free for 5 days in every three months. Then promote it on the free books websites.
7. Perceived value
   Create perceived value by offering a deal … for instance by pricing six serialized parts at $0.99 each, and the entire book at $2.99
8. Editing
   You will get killed in reviews if your book is not well edited. Go on Craigslist, find some unemployed English major, and pay a few bucks to get it edited. Use a real editor if you have the cash, but it’ll be expensive.
9. All free posting sites
   Get feedback on your book from 20 or so people by paying the $10-20 for reading your book. Bonus: they’ll probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews for you later. And use the free press release sites when you release your book.
10. Reviews
    It’s critical to get reviews as these have a direct impact on Amazon ranking and recommendations. Don’t do fake reviews — you’ll get caught. Do ask friends and relatives and contacts to review the book.
11. Engage
    Engage with readers via a video blog, or any blog (here’s Mather’s). Show progress on future books. Get them engaged somehow.

By using this system — and by working a 14-hour day when his book was released — Mather ensured that his book launch didn’t disappear into the vast Amazon machine without a ripple. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the Shakespeare system, check the first letters of each step.)

“You need to prepare beforehand and do it all at once, at launch day,” he told me. “I started at three AM, sent out three to four press releases, ran through the whole marketing program in 14 hours, and by the next day I was number one in science fiction.”

One thing that is critical, Mather says, is pricing.

“I talked to a lot of science fiction readers, and it’s sort of like the music industry,” he told me. “A book from a big publisher is $10-15  … so people will pirate them. But if you price it at $2-3, they won’t. And, since you’re getting 70% of the purchase price from Amazon versus maybe 20% from a regular publishing deal … you’re better off in the end.”

The results are pretty obvious: a book that went to first in Amazon’s science fiction list in a day is still on three different top-ten lists and is currently ranked 1,813 on the overall Amazon’s best-sellers list. Not bad for a first-time author.

Of course, it’s not all about the system. One thing that Mather did add when we chatted: it helps if the book is good.

With the cloud-based service, developers can finally allow their apps to send updates and other information to individual Kindle devices. While this sort of centralized notification system is already built into Android (and iOS), it’s so far been noticeably absent from Amazon’s custom fork of Google’s operating system.

One of the most significant components of the service is that it doesn’t have to ping servers constantly in order to get updates. Not only is this much better for a device’s battery life, but it cuts down on data transmission as well. These are both pivotal features in mobile devices, which is why the service will be an indispensable component of any future Kindle smartphone. (And it’s good news for the current Kindle tablets, too.)

Developers should be happy with Amazon Device Messaging as well, because it can help make their Kindle apps as robust as those on other platforms.

Photo: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

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The sad reality of the technology world is that many of the best gadgets are also really expensive. Tablets, smartphones, game consoles — the high end of the gadget world is dominated by some really awesome devices that come with equally scary prices. And this makes them awful as gifts. (Though, admittedly, we have a gift guide for tablets as well.)

The cure, then, is clear: Go cheaper. Plenty of devices on the lower end of the price spectrum do some pretty impressive things, and the gadgets you’ll find below are some of our favorites.

For the failed home gardener: Koubachi Wi-Fi plant sensor

Some people are really good at taking care of plants. For everyone else, there’s the Koubachi Wi-Fi plant sensor. Once placed in the soil of a plant, the sensor gives forgetful botanists the low down on all the plant’s vitals, including moisture levels, light intensity, and temperature. All this information is fed to the Koubachi app, which lets you see how your plants are doing — even when you’re out of the country. Something tells me the house plant mortality rate is about to drop precipitously. $100.

For the kids: Furby

With every holiday season comes that one toy parents scratch each other’s eyes out over in toy stores, and this year it’s the Furby. Furbies have always sat on the divide between cute and creepy, but the latest revision is something else: super high-tech. Along with the toy, Mattel has created an iOS app that kids can use to both feed Furby and figure out what the heck the thing is talking about. $80

For the writer: Moleskine’s Evernote Smart Notebook

Being a writer is tough nowadays: Do you stick to paper or fully embrace the promise of the cloud? The Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook turns that conundrum into a compromise: Not only can it be used as a regular old notebook, but the included smart stickers let you upload your notes (and automatically tag them) simply by photographing them. Comes with two free months of Evernote Premium. $30

For the eco nut: Square water bottle

There are about as many water bottles on the market are there are drops of water in the ocean — but the Square is different. Solving one of the central problems with water bottle sanitation, the Square opens at both ends, allowing owners to clean it with unparalelled ease. The best part? It won’t roll away if you drop it. $45.

