For laptops, Samsung and Apple were tied, according to the Brand Keys’ 2013 Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, released today. But Samsung led in flat screen TVs, and, in perhaps the biggest shocker, beat out Apple for consumer loyalty in smartphones.

“This is the first year that Samsung beat out Apple in smartphones,” Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff told me this afternoon. “When Apple was number one, everyone said, ‘Well sure, it’s Apple.’ But the fact is that Samsung always had a larger share of the marketplace.”

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – smartphones

If you’re wondering whether this is just some dinky little no-name survey, think again. The Brand Keys customer loyalty index surveys 39,000 people, making it generalizable to the entire United States population with 95 percent confidence. And if you’re also wondering how big the delta between number one and number two actually is, Passikoff says there’s a “significant difference.”

“It’s not terrible to be number two,” Passikof said. “But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction.”

Asus followed Samsung and Apple as the laptop vendor with the third-most-loyal customers, with Toshiba and Sony right on its heels. In smartphones, LG took third place after Samsung and Apple, followed by Nokia and Sony, who were tied for fourth. Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry rounded out the top eight.

Amazon handed Apple some more bad news in the e-reader category, leading the field with its Kindle tablet. Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second, with Apple, Kobo, and Sony following. One big caveat here: it’s likely consumers don’t think of the iPad as an e-reader first and foremost, but rather as a general-purpose tablet, which may have affected these rankings.

I asked Passikoff about exactly that:

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – laptops

“That’s absolutely so. When we initially added the category, iPad never showed up. And then later it did … its primary product value is not as an e-reader. But we don’t define what products go in which categories: consumers do.”

But, adding injury to insult, Amazon beat out Apple in the dedicated tablets category as well. Apple and Samsung tied for second in that category, followed by Barnes & Noble in a tie for third, and Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba in a tie for fourth. Google showed up in the tablets category, also in a tie, in fifth place with Sony.

Clearly, consumers are a little confused about what is a tablet and what is an e-reader — a rapidly disappearing difference — and that confusion played a role in Apple’s rankings. But just as clearly, Samsung’s products, innovation, and advertising are helping that company shape an extremely positive reputation.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

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

The 6-inch e-reader will be a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Touch with Special Offers and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch. All three are $99 e-ink touch devices with 6-inch screens that display content in 16 levels of grey. Sony also has an e-ink product, the $130 Sony Reader Digital Book, and Amazon carries the $79 Kindle, which doesn’t have touch navigation.

Because the hardware is so similar, consumers may end up choosing between the products based on their familiarity with the content ecosystems. The Kindle benefits from its association with Amazon’s giant collection of e-books. The Nook has the Barnes & Noble name and library in its corner. Barnes & Noble is also hoping its new free, in-store customer service centers will appeal to gadget lovers used to Apple’s Genius Bar.

Kobo, however, isn’t as well-known of a name in the U.S., even though it has deals with large book chains in Canada and Europe. Just last week, the Canada-based e-reader manufacturer was acquired for $315 million in cash by Rakuten, the largest online shopping mall operator in Japan, which may help the reader become an international hit. As for this season’s e-reader wars in the U.S., it’s still a scrappy underdog.

The Kobo Touch does offer a few unique features. It can support more file formats than the competition, including HTML, RTF and various image files. And its “Reading Life” feature gives you awards for reading and collects stats on your reading habits.

The Kobo Touch with Offers is only available in black and to customers in the U.S.

Kobo, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are also battling it out on the 7-inch Android tablet front, with similarly featured and priced devices. For a look at how those tablets compare, check out this chart.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Kobo today launched Vox, a new, priced-to-sell Android tablet. Or is it an e-reader? Does anyone know the difference these days?

Vox is a color, 7-inch touchscreen, Android-running gadget that features music, video and social widgets and apps. It has a web browser, an email client, and even an app store stocked with more than 15,000 free Android applications.

The product directly competes with the much-hyped Amazon Kindle Fire, a similar device set to start selling November 15. The $199 Fire is another combination tablet and e-reader with a color touchscreen, apps and web browsing. Likewise, Barnes & Noble is now touting its updated Nook Color, which has apps, email and other tablet features; the Nook Color retails for $249.

All three of these gadgets are a dang sight cheaper than the iPad 2, which starts at $499. And being much better priced for a mass market is a key component to these devices’ success as holiday shopping season (how I loathe the commercialism of that nevertheless appropriate phrase) approaches in a bad economic year.

One question we’re asking is why the device is running Gingerbread, a.k.a. Android 2.3, an operating system for smartphones, rather than Honeycomb, a.k.a. Android 3.0, the fork of the OS intended for tablets. Better yet, why isn’t it running the brand-new Ice Cream Sandwich, code name for Android 4.0, the newest version of Android that’s supposed to work on all devices. We’re waiting to hear back from the company on that and will update this post when we get more information on the subject.

Kobo is the maker of the third most popular e-reader, also called Kobo, after Amazon’s wildly popular Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Earlier this fall, Kobo launched Pulse, a new e-reader platform with some interesting social implementations. Pulse will also be featured on the Vox.

You can buy the Vox now on Kobo’s website; orders start shipping next Friday. The device will later be available in the “usual suspects” retail outlets where consumer electronics are sold, including Best Buy and Fry’s.