A month after a price war broke out between Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com over e-reader prices with a WiFi only Barnes & Noble Nook selling for $149, Amazon.com will soon announce a smaller, lighter WiFi-only Kindle for $139. A 3G enabled version will sell for the previous model's price of $189.
$10 is not enough to make up for its e-books being restricted to one vendor however.
Amazon.com reports that Stieg Larsson, author of the internationally bestselling Millennium Trilogy, has become the first author to sell over 1 million Kindle books. To mark the occasion, Amaozn.com is starting the "Kindle Million Club" which recognizes authors whose entire body of work has sold over 1 million copies in the Kindle Store.
Kindle e-Books can be viewed on Kindle readers and on Kindle software for iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, iPad and Android devices. They are still however DRM locked to the Amazon.com ecosystem and thus less useful than freely transferable e-Books.
In other Larsson news, Daniel Craig who previously played James Bond will star in an English language adaption of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and if that is a success adaptions of the next two books.
Amazon.com has stopped directly selling books from Macmillan and its imprints (including Tor Books) in a dispute about ebook pricing.
Macmillan CEO John Sargent has issued a statement. His vision for pricing is:
Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.
Amazon by contrast wants a maximum $9.99 fixed price for eBooks that for now can only be read on a Kindle.
Hovering over all this is the Apple iPad and its iBooks Store. The NY Times states:
Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.
Some reaction by Tor related writes and editors:
Update - feb 1, 2010
Amazon.com has posted a message stating they will have to agree to Macmillan's pricing scheme, which was probably what they planned to do once they had Macmillan fingered as the party wanting higher prices.
Page 62 of the National Geographic book, “The New Solar System: Ice Worlds, Moons and Planets Redefined” includes a rather funny example of why books need a good production team.
In discussing the proton-proton chain reaction in the Sun:
Under normal circumstances, two positively charged protons would repeal each other. But in the intensely heated conditions of the solar core, a few are slammed together at high speeds. Once they are within 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 ft) of one another, they are pulled together by the “strong force”, one of the fundamental forces of the universe.
The distance should be 10-15.
Notwithstanding a few small issues like this, it is a great book with lots of brilliant pictures and clear and detailed text.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced the winners of this year's Nebula Awards on Saturday April 26, 2008, in Austin, Texas
Writing at The SF Site, Regina Lynn has an open letter to publishers asking that they include a volume number on a book’s cover if the book is part of a series so that a reader can determine the order of books in the series without even needing to read the book’s jacket blurb and potentially learn spoilers about the plot of earlier books in the series.
I think this would be very useful when possible, through in some cases there is not an established order. Determining the reading order for books in the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold is the subject of many an argument – by publication date, chronological, or more important or better written books first?
One thing that is definitely needed is an indication if a book is part of a series, trilogy or other multi-part volume, I was wondering why nothing much was happening in Harry Turtledove fantasy novel Beyond the Gap when it got to the last few chapters and I realized that it was the first book in a series, a fact not at all mentioned on the cover or front flap.
Tor Books has announced that novelist Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the final novel in Robert Jordan's bestselling Wheel of Time fantasy series. Robert Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr. died September 16, 2007 of the rare blood disease amyloidosis.
At the time of his death Robert Jordan has started some work on the twelfth and final book in his Wheel of Time fantasy series with some sections complete and written or dictated notes on others.
Tor’s news release describes Sanderson as follows:
Like Jordan, Sanderson was an avid reader and writer from an early age. His debut novel, Elantris, was an unagented gem discovered after Sanderson, then a college student writing during his late night shift at a local hotel, approached Tor editor Moshe Feder at a fantasy convention. Several months later, after reading the manuscript and deciding he had to have it, Feder tried to find the author, who had since moved. Using the internet, he tracked down Sanderson through a campus directory--and the rest is history. Sanderson has since gone on to establish a loyal fan base as the author of three critically acclaimed fantasy novels: Elantris, Mistborn, and The Well of Ascension, as well as a YA novel, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. Publishing trade magazines Publishers Weekly and Library Journal gave Elantris starred reviews and it was the winner of the Romantic Times Award for best epic fantasy. The Washington Post also praised Sanderson for his creation of "a fascinating world" in Mistborn.
The scheduled delivery of the manuscript for the final book is December 2008 and a planned publication date of Fall 2009.
Sanderson has a blog posting about the decision.
Now get to work Brandon!
Author James Oliver Rigney Jr. who wrote the massive Wheel of Time series under the pen name Robert Jordan died Sunday of rare blood disease at the age of 58.
A previous posting on “Jordan’s” Dragonmount blog and in comments to the announcement of Rigney’s death on the Making Light blog mention that he was writing and dictating details about the final book in the Wheel of Times series until his death. Hopefully his family and publishers can choose a suitable author to finish the work.
In her review of Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest work, The Sharing Knife which was published in two volumes: The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and The Sharing Knife: Legacy, Sherwood Smith notes that she waited for both volumes to be published before reading them:
I waited a year because someone had warned me that The Sharing Knife: Beguilement was actually the first half of a book summarily chopped in half. I didn't want to read the first half of a book and then wait a year, so I waited until the second came out.
Many fantasy and science fiction stories are multi-volume works, and thus readers face the question of reading the different parts of a multi-volume story when they are published or waiting until the final volume has been published and the work is complete.
Which is better: Reading volumes as fast as they are published or waiting until the end is reached?
Over the weekend the winners of this year's Locus Awards, voted by readers of Locus Magazine in the annual Locus Poll, were announced. The best novels were:
Locus Online has the details of the final Hugo and Campbell Awards ballots. The awards will be given out at Nippon 2007, the 65th World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Yokohama, Japan, August 30 - September 3, 2007.
Except for "The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko and "Inclination" by William Shunn in the Novella category there is no overlap in the written fiction categories between the Hugo nominees which are selected by fans attending the World Science Fiction Convention and the Nebula Awards ballot voted on by members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
T.M. Wagner has a review of Lois McMaster Bujold’s new fantasy-romance novel, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement which will be released on October 10th. Wagner calls the novel, which is the start of a new two book series, “far from up to her elevated standards” and gives it 2.5 stars. He notes that the book is a “straight-up romance novel” and wishes that the plot were more complex and challenging. The review gives away a few spoilers about the plot, perhaps more than if it was another Miles or Chalion novel.
Bujold’s site lists details about the book and its background. She states that Volume 2: Legacy has a planned publication date of June 2007. There is also a sequel called “The Wide Green World” under development and a new Miles book has been sold to Baen and it may be started mid-2007.
Also reviewed at Strange Horizons, which notes it is “a quiet book with almost no tension”, and a more positive review at scifidimensions, which has an interview with Bujold.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Mark Fox's Weblog in the Books category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
BlackBerry Development is the previous category.
Business is the next category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.