Waterstones sign Kindle deal with Amazon | e-books on the High Street

James Daunt, the MD of Waterstones, has announced a deal to sell the Kindle through the chain of bookshops.

Waterstones is the only big player left in books on the British High Street. The immediate reaction has been one of shock and disbelief. Many seem to think that the arrangement is great for Amazon, terrible for Waterstones.

James Daunt, Managing Director of Waterstones, said: "At Waterstones, we are committed to improving our bookshops quite radically to offer the best possible book buying experience. It is a truly exciting prospect to harness also the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers.

"The best digital readers, the Kindle family, will be married to the singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop. With the combination of our talents we can offer the exceptional customer proposition to which we both aspire."

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO, said: "Waterstones is the premier high street bookseller and is passionate about books and readers - a dedication that we share deeply. We could never hope for a better partner to bring together digital reading and the physical bookstore."

The pessimistic take is that Daunt appears to be inviting book buyers to browse his bookshops, then buy what they like the look of on their Kindle. This may well be why the chain is investing heavily in coffee shops. People will want to buy a coffee while they are at Waterstones. They may not be buying books.

The really surprising thing about the deal is that Daunt has made it clear in the past that he isn't an Amazon fan. The Telegraph reported comments in December in which he likened the Internet behemoth to Old Nick himself.

Most of Twitter seems to have decided that this is a terrible one. But perhaps it is inevitable. Most ardent readers will embrace the Kindle in the same ways as people embraced paperbacks: as an inexpensive, convenient medium to read books. The challenge for the likes of Waterstones but perhaps even more so for the publishers, is to stay relevant in this new arena.

Would you pay for a book that Pat Kane and Terry Jones haven't written yet?

A couple of weeks or so ago I noticed a strange post on Pat Kane's Facebook page. Kane is a musician, writer, journalist, consultant and activist. Despite being utterly in the thrall of the SNP he's often worth listening to on media matters, which is why I befriended him on FB.
But the post in question really made me wonder.
Just to fill you in, Kane had a successful recording career with his band Hue and Cry. He's often in the public eye as a media and cultural critic and still plays live. He happens to live not so far away from me in Glasgow's West End and he is very interested and involved in social media.
Which is all fine and interesting. And my point, I guess, is that he's not starving in a garret somewhere.
Pat's latest project, some might say wheeze - and he 'launched' it in the traditional old fashioned papery Guardian - was to announce that he intends to write a book, Radical Animal, which would have an online social network element, and that he was looking for $10,000 (or £6K approx) to give him the time to write the MS.
Instead of getting a publisher to pay him an advance, he is offering the general public the chance to stump up for him instead. So if you are interested in reading Pat's as yet unwritten book, you could sponsor him to write it.
How many people out there, I asked myself, are so eager to hear Pat Kane's thoughts on a subject, any subject: eager enough to pay in advance for a man who tweets and appears regularly on traditional media outlets effectively for free?
Then the other day I saw a Tweet with a link to unbound.co.uk. This is another example of the net being used to democratise the book production process. This from their website: "What's different is that instead of waiting for them to publish their work, Unbound allows you to listen to their ideas for what they'd like to write before they even start. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If we hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing..."
So Kane's pay up front idea is wider than just him (and I am sure there are other examples probably in the US: links welcome).
There is clearly something attractive about democratising publishing. Its appealing to think that we'll get the books we want if we remove these elitist publishers with their mad ideas about thrillers selling hundreds of thousands of copies and no one being interested in the poignant memoir of a 26-year-old former drama student who once did drugs at a party.
I don't think it's true, of course. Publishers bring more to the party than just a fancy cover and shelf space in Tesco, as important as those two elements are. But I can see why some people might get excited over the idea.
What puzzles me is how anyone thinks this pay-up-front model is at all viable. We live in a book economy in which publishers struggle to sell new paperbacks at half price through the megaonline marketplace of Amazon. Waterstones has just been sold to a Russian billionaire. Borders is gone. One key factor in their demise is over supply: too many books, depressed prices, consumers who want to spend less and less.
Then there is self-publishing. You can put your MS straight out into the marketplace on Kindle etc without a publisher getting involved. You reap the rewards yourself. But you don't get paid up front and the per unit price is necessarily low.
My question is: just who thinks there are enough readers out there with enough time and money to speculate on books - fiction, non fiction - which haven't been written yet?
A glance at the Unbound website tells me that each of their current offerings has a long way to go before they get funded. In fact, the best of them - a short story collection by Python legend Terry Jones - is 98 per cent short of its target, albeit with 48 days to go.
I wish Pat Kane good luck, I'll sit and watch the result with interest. Similarly with Unbound. But I don't see either of these schemes coming off. Not in any meaningful, sustainable way.
What do you think?

Amazon's Kindle store in Germany dominated by English language books

Globalisation has been with us for quite some time. A few hundred years. Similarly, English won the war to become the lingua franca some time ago. It's undoubtedly the default setting for global business and while there are exceptions - and the rise of China might well alter things eventually - its status as number one looks safe.

