BilmBlog500

So once upon a time, and not that long ago really, I could look at my Nielsen Bookscan numbers and know that I was really and truly getting my weekly report card. Now, it's hard to be sure if I'm even getting an incomplete. And it's all because of those darned e-books. With Tanya Huff's permission, let us look at her excellent series of "Valor" military sf novels. Two years ago when Valor's Trial came out in hardcover, I could very easily look at those numbers and look at the numbers for the hardcover of The Heart of Valor from the year before, and I could see that it was good. Over the first few weeks, hardcover sales of the 2008 release were up something like 40% from the year-before book. And now I'm looking at the release of The Truth of Valor, and that's up by 25% from what The Heart of Valor did in 2007, but it's down 15% from what Valor's Trial did in its first few weeks in 2008. Down 15%!! Panic time? Well, no... Let's ...

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin . We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November. He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has ac...

So the Father's Day advertising war for various e-book devices, including the Kindle, Nook and iPad, was followed by the after-Father's Day price war. B&N came out with a bare-bones Nook that sells for $149 but has only Wi-Fi access, i.e., no 3G or no downloading a book anywhere with a cell phone signal. The fully-equipped Nook was also given a price cut. Amazon immediately responded by dropping the price of the Kindle to $189. Borders was already starting to sell some e-book readers, including first shipments in time for Father's Day, for $149. They're now offering a $20 gift card with that, and double Borders R Reward bucks. Since you get $5 for $150, then buy this and a truffle ball and your net price for the Kobo eReader becomes $120. One article I read says that B&N is now making more Nooks than Amazon is Kindles, so they seem to have some quiet success leveraging their store presence to sell the e-reading device. And Apple has sold over 3 million iP...

Here's an interesting post from Pyr SF editor Lou Anders comparing some of the iPad e-reading apps. The Kindle came out in December 2007 and it was a while before I started to see them. The iPad clearly seems to be ahead in month-to-month sales comparisons if my own experiences are any indication. Multiple people at Balticon had. My client Peter V. Brett got one the day before we headed down to the convention and was telling multiple people over the weekend that he never wanted to be without and would probably never again take a laptop around with him ever ever again. On the train ride back to NYC yesterday, somebody else in our car already had an iPad. This is a lot of adaptations, awfully quick. I've been kind of holding out on principle, that if they want to sell me one, I should be able to go into a store and buy one. But the more I see them around, the more I'm not so sure I can hold out. Especially seeing the iPad in the very thin case which Peter purchased ...

So, the iPad! While I type in one window, I'm watching the keynote speech on the Apple web site. Though I used the Kindle for over a year, I'm not the hugest fan of it. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do before, and I loved it for that. But it didn't allow me to do many of them very well. I could read a manuscript without carrying it around but not in cold weather and take notes on the same device but not easily and the relay to the author was cumbersome. I could read the Washington Post every day without schlepping into Manhattan to buy a hard copy, but the reading experience wasn't very good. I liked the Sony Reader less, because the note-taking interface was cumbersome and the glare on the screen distracting to me. And the Nook was surprisingly bad to me for how much learning curve should have been curved. I've never been a big laptop fan. They're portable, but not fun. When I live-blogged the Oscars last year, I had to sit at a desk inste...

So Borders has announced its e-book strategy , and Random House is making a land grab . The Borders announcement fascinates me on several levels. If my distant memory serves, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, Borders contemplated opening Canadian stores in partership with Heather Reisman, now the CEO of their e-book partner and major Canadian book retailer Indigo. This did not come to pass because of the difficulty in finding a way to structure the deal that would pass muster with Canadian content regulations for book retailers. Or at least that's my distant memory, which may or may not be correct. And it was after this did not come to pass that Heather started to put together the Indigo retail empire in Canada. Borders is late to the e-book game. As they were late to the internet. Late to having a modern inventory system and in-store computer system. Late and still not arrived to having a rapid supply chain. But unlike the internet business, being late here mi...

I played around some with a demonstration model of the Nook at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on Thursday and was not impressed. E-Ink is E-Ink, so the screen look like all the others. But if the initial Kindle had a knock that it was too easy to turn the pages accidentally, I found it took too much effort to turn the pages on the Nook. And when I did turn the pages, the refresh rate was very slow, a good two to three seconds. B&N did acknowledge this problem, and they say it will be fixed with a software update in the near future. But isn't that the kind of thing you should work on before you release the product? Anyone think they decided to rush out something for the holidays? And then there's that LED screen at the bottom that's used for navigating. It's a nice idea, on one level, because one knock certainly on the first generation Kindle was the awkwardness of the little sliding side thingie to navigate around. But I think if they were doing the seco...