Hans Across The Interwebs

Statistics from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) show that eBook sales are on the rise.

It looks like after a dip in ‘05, sales rose sharply in ‘06. That could give us some insight into Amazon’s problems with the Kindle eBook Reader, which hasn’t been available due to underproduction. Looking at these numbers that seems reasonable. When preparing the introduction of the Kindle, Amazon was working with sales numbers from 2006. Even if they’d had info on the first quarter of ‘07, that might have been a freak spike.

What it doesn’t explain is why Amazon is being so mysterious about Kindle sales. No numbers have been posted, so no one is really sure wether ’sold out’ means they estimated produced very few Kindles or sales were really high. As Mike Elgan from Computerworld Puts it:

Is Amazon really working hard to ramp up production? Or is the company artificially creating a perception of high demand by playing games with production? If not, why hasn’t it been able to fix the problem in four months? And since Amazon can’t keep up with demand, why does it devote the very top center of the Amazon.com home page — the most valuable real estate on the entire site — to the creation of MORE demand?

There are some issues with the IDPF numbers. For one, I’m not sure I completely agree with their trend line; looks to me like sales might be flatlining at the end there….I hope I’m wrong. There are also some caveats with what they mean, as they’re ‘whole sale’ numbers. That may mean retailers have overbought or underbought. We’ll see.

One thing though: I’ve never seen anyone use an ebook reader. Not on the train, not in a bar, not anywhere. What about you?

I think the jury’s pretty much agreed on how stupid this thing looks. My favourite twitter comment: “Hey Bezos, 1987 called and they want their style back”. (I love Seinfeld)

But of course it doesn’t quite stop there. The books and content are distributed under DRM. You have to pay $2 per rss feed (!) and there’s more not to like about the Kindle. Good business plan, bad consumer proposition. I’m sure however that Bezos has had to do some sucking up to publishing companies on the DRM front, them being all ‘old media’ and stuff. Daring Fireball has a write up.

★ DUM: “What it comes down to is that when you purchase books in Kindle’s e-book format, they’re wrapped in DRM and are in a format that no other software can read. There are no provisions for sharing books even with other Kindle owners, let alone with everyone.”

via Daring Fireball

What always surprises me in the DRM discussions is that no one ever hates Audible for putting DRM on their files. I guess they’re just a likeable company?

Anyone? I’d love to know why this is.