For the bibliophile: Kindle Paperwhite

With the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon has once again improved on a fairly spotless formula: Create a well-designed device and attach it to a seemingly infinite ecosystem of content, and you have a device that’s pretty tough for the average book lover to pass up. And by giving its latest eReader a backlight, Amazon has made the whole package that much more compelling. $120

For the music lover: Jambox

There are a lot of Bluetooth speakers out there, but none rise to the level of elegance of the Jambox. Deceptively small, the Jambox blows out some pretty powerful sound for a device that’s just 1.6 pounds. Oh, and it comes in four colors. $130.

For the fitness fanatic: Jawbone Up

If personal sensors are the future, let’s hope that future looks a lot like the Jawbone Up. More than a fitness tracker, the Up is capable of tracking your whole life: hours slept, calories burned, distance traveled — everything falls within the Up’s purview, which makes the device not only comprehensive, but wicked smart, too. The Up’s insight engine means that the device can also learn things about how its wearer lives and help that individual develop new habits — in theory, anyway. (To get a sense of how well it works, check out our review.) $130

For the cable cutter: Mohu Leaf

For anyone whose severed their relationship with their local cable provider, devices like the Mohu Leaf are a godsend. The super thin HDTV antenna gives owners clear access to local over-the-air programming, which, for a lot of people, is all the television they need. $40

For the hardware hacker: iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit

The gadget teardown wizkids at iFixit are good at what they do, and with the  iFixIt Pro Tech Toolkit, a lot of other people can be too. The kit gives you access to a wide range of indispensable tools, including openers, tweezers, a spudger, and 54 screw driver bits. For anyone who’s always wanted to crack open their electronics, there’s probably no better gift than this. $60

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apparently, people like to have fun, and they buy digital devices to assist them in that noble quest.

This is perhaps not a shock.

But they use those devices differently, according to Flurry, the app analytics company. To understand those differences between how we use our smartphones and smart tablets, Flurry analyzed six billion user sessions from 500 million devices in September.

Tablet owners are a little older than smartphone owners and have fewer Y chromosomes. And they spend a lot more time on games – 67 percent of time spent on a tablet is spent playing a game, versus 39 percent for smartphones.

Of course, this shows some overlap between devices and owners, with many owning both smartphones and tablets. But when Flurry analyzed the demographics of the 30 million people who have granted it the right to collection information on them, they found that, on average, tablet owners tend to be both more female and a little older.

Another key difference?

Tablets are for after dinner — the prime-time entertainment hours. While smartphones are in use all day, and do also show a small increase in the evening hours, tablets spike in the three hours between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.  That jives with Forrester research that says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. use them while watching TV as a second screen: following tweets, sharing updates, and chatting about what they are watching.

But it can’t just all be second-screen: That 67 percent of time spent playing games means that there must be a significant theft of time from traditional prime-time entertainment as well.

In addition, Flurry found that while smartphones are used more often than tablets, tablets are used for longer periods of time than smartphones. App engagement — the number of times a person opens an app — was 12.9 times each week on smartphones, versus 9.5 on tablets. But minutes per session showed 8.2 minutes in each tablet app, exactly double the 4.1 minutes in an app on a smartphone.

That rings anecdotally true: You pull out your smartphone to check a message or your calendar and then put it away … while you pull out your tablet on the sofa to catch up on news, read a book, or play a game.

In short, despite work from Apple and others to position them as more than entertainment devices, the biggest use case for tablets is still the sofa, while the smartphone’s home is still your front pocket.

photo credit: Andrew Scott via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Amazon has launched a full frontal assault on Apple’s new iPad mini.

The massive online retailer is not just comparing the Kindle Fire HD with Cupertino’s latest. It’s not just saying ours is better than yours. And it’s not just hiding its message under the proverbial bushel. Amazon is using its home page — perhaps the most valuable digital real estate on the planet — to absolutely ambush the iPad mini.

Source: Amazon

Amazon’s front-page attack on Apple’s iPad mini

This is not just trash talking. This is in-your-face dialed up to 11, fist in the face, calling Apple out, dropping the gloves and saying “let’s go.” And gadget blog Gizmodo is helping, in a way.

Amazon is using a quote from Gizmodo to help drive home the point:

” … your [Apple's] 7.9-inch tablet has far fewer pixels that the competing 7-inch tablets! You’re cramming a worse screen in there, charging more, and accusing others of compromise? Ballsy.”

