It’s finally here! Click here to go download it (download will start automatically).

There’s nothing super special about it. With all the delays, since last year, I thought they were cramming in all of the annotations and such, but it looks like those are coming later. This app, which lets you buy and read kindle books on any Mac OS 10.5 machine does support device syncing, which is more important to me and worked fine this morning. So I can start readying a book on my phone and then pick up where I left off on my computer. Pretty handy. Bookmarks are displayed too. Not a bad little app, but you can see why they didn’t launch with a parade.

Let me know what you think about it or if you’re even going to give it a try.

All you do is go to one of the JCLC libraries for a free copy of Tom Sawyer and read it. Then go to the Read It Forward site and enter in the ID number from the book and rate the story. Then go find a park bench or bus stop or lunch room and leave the book there. Just walk away. From time to time you can then go back to the Read It Forward site to see who picked up your copy and what they thought of it and see where that book is headed next.

I already have a couple of copies of Tom Sawyer, but I may have to go get one of these so I can play too.

Amazon has always artificially deflated the price of Kindle books, to get people to buy Kindles and to read Kindle books on their phones. Until the iPad, publishers had few choices as to other major hubs of online distribution. But I’m sure Macmillan feels they have a place to run. And Amazon has called their bluff.

The average cost per title on the Kindle is $9.99 and the publisher has little say in this. While Apple says publishers will be able to “adjust their own pricing” on the new iPad and upcoming iBooks store. Prices there are expected to be in the $12-$15 range.

For those still reading this, I would like to restate one point that many don’t realize: Amazon is artificially deflating eBook prices. So, even though they sell the Kindle book for $9.99, they are still paying the publisher royalties on the $12-$15 price the publisher wants. So, at this point, the publisher is still able to keep the lights on and pay its people. Macmillan’s complaint is that Amazon is ‘purposefully devaluing the product’. The fear is Amazon will so ingrain the $9.99 price in consumers’ minds that they can then quit subsidizing the pricing, forcing publishers to sell their products at loss at $9.99. So this isn’t a price “set by competition and market conditions” it’s a price set by a huge retailer with huge leverage to control the market and competition. I’m not calling sides here, but this is a very important point.

All I know is that no one wins when retailers pull books off the shelves, for any reason. And should sound as a warning to ALL publishers that they need to open themselves up to sell directly to consumers, at a minimum to offset crazy deals like this one.

The Alabama Book Festival launched a new website last weekend. This year will be the 5th year for the state-wide literary festival. It scheduled to run 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. Saturday, April 17th, in the Old Alabama Town section of Montgomery. The full line up of speakers and authors is listed here and includes notables names Rick Bragg, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines and a gazillion more. The book festival also has a blog and Facebook page.

Are you going?

1. New 70% royalty rate. Amazon has been artificially keeping Kindle book prices at $9.99, to entice readers. Fancy math aside, this just means that Amazon has to pay royalties based on the cover price, not the lower $9.99 price. So the profit is non-existent there. This week Amazon announced, that starting in June, they will increase their payouts to 70%. This should balance out a lot of the math so that publishers can keep the doors open and Amazon can keep the prices low.

2. Kindle to support apps. Amazon is making the Kindle SDK available for download and will open up the devices as app platforms. So, if all things stay constant, third-party folks could make software that readers could install and run, in their Kindle. This is the same model used on the iPhone and other smart phones.

3. Amazon invites other printers back to the party. It’s no secret people can print their own books these days. The secret is finding a great way to sell and distribute those books. For years Amazon let people print their own books and then sell them on Amazon as each being their own publisher. In 2009, Amazon stopped playing nice and told writers that if you want to print your own writings to sell on our site, you have to use our printers… at our prices… everyone else, hit the road. This was a BIG deal and lots of people left the Amazon ecosystem. But now they have backed down and opened the doors to everyone again.

And all of this because the latest twist on the rumor of the hearsay of the tablet is that Apple has been talking to publishers to build enhanced editions of their eBooks to run on the pixi-dust powered Apple Tablet. I just want to know how “enhanced” an eBook has to be to warrant a $1,000 device, multi-functional or not? We’ll see.

What I do know is that consumers win again as competition forces big businesses to be more open and agile.

1. Keep event calendar online. Make it mobile-friendly. Better yet, use LibraryThing. Things have changed too much in the past 10 years to keep your book-signings and book-groups calendar held captive on the wall behind the register. Have it on your site, add it to LibraryThing local and please please please KEEP IT UP TO DATE.

2. Use Twitter correctly. Don’t give it to a kid. Do it yourself. Learn. It works. There is value there. You should have a Twitter presence before a Facebook page. Seriously. Yes, the part-time college kid can tweet, blog, text and email all with one hand… simultaneously. But they don’t have your working knowledge of your customers, the authors and what books you need to move. Folks on Twitter do want to follow their local bookstore and they want to talk to you and they want you to pass along calendar events on Twitter. Please please don’t just post links to your website or Facebook page. That’s missing the point and customers will not respond.

3. Have a working knowledge of digital options. Work deals with publishers. Offer bundles. If I have a eBook version, give me a reason to come to your store. Digital books are here to stay. Don’t be afraid. Work it into your product knowledge. If you sell books by local authors partner with them to run the text through free converters and bundle it with the printed product. Find small publishers who will work with you so you can offer bundle and discount deals to add value to the book you physically have in your store. At a minimum, you’ll begin to see what all the craziness is about and begin to start figuring out solutions for the indistry.

