06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here it is again, our weekly roundup! Enjoy!

E-Book General - News

• Bluefire Reader for Windows released
• Amazon is testing “Kindle Unlimited,” an ebook subscription service for $9.99/month
• July AUTHOR EARNINGS report brings focus on DRM

05:56 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

As expected, the third Author Earnings report is out.

http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-...rnings-report/
Among the expected focus on publishing path data, this time they looked at the prevalence and effect of DRM on Kindle ebooks:

DRM – A Bad Idea

In addition to our standard pie charts on sales and earnings, we always like to bring something new and interesting to each report. Last time, we looked at rates of churn on the bestseller lists. We have also previously looked at the vast income difference between tenured and debuting authors. This time, we pulled data for DRM, and what we found was very interesting.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the encryption lock applied to electronic entertainment. The film, music, video game, and book industries all employ DRM. With ebooks, DRM poses little challenge to pirates, who can crack these locks with a few clicks. Meanwhile, for the paying customer, DRM makes it difficult to move ebooks between devices and traps readers into a single retail channel.

DRM is entirely optional on Amazon. Major publishers and self-published authors can opt out of DRM. We pulled DRM info on the 120,000 ebooks currently ranked on Amazon to see how often it was applied and if DRM had any effect on sales.

It wasn’t surprising to see that most Big 5 books employ DRM, but we were shocked to see that it is practically 100% of them. Indies, on the other hand, locked down roughly 50% of their titles. Since there isn’t any variation in the Big 5 books, we are forced to look at the self-published titles for any effect on sales, and indeed there is one. The 50% of non-DRM ebooks account for 64% of total unit sales.

Indie titles without DRM sell twice as many copies each, on average, as those with DRM.

At almost every price point, we see the thousands of titles without DRM significantly out-earning the thousands of titles with DRM. In fact, at the only two price points that appear to buck the general trend and which show DRM titles outselling non-DRM ones, we found that the reversal was due to 3 outlier DRM titles published by only two authors.

What our data strongly suggests is that DRM harms ebook sales at any price point. And it backs up a report from Tor, one of the few major publishers that gave up DRM two years ago. It also reinforces this report on DRM’s effect on music sales. Interestingly, one of the Big 5 publishers urged authors to push back on Tor’s decision to get rid of DRM.

For those with short memories, this two year old column discusses the "pushback" campaign referenced in the extract:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...wn-on-drm.html

There is way, way more at the source, highlighting how BPH ebooks constitute only 16% of Kindle's top 120K sellers, and how it turns out indie publishing works fine for less popular genres like litfic and non-fiction.

Reach for the muchies; plenty of fireworks incoming in the next few days.

03:40 PM by Top100EbooksRank in E-Book General | News

http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/amazon-...for-9-99month/

Amazon is testing an ebook and audiobook subscription service called “Kindle Unlimited” that would cost $9.99 a month. According to pages that were pulled down, it will offer access to over 600,000 titles.

Test pages were pulled down Wednesday after some users on the Kindle Boards noticed them, but they are still available through Google Cache.

Image of the Google cache
https://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/...0-17-30-am.png

http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2...ng?w=708&h=282

06:55 AM by Micah in E-Book General | News

For those that read EPUB on the desktop, there is a new option in town Bluefire Reader for Windows PC's

Syncs location in book across devices, export annotations, user settings for font face, colors, themes, margins and more.

Supports PDF and EPUB2 as well as Adobe DRM. Officially supports Win7 and above (though works on Vista in our tests)

App can be downloaded free here: http://www.bluefirereader.com/windows-app.html

Note that it does not contain UI for transferring files to tethered ereader devices.

Happy Reading,
Micah

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Once again, our weekly roundup of highlights from the past seven days of MobileRead:

E-Book General - News

• Smashwords Releases 2014 Indie E-book Sales Survey
• If you're flying to or from the UK, make sure your reader is charged!
• Amazon makes a direct offer to Hachette authors: 100% ebook royalties
• Nano-pixel discovery, screens of the future?

06:58 AM by HarryT in E-Book General | News

As from today, new security rules have been put in place at UK airports which will involve random checks on electronic devices in hand luggage. If your device won't turn on when you're asked to do so, it doesn't go on the flight. So make sure your reader, phone, or laptop is charged!

More details on the BBC News web site at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28223150

06:56 AM by owly in E-Book General | News

Heard about this on Swedish Radios Science news,

"A new discovery [at Oxford University]will make it possible to create pixels just a few hundred nanometres across that could pave the way for extremely high-resolution and low-energy thin, flexible displays for applications such as 'smart' glasses, synthetic retinas, and foldable screens."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0709140115.htm

06:49 AM by AnemicOak in E-Book General | News

Readers in the market for indie or self-published e-books favor longer works, priced between $2.99 and $3.99, and are attracted by free e-book promotions, according to data from the third annual 2014 Smashwords Survey. The annual survey is based on data from $25 million in sales generated by the indie/self-publishing e-book vendor.

While average lower e-book pricing continues to drive higher author earnings, Coker said this does not mean that "ultra low prices" are necessary. He noted that the "sweet spot" appears to be between $2.99 and $3.99 for bestselling titles. He emphasized that incremental increases in a title's sales ranking are "usually matched by an exponential increase in sales." He also said that, according to the data, indie e-books selling for $2.99/$3.99 earn as much for their authors as conventionally published e-books selling for $7.99 or more, but generate "triple the readership."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...es-survey.html

The original Smashwords blog post can be found here...
http://blog.smashwords.com/2014/07/2...veals-new.html

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