AllThingsD » best seller

NYT to Give E-Books Their Own Best-Seller Lists

Voices — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:29:06 +0000

In another sign of the integration of digital books into the mainstream, the New York Times announced it would begin publishing e-book best-seller lists in fiction and nonfiction beginning early next year. The sales data will be collected weekly from a variety of sources, including publishers, chain bookstores, independent booksellers and online retailers.

Update: Zappos's Tony Hsieh on His Magical Happiness Bus Tour and Hugging It Out With BoomTown

Kara Swisher — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:30:28 +0000

Also, while in Vancouver, BoomTown tried to avoid the happiness-fueled stalking by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online retailer Zappos.

To no avail.

I interviewed Hsieh (as well as Groupon’s Andrew Mason) onstage at the Grow2010 conference. Hsieh’s topic was his new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.”

It came out in June and is all over the bestseller lists, and Hsieh is now headed on a nationwide bus tour to promote it.

You can see my video interview with him below, in which he discusses his fervent intent to hug me. Also other stuff.

Amazon (AMZN) certainly gave a bear hug to the company, buying Zappos last summer in a deal valued at about $850 million.

It was a good idea, since Zappos is well known for its culture of intense happiness, both in its high level of customer service and the enthusiasm of employees of the company, which started as a Web shoe retailer but has been expanding its offerings.

I actually went to Zappos’s Las Vegas HQ and terrorized its very friendly “Mayor” Jerry Tidmore, and also talked to Hsieh then. Both videos are also below.

Here is the update with Hsieh:

[ See post to watch video ]

Questions for Tony of Zappos and Andrew of Groupon? Step Right Up!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:15:11 +0000

Later today, BoomTown will be onstage at Dealmaker Media’s Grow2010 conference in Vancouver, Canada, to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO and co-founder of Zappos, and Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon.

Hsieh has just written a book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” which is topping the best-seller lists.

It essentially chronicles how he built the customer-service-focused online retailer, which was sold for $850 million to Amazon (AMZN) last year.

Mason is also a bit of a phenom, having turned the social local buying service into a start-up juggernaut, garnering massive funding and a valuation of above $1 billion.

Yesterday, Groupon had a big day, offering its first national social discount at the Gap (GPS), which blew off the doors at the service.

I will ask both the usual questions, but feel free to suggest any for me to use.

Note to Tony: No trying to hug me or getting me to do a group cheer.

Note to Andrew: No, I do not want a 50-percent-off spa treatment today.

Of course, I will post video updates with both innovative–and unusually likable–entrepreneurs later, but here are the interviews I did with each earlier this year to enjoy until then:

Like Your Kindle Books Cheap? Don't Get Too Used to It.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:00:58 +0000

Are you one of those Kindle owners who stuffs your device with cheap e-books? Enjoy it now, say analysts at Bernstein Research. Because they’re not going to stay cheap, or at least, not quite as cheap, forever.

One of the chief selling points of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle is that once you’ve paid $359 or more for the e-book reader, you can start recouping your investment by buying digital books for much less than it costs to buy their physical counterparts. And the vast majority of Kindle downloads are indeed priced at $9.99 or less (and a third of them are freebies):

Digital books should be higher-margin products than physical ones since the cost to produce and distribute them is so much lower. And they will generate higher margins eventually. But right now, Amazon is subsidizing the cost of those $9.99 books, which means they’re just barely profitable.

Bernstein analysts Claudio Aspesi and Jeffrey Lindsay estimate that Jeff Bezos and company record an operating profit of 61 cents on each $9.99 e-book they sell. But a $24.95 hardcover generates $4.25 in operating profit. That’s a 7 to 1 ratio, and that can’t continue, indefinitely.

The good news: Aspesi and Lindsay argue that Bezos doesn’t have to raise his prices by that much to make his e-books much more profitable. Bumping up best-seller prices from $9.99 to $12.50 would boost his profits from 6 to 20 percent per book, they estimate. The flip side: Costs for the devices themselves will certainly go down.

Shortcovers, Iceberg Put Latest e-Books On Your Cellphone

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:04:07 +0000

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been a solid success. The device can access a catalog of over 200,000 digital books, including most current best sellers, according to Amazon (AMZN). Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.

[ See post to watch video ]

In recent months, e-book offerings have especially exploded on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which, like the Kindle, have excellent screens and an easy and well-organized system for directly downloading content. Apple’s App Store, which carries everything from games to business software, has hundreds of e-book offerings (in addition to the audio books available through the iTunes store).

Some of these e-book apps, or programs, constitute just a single book, while others are digital-reading portals that can access anywhere from a handful of e-book titles, like the collected works of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes tales, to many thousands of titles.

Two of the most popular e-book apps for the iPhone and the Touch are Stanza and eReader. They are pretty basic and straightforward, with little in the way of fancy formatting. But they get the job done, allowing you to download tens of thousands of titles from a variety of sources.

But, as with past cellphone or PDA e-book systems, most of those on the iPhone and Touch focus primarily on older, classic, or out-of-copyright titles, rather than on the sort of current, in-demand titles available on the Kindle. Some fresher titles are available, but the selection of popular books is relatively thin.

Now, two companies are launching new e-book apps that aim to bring current and popular titles from major publishers to the iPhone and Touch. And they add interesting features, including fancy formatting and community tools. I’ve been testing both.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

I found that reading books from these two services was OK, but not nearly as satisfying as reading them on a dedicated, large-screen device like the Kindle, which also offers free excerpts. But it was more convenient. I was able to knock off a chapter or a few pages while commuting or waiting in line. The apps use the iPhone’s touch features to allow you to navigate.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,” current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and blog posts and magazine articles.

Iceberg’s claim to fame is its handsome appearance. It has just 14 titles available now, including the “Eragon” fantasy trilogy, and each must be downloaded as a separate app, which risks cluttering your iPhone with icons. The company is promising thousands of titles eventually, and has signed deals with major publishers. Prices hover around $10 or $11, but range to $27.

Books by Iceberg try to preserve the formatting and pagination of the printed title, and stress easy skimming to any page, searching and annotating. Pages are tinted and flip with a visual effect that apes a physical page-turn.

But there are missing features in both. Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.

The iPhone isn’t primarily an e-book reader, and these new apps still can’t match Kindle’s full catalog. But they add yet another dimension to a very versatile gadget.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.