Amazon is hitting Apple where it hurts: the display, the dual speakers, and yes, most of all, the price, the price, the price. It’s what we said when we first saw the iPad mini: light, portable, awesome, expensive. And it’s the difference between a company that makes money on the device — no points for guessing Apple, people — and a company that sells hardware at cost so that it can make money on content sales.

Razor, meet blades.

Truthfully, it is also the tale of a company that makes money hand-over-fist – still no points — and a company that makes less than nothing on $14 billion in sales.

The issue is perhaps not so much whether Amazon is freaked out by the iPad mini as whether it is freaking out with joy, amazed to be handed a potential marketing coup on a platter. And it’s one that, if Apple had started its pricing at $250, as the rumors had at one point indicated, would be a tougher sell.

The real question, if you’re an Amazon shareholder, is whether Jeff Bezos can ever turn the biggest digital marketing platform on the planet into a content cash cow. Or, when he wants to.

For Apple shareholders, of course, the question is whether Apple’s legendary brand, its content and apps ecosystem, and its industry-best quality, fit, and finish are enough to overcome a $130 price gap.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon is helping to fill out the Windows 8 app catalog with a dedicated Kindle app.

Announced after the Windows 8 launch event in New York City, Kindle for Windows 8 brings Amazon’s library of books to Microsoft’s fledging operating system.

The news is indisputably great for Windows 8, which has been criticized in most early reviews for its paltry selection of apps. While Kindle for Windows 8 doesn’t appear to do anything new visually, it’s still a significant addition to the Windows 8 ecosystem.

Notably, the app supports x86, x64, and ARM processors, meaning that it’s compatible with both Windows 8 and the tablet- focused Windows RT.

But what’s really interesting is that Amazon announced its eBook app before Barnes & Noble did the same. That’s notable because when Microsoft invested $300 in a Barnes & Noble, a Nook Windows 8 app was an explicit part of the deal. In any case, we’ve reached out to Barnes & Noble to see what’s going on.

The Amazon news comes on the same day that StumbleUpon announced its own Windows 8 app, which the company says takes full advantage of the operating system’s live tiles. With all of this third-party support, maybe Windows 8 will turn out alright after all.

Amazon is streamlining the number of Kindle products in its lineup today by discontinuing some of its older e-ink reader devices.

Amazon’s $99 Kindle Touch is currently unavailable for purchase, but its product listing page directs you to the company’s new Paperwhite product. The Paperwhite itself isn’t a direct upgrade to the Touch. It retails for $119, offers a paper-like experience while reading your books, and is plagued with some serious flaws. (However, that hasn’t stopped people from ordering the device, as it’s currently on back order for 4 to 6 weeks.)

My guess is that the Paperwhite was always intended to replace the Touch. Amazon probably wanted to sell through its current stock of Kindle Touches, which would be much harder to do if it branded the device as obsolete (aka last year’s model).

Amazon is also discontinuing its Kindle DX, a larger version of the e-reader that was more expensive and never quite achieved the success of the smaller versions. This news isn’t very surprising as we’ve heard rumblings for a while that Amazon was ditching the DX.

Customers still have plenty of options if they want a Kindle, though. The company is still offering two versions of the non-touch Kindle (with and without ads), as well as its line of Kindle Fire tablets.

We’re reaching out to Amazon for an official confirmation that its discontinued both the Kindle Touch and Kindle DX and will update this post with any new information.

Via PaidContent

Amazon has introduced a new service called Whispercast that will help organizations take better control of content on large numbers of Kindles, the company announced today.

Ideally, Whispercast will give schools and other organizations a single touch point for buying and distributing e-books, PDFs, and more to students and employees with Kindles. Whispercast also works with the Kindle apps for iOS, Android, PCs, and Macs.

“Hundreds of thousands of students around the world are already reading on Kindle,” Amazon Kindle VP Dave Limp said in a statement. “Today, we are announcing Whispercast, a free, scalable solution for school and business administrators to centrally manage thousands of Kindles and wirelessly distribute Kindle books as well as their own documents to their users. Organizations can also design bring-your-own-device programs at school or work using personally-owned Kindles, Kindle Fires, and other tablets using the free Kindle reading applications for receiving content.”

Here’s Amazon’s list of features for Whispercast:

• Easily manage fleets of Kindles

With Whispercast, administrators can register and assign users to all of their organizations’ Kindle devices at once, creating personalized Kindle experiences for each student or employee.

