Wednesday News: Is the long tail driven by quality or quantity; Cookie tracking replaced by ID tracking (more ominous); BN refreshes the Nook Glow
Publishing NewsAmazon / book-sales / long tail / Nook / privacy12 Comments
I have to apologize for not posting any news yesterday. I went to bed early and just forgot!
A Tsunami of Wonderful: How the Long Tail of Publishing Is Finally Overwhelming the Early Adopter eBook Bounce — and What This Means for Fiction Writers Going Forward – Scott William Carter, in a long arduous post complete with charts containing data he has made up, argues that the long tail will work for authors who have quality books over quantity and over luck. I’d like to believe that is true but from what I hear from self published authors it is quantity that is making the backlist sell. How long quantity wins out over quality remains to be seen. Scott William Carter
Google, Microsoft Threaten End to Cookie Tracking – I consider this a must read article. Google, Microsoft, Apple and every other tech company who can do this will be assigning each individual user a unique ID and then they will follow you throughout the internet so that they can better identify what products to sell you. “Some privacy advocates warn the kinds of hyper-targeting capabilities in tech giants’ cookie industry replacements will spawn even more invasive advertising in people’s lives.
One company named as a partner in Microsoft’s announcement on Wednesday, MediaBrix, says it offers “proprietary emotional targeting” to “reach game players at natural, critical points in game play where they are most receptive to brand messages.” “There is going to be an economic incentive to find out when people are most impulsive and vulnerable,” said Ryan Calo, assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law.”WSJ.com
What’s interesting about this is that there are specific laws that cover door to door sales to prevent individuals being taken advantage of, primarily elderly and lower income individuals who are more vulnerable to these types of appeals. I was involved in a lawsuit concerning credit card sign-ups that would occur after completing banking business. We use this door to door sales rules to modify conduct of these telemarketers. It will be interesting to see if there’ll be any type of legislation that will be designed to protect consumers from what could be very predatory advertising practices.
Amazon.com: Kindle MatchBook – Kindle Matchbook program launched yesterday and if you are signed into your account, you can hit this link here and Amazon will spit out a list of books for you to buy. I only had 5 offers available to me. Laura Hazard Owen of GigaOM says that HarperCollins is the only publisher really embracing this feature right now with 9,000 titles in the program. Amazon.com: Kindle MatchBook
Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy — Remains of the Day – I don’t know who this guy is but his rundown on how Amazon makes money is fascinating. Amazon isn’t just in the business of selling books or diapers or movies. Its Amazon Marketplace is one of the largest swap market around. And Amazon does very little to garner a cut of each sale.
Amazon is a classic fixed cost business model, it uses the internet to get maximum leverage out of its fixed assets, and once it achieves enough volume of sales, the sum total of profits from all those sales exceed its fixed cost base, and it turns a profit. It already has exceeded this hurdle in its past.
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But “flipping a switch” is the wrong analogy because Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit with most every transaction at its current price level. The reason it isn’t showing a profit is because it’s undertaken a massive investment to support an even larger sales base. How does Amazon turn a profit? Not by flipping a switch but by waiting, once again, until its transaction volume grows and income exceeds its fixed cost base again.
Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s interesting.
B&N Maintains Their Rearguard Position in the eReader Market With the Launch of a New Nook Glow – You’ll be forgiven if you did not know this, but Barnes & Noble is releasing a new Nook Glow today! there was no fanfare leading up to this release and given its, as Nate calls them, “anemic” improvements, it is probably best that the launch is low key. The device has an improved front light, higher resolution screen, and more storage at $119. The device comes in white only. The Digital Reader
My sketchbook list is about 10 including one I don’t remember buying at all. However I can get the lot for less than $20 so I think I will.
Make sure you look for the “show more” button on sketchbook. It starts with only showing 10, but I actually had 32 after hitting the button a couple of times.
My matchbook list is 4 titles, priced at $2.99, nothing purchased less than ten years ago. I don’t remember buying any of them from Amazon–two of them, a nonfiction and a memoir, say I bought them 15 years ago–and maaaaybe the two Johanna Lindsey books listed as having been bought thirteen years ago may have been bought used more recently than that. In any case, I guess I’ll wait and see if anything useful ever shows up on the list.
Zero Matchbook titles. But I didn’t expect any. Except for my three favorite authors I gave up buying paper fiction in 1999 so I was pretty sure I didn’t have anything to match.
I have 16 on my list but I know where I have the ones I regularly reread on the list, so I just don’t feel the need to get them in Kindle form just yet
Hi, my name is Rowan and apparently I’m an Amazon addict. 34 matchbook titles. And most of them I wonder why in hell I bought them in the first place…
30 titles matched (mostly m/m), but in my defense most of them I bought three – four years ago – almost not buying any paperbacks now :).
The Matchbook thing made me laugh. I had 6 titles–3 I gave as gifts, 2 were historical romances, and the last one was a puberty book I had bought for my son:-)
Cough. I quit hitting the “show more” button after a couple of hundred titles. The prices seem to range from between $.99 to $2.99. I actually discovered this when I went to check out a book on someone’s list of favorite heroes from yesterday’s post–the book in question was a match book for me and I bought it.
I’d love to replace as many of my paper books as possible–for obvious reasons–so this feature is great for me. I also love the auto-rip feature for cd’s.
Peeping out from the lurking cubbyhole to confess to having 384 titles on the Kindle matchbook, including every Georgette Heyer, historical and mystery, and every Terry Pratchett. What a temptation!
My matchbook list is HUNDREDS. I’ve been with Amazon since it started, and I bought lots of books. LOTS. I will be slowly availing myself to titles!
I was a little cranky that I only had 11 Matchbook titles and of those maybe one or two that I would buy. I went almost all digital in 2010 or so, but before that I purchased a lot in paper. Hopefully as more publishers come online I’ll have more to choose from. I actually really like replacing my well-loved paperbacks with kindle versions and often do when books go on sale, like when there was that big sale on Sherry Thomas’s romances a while back.