I received an email from Amazon’s Customer Service Department yesterday in which they informed me that an ebook I had purchased some time ago, and which had a number of typos and other errors in it  had been updated and those faults repaired.

Why Tell Me?

To begin with I couldn’t work out what the point of the email was, as I had no recollection of the ebook in question (the problem of remembering the titles of ebooks yet again), but on the second reading of it, I grasped what it was they were telling me. I know, I can be slow on the uptake at times, and can only plead my advanced age (almost 70) as an excuse.

What I was being offered was the chance to download the updated and corrected ebook for free to ensure that I had the best possible version of the ebook in question in my ebook library.

They gave me very full and concise instructions on the several ways in which I could do this update:-

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In my meanderings around the Net I came across an intriguing analysis of the Amazon/Indie Book seller problem written by the owner (manager?) of a bricks and mortar book store.

He feels that Amazon is not in fact to be compared to a physical book store, but to the older model of catalogue sellers… And that all Amazon have brought to the party is the use of the internet rather than printed catalogues.

He feels strongly that physical stores such as his offer so much added value to book buying that they deserve to survive in the market place, whereas Amazon actually offer almost nothing for a real book lover.

His main argument:

He sort of sums up his thesis in the following way:-

My point is that the booksellers who work constantly to maintain the bookstore and equally hard to answer your questions are the reason we all shop at bookstores — the books themselves are available from just about anywhere these days, including Wal-Mart and the supermarket.

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Yesterday I wrote a post about the rumours that Amazon were about to launch a Kindle with a splendid patented front lighting system, and said how good that would be.  Blow me, if Barnes and Noble haven’t beaten Amazon to the draw here and have just announced the launch of their own front lit version of their Simple Touch Nook ereader, splendidly and memorably named (hang on while I go and check that name again….)  The Simple Touch Nook with GlowLight (now that is a name that flows,isn’t it?).

As you will see when you watch the video they have made (see below) extolling the virtues of this ereader, it is actually rather good, with very little Hot Spot Syndrome trouble, merely a slightly brighter wash of light at the top of the screen, reasonably enough, as that is where the LED’s are placed.

The main specs of this version of their latest ereader are almost the same as the standard Simple Touch Nook, except it is about 1 ounce lighter, which  is a rather  good achievement I feel.  By the way, they claim that you can go about 1 month between battery charges if you keep the WiFi turned off, try that with a Tablet!

As I commented in my post about the rumour of the front lit Kindle, Sony had a similar system on one of their earlier ereaders, (about 3 years ago),  which worked very well by and large.  The main difference being that the Sony front lights were either on,or off, no graduation possible.  Unlike this system from B &  N,which has a virtual slider on the screen that allows you to adjust the brightness of the lights from zero,to full blast.

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As you may know, the American Department of Justice (DOJ) has been considering taking legal action against the big 6 of the publishing world for some time for what they consider to be illegal collusion to fix the retail price of ebooks, the so called Agency Model.

The way that paper books are sold to book sellers is based on a system in which publishers set a wholesale price, normally about half the cover price, and then the retailer can decide how much they actually sell the book for.  In the early days of ebooks, this system was also used for ebooks.   But this changed about the time the iPad came along, at which point at the urging of Steve Jobs of Apple, the main publishers and Apple adopted what has become known as the Agency Model

What is the Agency Model?

The Agency Model is one in which the publishers sell the ebook to a retailer and set the retail price of the ebook, and base this on about a 30% mark up for the retailer.  The point at contention is that the publishers insist that the retailer sells the ebook at the price they (the publishers) set.  This is the heart of the legal case against them, as this is price fixing between producers of a commodity, and as such is illegal as it is seen as removing any sort of competition between publishers.

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Devin Goldewey of TechCrunch has written a post in which he describes a prototype of a Kindle with some form of front light built into it, which he says, is rather beautiful.

Currently if we own a standard monochrome e-ink screened ereader, we need to have some form of external lighting should we wish to read it in anything other than a reasonable lighting level, exactly as with an old fashioned paper book. This normally means having some form of clip on light attached to the ereader. These mostly work reasonably well, but all of them suffer from the dreaded Hot Spot Syndrome, which can be intensely irritating, as it frequently entails moving either one’s head, or the ereader when we use such a light to move the Hot Spot away from the section of the page we want to read.

Not this.... But you get the idea

It would seem that this new idea from Amazon will do away with this problem…..   We hope!

Apparently Amazon bought up a Finnish company called Oy Modilis who specialise in inventing and developing all manner of lighting systems for devices such as ereaders and have now built themselves a prototype Kindle with one of their lighting systems in (on?) it.

Just a cardboard box for now……

Currently it is apparently no more than a simple cardboard mock up Kindle, with this lighting system installed.

A film over the screen:

It is a sort of film that is placed over the actual screen of the Kindle, and using edge lighting, spreads the illumination from some LEDs evenly across the screen of the ereader, giving a pleasing blue/white light he reports.

Intensity fully controllable:

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Rich Adin, in his always intriguing and diverse blog – An American editor – has posted an interesting article about the infamous Agency Pricing Agreement for selling ebooks.

This structure, which is currently the subject of legal inspection in the USA, Europe and the UK has caused a real stir over the last year, as it is seen as a form of price fixing, aimed chiefly at preventing Amazon from taking over the entire world of ebooks, and in passing, to give Apple a fighting chance to break into the market as a result of the launch of the iPad.

From the point of view of the consumer, it has had the effect of frequently pushing the price of ebooks up to levels higher than many paper books, which, not surprisingly has caused a lot of anger and resentment.

In this post, Rich gives a rather more nuanced view of this system, and it is because of this broader view of it all that I felt it might be of interest to you to read – assuming you have not already seen it on his blog, of course.

So, the word is with Rich now….  Read on.

eBooks: Is Agency Pricing Good or Bad?

Recently, there has been a lot of focus on the “conspiracy” between 5 major publishers and Apple regarding agency pricing and whether these 6 entities have violated antitrust law. The focus is not on whether agency pricing is good or bad, but whether the parties colluded. That question I’ll leave for the US Department of Justice.

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