• Support for “bring your own device”

With support for personal devices, organizations can invite employees, students, customers and partners to receive content from the organization on their Kindles.

• Create user groups

Whispercast gives administrators the ability to assign users into one or more groups, such as specific class, grade level or corporate department. User groups make it easier to purchase and distribute content for each group’s unique needs.

• Control device settings, such as Wi-Fi and password protection

Schools and businesses can configure device settings across all their Kindles, including configuring wireless connectivity to private networks for a simple and secure user experience as well as restricting web access and purchases.

• Wirelessly distribute Kindle books, documents and applications

Whispercast makes it easy for organizations to centrally distribute Kindle books as well as documents on an individual basis. In the coming months, Whispercast administrators will be able to purchase and send Kindle Fire applications. Additionally, during the purchase process organizations will be able to select which content should be assigned to specific user groups they have created.

• Support for free Kindle reading apps on iOS, Android, and other devices

Schools and businesses can purchase and send Kindle books and distribute documents to devices using any of the free Kindle reading apps, including iPads, iPhones, Android phones and tablets, PCs and Macs.

• Support for centralized procurement

Organizations can efficiently purchase Kindle devices and content through a single payment method, including purchase orders, as well as Amazon gift cards or credit cards.

Take a look at the video below to see Whispercast in action in a school setting:

If you’ve held off on ordering Amazon’s new Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, you’ll now have to wait more than a month to get your reading on.

Amazon began shipping out Kindle Paperwhite preorders Monday, but now the e-reader is showing an expected ship date of four to six weeks. From the looks of it, the delay applies to all Kindle Paperwhite models, which include the Wi-Fi and 3G versions as well as the versions with and without ads.

While Amazon could conceivably receive a new load of Kindle stock in the next few weeks, I wouldn’t bet on getting your hands on one until next month. Best Buy and other retailers will also offer the e-reader soon in-stores.

We’ve contacted Amazon about the Paperwhite delay and will update if we hear back.

Amazon announced the Kindle Paperwhite alongside its new Kindle Fire tablets in early September. The company touted the e-reader’s sophisticated front light as the key feature, but it also includes improved E-Ink technology and better touch response. Up until now, Kindle e-readers had no built-in lighting, you either had to read them in a bright room, or with some sort of light accessory.

Even though Amazon’s playing catch up to Barnes & Noble’s Nook Glowlight e-reader, I think the Kindle Paperwhite still wins out when it comes to its execution of E-Ink lighting. After a few days of testing out my Kindle Paperwhite, I noticed that I never really had a reason to turn off its light. It obviously helped when reading in dark rooms, but it also made a difference in normally lit rooms as well. I grew used to the ethereal glow of the Paperwhite’s screen — and eventually, I began to prefer it to relying solely on external lighting. (Luckily, Amazon says the Kindle Paperwhite should see around eight weeks of battery life with the light turned on.)

I’ve also been pleased with the new Kindle’s touch response. On last year’s Kindle Touch, the technology just felt out of place — typing and simply maneuvering the device’s interface was a chore because the screen took forever to refresh. But with the Kindle Paperwhite, touch response is almost real time, which makes it feel more like a tablet than an e-reader.

Check back for my full review of the Kindle Paperwhite sometime next week.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Barnes & Noble has dropped the price of its back-lit Nook e-reader to $119 from $139 at several retailers to prepare for Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Paperwhite, which also retails for $119.

The Nook Simple Touch with “GlowLight” technology launched in April and received beaming praise from critics. But Amazon is poised to challenge Barnes & Noble with the Kindle Paperwhite, which looks like it will blow away previous Kindle e-readers with a higher resolution screen and adjustable lighting.

Nook’s Simple Touch with GlowLight is now available online and in Target and Walmart stores for $119.

The $119 Kindle Paperwhite was originally supposed to ship to prospective customers on Oct. 1, but now anyone who wants to pre-order one will have to wait until the week of Oct. 22. Amazon claims “popular demand” has pushed back the date.

In the e-reading tug-of-war between Barnes & Noble and Amazon, B&N also recently announced the Nook HD and HD+ tablets. They will compete with Amazon’s Fire and Fire HD tablets.

Photo credit: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looking for a Kindle? Well, you won’t find one in the country’s largest retail store chain anymore.

Walmart will stop sales of Amazon’s entire line of Kindle devices. This is effective immediately, reports Reuters. That includes all Kindle e-readers as well as the Kindle Fire and new Kindle Fire HDs. This move not only includes the big box Walmart stores but also its membership-only chain, Sam’s Club.

