Kindle’s Looking better.

I wrote last year about some of my frustrations with Kindle for the UK (the hardware) and Kindle Publishing services and only thought it fair to them to share my views on their most recent product and service update.

First, the hardware. I’m very encouraged by the pricing and the features of the ‘All-New Kindle’. At £109, in the UK, it’s excellent value and the list of features is very comprehensive, especially the claimed battery life. I also like the hi-contrast screen and the book capacity – at 3500 books, that’s more than I’m ever going to read in a lifetime. The only downside is the b/w only screen which, at only 6″, is possibly a bit small for many.

Onto the publishing, where it used to be virtually impossible for non-US based authors/publishers to get their books listed, Kindle’s DTP (Digital Text Platform) is a big step forward and now, in theory at least, non-US authors and publishers can get their work published. The royalty situation remains complex and unclear though and is something Kindle really need to sort out if they are going to truly dominate this market place.

Authors and publishers want simple and consistent application of royalty payments and not for retailers (nor etailers) to dictate what royalties are due under what circumstances. Here’s a synopsis of how it currently works:

As a publisher/Author, you can select a 35% or 70% royalty from your ebook list price. The 70% only applies for book prices between $2.99 and $9.99 and ebook prices must be at least 20% lower than the same paper/hardback. Furthermore, the 70% royalty only applies to sales to US based customers. Royalties on sales to other territories are fixed at 35%. From there it gets messy. If Amazon find that the same ebook is being sold elsewhere at a lower price than on Amazon then they can reduce the price to match. In this case, any royalty will be reduced to a percentage of the Amazon dictated selling price, not the RRP set by the publisher.

Compare this with Apple’s iBookstore and iTunes where publisher retains 60% of price set by publisher. Period.

As a consumer, I really appreciate what Amazon are doing to keep ebook prices favourable for us. However, unless they make the process simple and attractive enough for publishers, they will miss out on maximising the number of books published as publishers and authors simply will not get sufficient return on their investment.