Post #14 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Put this in your Not-So-Surprising and Food-for-Thought categories. When Amazon announced that this past November was its best month so far for Kindle sales, what do you think thousands of new Kindle recipients did on Christmas Day? They downloaded books, of course. In fact, they downloaded so many digital copies that for the first time digital
outsold print sales for the same day.
What does this mean to us, as authors and publishers and, naturally, as readers? I think the best way to view these milestones is to make a New Year’s resolution to keep a closer eye on the Kindle and to promise to learn more about what is involved in converting your book into a Kindle-compatible ebook. You don’t have to take immediate action. The digital revolution is a journey, and it’s too early to know our final destination. New players will appear; others will fade away. But it is time to acknowledge that ebook publication is a viable option. So to help you start to get up to speed, here’s a link to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform.
And here’s one final bit of perspective. The blog site Mashable has posted its own interesting assessment of the Kindle’s holiday sales milestone. In answer to their question, Has the digital book revolution really arrived? they say, yes…and no. The numbers are certainly creeping up. Reader prices are slowly coming down (good news). More players in the game. But, and here’s the obvious, of course new Kindle owners are going to immediately start downloading books, but how many other readers are going to interrupt their holiday celebrations to place an order for books on Christmas? Probably not so many.
Update:
I want to give you this link to Seth Godin’s blog today (12/28/09) because he makes an excellent point about the power of Amazon and Kindle to kill the independent bookstores. He writes, “Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever,” and he’s absolutely right. This weekend I’ve been reading comments among the Story Circle Network Lifewriters about books piling up (or not since they have a Kindle) and the books they contribute to local libraries. These women are big readers. The Kindles they received for Christmas are certainly going to make a difference to their local bookstores and libraries. The story continues to unfold…
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Kendra, I loved this post! So much, in fact, that I embarked on a little experiment to publish a Kindle book. Here are my thoughts on the process: http://www.beccascyberhome.com/2009/12/setting-up-a-simple-kindle-book/
Cheers,
Becca
Becca: Thanks for your comment and your afternoon of experiments. I urge all our readers to check out your website and see how easy it is to create a Kindle book. It’s great for you to share the limitations since it will make the task easier for an author if she knows early in the process what she will and won’t be able to do.
-Matilda
Thanks, Becca, I read through your “little experiment.” Your discoveries are very interesting. And I agree with Matilda, anyone thinking of converting their book to Kindle should read your post. Good job.
I have yet to purchase a Kindle but I do have a Kindle Ap on my iTouch. What I have found is that I like to download and carry material with me which is applicable to any project I may be working on at the moment, but I still buy books. In particular, I’m a big consumer of Coffee Table type books on subjects related to travel and photography.
We live in interesting times. My next project will be one which is quite visual. -Rosemary