Even so, this report in the Bookseller's Futurebook blog really surprised me. When it comes to books, Europe has a rich culture, and people read books in the vernacular. Whether a novel is a romance, a thriller or considered literary, it is closely related to the spoken word. Just as I think and dream in English I find it hard to imagine ever reading a novel in another language.

But then I am particularly inept when it comes to languages. I have a few words of German and French but not enough to hold a conversation in either language. In this respect I think I am probably like most Brits and perhaps most Americans too. English is it: why bother with anything else?

In Europe, because of the dominance of English, people don't think the same way about their own language. The French love French. The Germans love German. But they speak English too, in large numbers. We were recently in Spain and were impressed by just how many locals were able to speak a little English - enough to do business in anyway.

According to Futurebook however, this trend toward English may well end up with books written in German being squeezed out as reading in English becomes the norm.

What an extraordinary idea. An entire language, one as old and as venerable as German, seeing its literary traditions dying out due to the economic power of Amazon and its pesky Kindle machine?

But why not? Technology is bringing the world together, fast. If everyone is on Facebook, why should we be speaking different languages? Wouldn't that get in the way of poking and messaging each other? In Ridley Scott's futuristic Blade Runner (pictured above), Harrison Ford's character speaks a hybrid language of English, Japanese and Chinese.

Of course, English is in pole position at the moment. But with the rise of China and its billions of people, who could say that the future language of the world might not be an English-Mandarin mix? Language is so fluid, and the world so increasingly small, it would be remarkable if this didn't happen.

What not to do when you have a bad review...

One upshot of the new digital age of self publishing on Kindle etc is the accompanying blog review posts.

The internet has turned the whole world into one big schoolyard, and if you don't believe me check out this link to Big Al's books and pals blog.

The blog is a review of a self published Kindle book by an English born, American based writer-atist called Jacqueline Howett. No, I've never heard of her either. But if Ms Howett was planning a long, successful career as a digital author she may be about to be disappointed.

The review is slight. The book in question is some sort of suspense romance involving a girl marrying the captain of a merchant ship. What the reviewer is upset about the most is the sloppy presentation of the book: it is full of grammatical errors and typos. What follows is an increasingly hostile exchange between the reviewer, the author and a host of other people who follow the blog. Ms Howett's comments are now getting pinged round the world via the interweb, facebook and twitter.

In part this seems to prove the point that self publishing isn't for everyone. It also suggests that if you are self publishing then you should employ some sort of editor or seek professional advice before you hit the send button. Publishing a  novel can be hard in the traditional world, it's even tougher on the digi-sphere. Careers that might have lasted a few years might now only take seconds to unwind.

Andy Warhol's 'famous for fifteen minutes' is looking like an awful long time.

The digital update

A friend of ours, Beatrice Colin, has just published her second novel on Kindle. The book has been out of print for a while and she is taking advantage of the revolution in book buying to take it onto a digital platform herself, without a publisher slicing off a large amount of takings. You can see the title by clicking here.

Beatrice writes literary fiction - not vampire romances or bloodsoaked thrillers - so it will be interesting to see how she does. She's certainly done the right thing by getting her partner, Paul Harkin of Swordfish Photography, to come up with a cover image (which I hope he doesn't mind my reproducing here). It looks lovely, most professional.

Self publishing | Kindle | Can you make money out of ebooks?

How to make a million out of ebooks

I have to credit Ben Goldacre for alerting me to this one. It's a story about a young woman who has built up such a following for her books on Kindle that she is well on the way to becoming a millionaire - and yet she has never been published by a traditional publisher.

Check it out here.

I've been pretty well anti-Kindle from the start. The idea of giving up my beautifully made hardbacks and paperbacks for a strange, corporate looking eReader (that will no doubt be obsolete in a couple of years) has been anathema to me. What the hell am I going to put on my bookshelves if I have an eReader? And do I really want to take a device worth £150 to the beach?

But the example of Amanda Hocking has got me thinking. Her books are there to download now. She apparently sold over 100,000 copies last month. So she's making money, she has a following - built up in no small part by her twittering, blogging and facebooking - she is a one girl industry. Publishers really ought to wake up to this.

Not just publishers, writers too. Over the last few years we've seen writers get smaller advances. And yet sales haven't really declined. Some costs have gone up. But the writers are getting squeezed. Kindle offers authors 70% of the take. Lower prices, but there is the potential of higher volume.

(Beatrice Colin has discussed this on her blog too. You'll also want to check out this blog here, written by a Chicago based thriller ebook author called Joe Konrath)

It's a big dilemma though. What would life without publishers be? It might be harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. Publishers are great filters and a good editor is worth their weight in gold. But in many cases, you have to say, you wonder what the publisher does bring to the party. Do they really contribute so much for the author to be stuck with a mere 10 per cent royalty?

So I've just downloaded my first ebook, a Hocking called Switched (Trylle trilogy, book 1). Apparently it's about trolls but the Amazon reviewers are in love with it. Oh yes, and it cost me a mere £0.49 (including VAT, apparently ebooks, unlike paper ones, are not exempt). I got charged more than that the other day for a Mars Bar.

I'll let you know if it is any good when I finish reading...