@sivavaid to @wroush: How do you know how many sales are lost? Amazon won’t say. Do you think publishers are dumb? Negotiations with Amazon are brutal.
@wroush to @sivavaid: But Amazon *does* say: When a book is available on Kindle, 35% of buyers choose that format. I think publishers are scared, not dumb
@sivavaid to @wroush: stat says nothing about mkt penetration of Kindle. Secret because inconveniently small. BTW, not 35% of every book. Sly.
@sivavaid to @wroush: publishers not scared of Kindle. Pubs can’t get a good deal from Amazon. Scared NOT to bow to Amazon strong-arm tactics. Talk 2 them
At that point, I began to sense that neither of us was having much luck winning the other around to his position. We wound down with:
@wroush to @sivavaid: Clearly we won’t agree on this. I will expect to see a chapter in your book on the Amazonization of everything.
@sivavaid to @wroush: I guarantee no one will ever write a book exposing Amazon’s machinations!
Now, I’m willing to admit that my original tweet was glib. My use of “Fail,” in particular, implied more derision than I really felt. (The New York Times published a great column two weeks ago about the etymology of this peculiar interjection). And it probably wasn’t fair to pick on Shell’s book; Ellen is actually an old acquaintance, and I have no idea why her book wasn’t initially available for the Kindle. In any case, it is now.
But many books still aren’t. And if Vaidhyanathan really thought I was being disrespectful toward authors, he had me all wrong. If anything, I was trying to help authors by pointing out that there is now a population of prospective readers, myself included, who are conditioned to look for the digital version of a book first, and who are far more likely to buy it if it is available at the moment they need it—and, conversely, far less likely to buy it if they have to drive to a bookstore or a library or wait for the postal service to deliver it. Indeed, as I’ve said before, the genius of the Kindle is not its e-paper screen (although that’s cool, and is the product of some serious technical innovation)—it’s the ability to download books and newspapers almost instantaneously via Amazon’s Whispernet wireless network. The Kindle is making it far easier to indulge my reading habit, and I know I’m buying more books now than I did before I got it.
Nonetheless, there are some understandable reasons why authors and publishers might be wary of the Kindle. One, as Vaidhyanathan mentioned, is