“We have recently made the business decision to not carry Amazon tablets and eReaders beyond our existing inventory and purchase commitments,” Wamart stated in a memo to store managers yesterday.

Searching for Kindle on both Walmart and Sam’s Club official websites is currently returning zero results, which could indicate that the online store fronts are also halting sales.

The move is not at all surprising, considering that Amazon’s online store sells a variety of items you can typically find in Walmart. The Kindle Fire itself acted as a “trojan horse” of sorts for Amazon by enticing people to shop online via tablet rather than go into a brick and mortar store to make a purchase. I’d imagine Walmart wasn’t making any money off of Kindle sales, either.

Walmart is the second big box retailer to boot Amazon’s Kindles out of its stores, with the first being discount-chain competitor Target back in May.

I’m curious to find out if the lack of retail presence on retail shelves will affect Kindle sales heading into the 2012 holiday season. (Coincidentally, I purchased a Kindle for my Dad last Christmas, but only after waiting in a substantial line of people who typically wouldn’t make it into an electronics store. Walmart employees actually had to explain each product and offer a short demo before the three people ahead of me ended up purchasing something.)

Photo via Walmart Corp./Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s slick new 7-inch Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets are now available to purchase online.

Just last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage in Santa Monica, Calif. to debut new Kindles, including a Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, a refreshed Kindle Fire, a 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, and an 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD.

While we’ll have to wait until Nov. 20 for the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire to ship, Amazon’s 7-inch tablets and new $69 Kindle e-reader are here today. If you want the absolute lowest price for a decent color tablet, the $159 Kindle Fire is worth a look. But if you’re willing to pay up just a bit more, the $199 Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7 are the two best 7-inch tablets we’ve seen yet.

Let us know in the comments if you plan to buy a Kindle from Amazon’s new lineup.

Kindle Fire HD photo: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After numerous complaints, Amazon has confirmed that it will indeed let customers opt out of “Special Offers” advertising on the new Kindle Fire HD for $15. It’s a show of goodwill on Amazon’s part, but what was with the mixed messages?

“With Kindle Fire HD, there will be a special offers opt-out option for $15,” Amazon said in a widely circulated statement. “We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We’re happy to offer customers the choice.”

From the looks of it, Amazon didn’t think it would be a big deal if its Kindle Fire HD served ads because “very few” Kindle owners opt out of Special Offers. However, with the confusion and mixed messages, it’s almost as if Amazon decided to test if there would be a freak out over not offering an opt out. Once angry customers and tech pundits spoke up, Amazon caved to their requests.

To be fair, the reason many folks (including me) haven’t opted out is that Special Offers aren’t that obtrusive and only show up on the lock screen. Unlocking the screen takes a split second, so I don’t even have to look at the ad.

But it’s always better to give customers the option to ditch advertising, so Amazon is doing the right thing and giving customers a way out by paying $15 — just like it did with the first Kindle Fire. Advertising is included to subsidize the price of the tablets, and Amazon could eventually make a lot of money advertising on millions of large, colorful home screens. But it’s better to keep customers happy by giving them an option they probably won’t take.

The Kindle Fire HD will be released on Sept. 14, while the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Wi-Fi and 4G models are expected to ship on Nov. 20.

Kindle Fire HD photo: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Update 9/10/2012 (11:1o a.m. PT): Amazon is now allowing Kindle Fire HD owners to opt out of ads for $15. Check out the full store here.

You’ll love many things about Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HD, but viewing ads probably isn’t one of them.

Amazon is placing an ad on the lock screen of the new tablets, which people will see whenever they wake the device from slumber or banish the home screen by clicking the power button. The ads apparently come from the “special offers” widget featured on all devices. Initially, this caused some people to criticize Amazon’s move, especially because the company didn’t give users the option to “upgrade” to an ad-free version.

However, now the company has confirmed Kindle owners will be able to opt out of the default ad settings, according to an Engadget report based on a tip from an anonymous source.

According to the source, Amazon sent the following response in response to a complaint regarding the lock screen ads:

“Special Offers appear directly on your Kindle Fire. Offers appear on your lock screen, and you can also view offers from the Home screen by tapping Offers. By delivering these offers to your Kindle Fire, Amazon is able to sell it for a lower price.

I understand that you would like to opt out of the special offer and willing to pay extra for opting out special offer. Options for unsubscribing special offer will be announced soon.