4. Know the value of a printed book. Don’t romanticize it for me. Know why I should buy that hunk of gorgeously bound paper at your store. With every purchase I make I weigh the pros and cons of print vs. digital. There are reasons I choose some categories as digital and others I will always buy the print version. You should know these, for yourself and your customers. There are reasons I will drive across town to buy a book. You should know them. Value is more than just price.

5. Organize your community. You should be in touch with the pulse of readers in your area, both online and off. Do you help start bookgroups? Of course you do. You have good bookstore. Ever hosted an “online event”, such as a book group or author chat? You should. It would make you a great bookstore. There is no reason your shop can’t become the center of the book universe for your town, both online and off.

Dear Milestone Friends,

This is a difficult email to send y’all.  Around six years ago, a dream turned into  a reality, and Milestone Books opened right here in Vestavia Hills.  An independent bookstore for independent thinkers.. a community of intelligent, highly educated, upper middle class people.  This community had asked for a bookstore for years!  And we brought one here.  We have become a Partner in Education with the Vestavia Hills School System, a proud member of the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, and a valued contributor to our local economy.  You have told us so often how happy you are that we are here, and we value your loyalty and patronage.  And we’ve been successful on many levels, even ending 2009 profitably after enduring a severe economic downturn in late 2007 and 2008.

But now my personal circumstances have changed and I’ve been offered a position with a progressive, growing company here in Birmingham.  This job will allow me to be a little more available for my 16 year old twins, who only remember Mommy working at the bookstore.  For those of you who may own a small business, you know that doing so requires a 24/7 commitment, and all the blood, sweat, and tears you imagine.  But not many people can love what they do every day….and that’s one thing I’ll miss.

So.  If you’re down the road of life a little further than me…here’s your chance.  The first five years of any business are the toughest.  Done.  I’m offering my loyal customers an opportunity to take this little bookstore to the next level.  If I could stay, trust me when I say I would.  But responsibilities as a parent often require a choice…and anyone with children will understand when I admit that right now, this option is the right one for us.

This window of opportunity is small.  So if you are interested acquiring the assets of Milestone Books, or the business itself, please let me know by the 17th.  If no one steps up by then, we will begin an Inventory Clearance beginning January 18th.
Thank you for your patronage, your encouragement, your prayers, but most of all…thank you for helping me live a dream, if only for a little while.

Linda Brown
Milestone Books, Inc.

This is such a shame. The Milestone Books crew love books and the people that buy them. I do hope someone will step into that space and keep things going. We’ll see.

But Hulu has all three seasons up now. So now you can watch from wherever you live, free.

Hope all of you are having a great start to 2010! It’s going to be an interesting year for publishing.

Publishers need to bundle their products. Period. It’s simple and can require very little extra cost (production wise) beyond putting together a printed book. There are too many services and tech solutions to name, so I’m going to put forth just a basic outline of a bundling option that a publisher might offer. Bundling accomplishes two things:

1. keeps the customer first; it allows the reader to access the content how they prefer
2. it increases the margin of every book sale, ever so slightly

So, I think publishers should really start to look at their product offerings and seeing if they can’t offer something like the following.

1. Print Book – been around for hundreds of years. Everyone knows the business model. Amazon seems to discount much of publishers’ backlists by 20%-30%. So if possible the publisher should discount their books on their own direct-to-consumer website by 25%.

2. Print Book + Digital Edition – This bundle would be made available on the publisher’s direct-to-consumer site. Basically, you’re selling the printed book and a “smaller file size” version of the pdf you sent to press. So no more work is created, in offering this. A consumer is then faced with the following decision: do I buy the print book for 25%-off and have it delivered to my doorstep in two weeks or do I simply pay cover price for the print book, which is what I would pay in the bookstore, which gets the book delivered in two weeks, but I can also immediately download the pdf and start reading now.

3. Enhanced Digital Edition – This is a $9.99 offer designed to compete with device-dependent eBooks. The publisher would basically be selling their “to press” pdf, but with color photos, a hyper-linked TOC, maybe added audio snippets, an extra “links on the web” section, video, etc. Anything you can add to a current pdf to add value to it, to justify the higher price for a pdf-only download. Your readers deserve it. You have the content. Get it off the edit-room floor and add value to the digital book.

4. Device-Dependent eBooks – these are your Kindle, Nook, Sony eReader, etc. files. They need to be out there and in the catalogs. Let the device makers do the marketing for you. I really think these will come and go, but the amount of infrastructure in place here really makes it a great sales channel for 2010. Most of these are in the $9.99 price range.

5. Mobile Apps – you have to start looking mobile. It doesn’t matter if you publish fiction or non-fiction. There are many ereading devices out there, but many people already have a device they love. And it fits right in their pocket, their phone. The mobile ereaders are getting better and better. So publishers better have a plan in place, if not already in the mobile space, by the end of 2010. Just check out some of the cool things that Stanza, Kobo,Aldiko and Vook are doing. They all rock. Publishers need to start seeing .epub, .mobi and .prc appearing somewhere in their workflow. The earlier in the publishing process those files appear, the better.

So that’s it. A quick rundown of how a small publisher might offer one book to the world. It’s by no means a definitive list of the possibilities.

But it does only get better. What happens if you have a “hot” book? Imagine if the book hits shelves in March, what would rabid fans or curious consumers pay for a pdf copy one month earlier? Would the same pdf be worth a higher price pre-pub and then a lower price after the book came out? Pretty cool topic for another post on some other day, I think. Not too mention what happens once you invite XML-tagging to the party.

If you have any digital product strategies that are working for you or that you have seen and are a fan of, please share!