To ensure the utmost attention, I’ve also passed your message on to the appropriate people in our company. We value customer feedback such as yours as it helps us continue to improve the service and selection we provide.”

The obvious typos in the note do cast doubt on the idea that this is a new company policy: If the note did come indeed from Amazon, it doesn’t appear to be a prepared response but an improvised note from a customer rep.

We’re reaching out to Amazon for confirmation and more details and will update the post with any new information.

Update 9/7/2012 (1:35 p.m. PT): Amazon is apparently not willing to let people opt out of lock screen advertisements on the new line of Kindle Fire devices, reports Cnet. This contradicts information from the Amazon support contact’s response (above), which states that owners would have a way to banish the ads if they didn’t want them.

In the case of the Ad-supported Kindle readers, owners could pay to remove the ads when they redeemed a special offer. Presumably this fee would cover the lost revenue Amazon was bringing in for the advertising. However, this option won’t be available to new Kindle HD owners ( 7-inch, 8.9-inch, and 4G LTE versions).

Update 9/10/2012 (11:1o a.m. PT): Amazon is now allowing Kindle Fire HD owners to opt out of ads for $15. Check out the full store here.

Photo by Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon shook up the tablet computing industry by entering a new device into the category: a glossy Kindle Fire HD that comes in a familiar 7-inch model or a supersized 8.9-inch variety. Amazon also introduced a fifth generation Kindle e-reader called the Kindle Paperwhite.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos featured the devices in a press event held in Santa Monica, Calif. today. Bezos also showed off a refreshed Kindle Fire tablet, but the clear star of the show was the all-new Fire HD.

The $199 7-inch Kinde Fire HD will feel familiar to existing Fire owners when it comes to its size, but the device packs a faster, louder punch with an HD display, faster processor, Dolby audio, and 11 hours of battery life.

The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD is bigger and brighter, though it’s not quite as ready for production as its smaller kin (it won’t ship until November 20). The $299 device has a 1,920 by 1,200 HD display and an OMAP4 4470 processor to speed things up. Both models come with front-facing cameras, Bluetooth support, HDMI out, and 16GB of storage.

Big spenders can plunk down an additional $200 to get 4G LTE connectivity, courtesy of AT&T, on the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch. This $499 model includes 32 GB of storage.

See also: Amazon unveils Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Paperwhite

I chatted up Dave Limp (pictured above), the vice president of Amazon Kindle, after the event to get a better idea of the company’s intentions behind its expanded lineup of devices.

“Customers are smart, and Amazon is founded on selection,” Limp said. “I think we’re hitting some key price points that consumers have told us … are important to them.”

Limp, of course, didn’t directly answer my question on whether the company priced its Kindle Fire HD to compete with the Google Nexus 7 or an Apple device — “$199 for what’s in this product — I hope somebody comes and tries to do it. It’s incredible. It’s the best value you’re going to see.”

But as to whether Amazon can successfully sell a $499 tablet to consumers, Limp really couldn’t say.

See also: Why the Kindle Paperwhite blows away previous Kindles

“It’s been proven that it’s a very large market,” he said. “I think we’re going to give it a shot and see how we can do with customers in that very big market. Now, we’re new and we probably have lots to learn … but having used this for the past month in and around Amazon, I think it’s a great product.”

So Amazon is extremely proud of its newest machinations, but what should you think of them?

Here’s my advice for you: Don’t order a Kindle Fire HD until you can spend more than a few minutes playing with one. It’s not that the 7-inch Fire HD (the 8.9-inch wasn’t out for display) was underwhelming, it’s just that I didn’t get enough time playing with it to say that it’s any better (or worse) than the Google Nexus 7, which I find to be a fantastic little device. Overall, the touchscreen was pretty responsive, but the browsing speed over Wi-Fi wasn’t all that impressive (maybe two antennae aren’t enough?), and the virtual keyboard felt pretty sticky.

The Kindle Fire HD is also different enough from the iPad and the Nexus 7 in how it operates, largely because of the Android fork that Amazon employs, that you’ll want to find the device that perfectly fits your fingers’ mojo.

The Kindle Paperwhite is a far easier sell. Amazon knows e-readers (it’s number one in the category), and this one’s design has serious readers in mind. Considering that the cheapest Paperwhite version (sans 3G connectivity) sells for a why-wouldn’t-you-buy-it? price of $119, any book lover will find the Paperwhite almost impossible to say no to.

Anyway, why don’t you have a look for yourself.