Amazon solicits ads for Kindle Fire welcome screen, to the tune of $600,000

Might an ad-supported Kindle Fire be in the offing? Ad Age reports that Amazon has been soliciting ads to appear on the Fire’s welcome screen, according to an executive at an agency Amazon pitched. The ad packages would start at $600,000 and include both Kindle Fire and Kindle with Special Offers ads, going up to $1 million for additional ad perks.

The current Kindle Fire has no advertcising, but Amazon has been reported to have a new model of the tablet in the offing for July and may be looking to start the program then. An interesting note is that Amazon reportedly “hasn’t decided” whether it will put ads only on a new special-offers version of the Fire, or introduce them to already-existing devices.

As a result, the ad executives Ad Age spoke to had both declined to participate, since Amazon wasn’t even able to tell them how many devices would comprise the audience—and they were also concerned that their ads popping up on devices that didn’t have ads when people bought them could be a turn-off.

Of course, Amazon has proven remarkably savvy so far at getting people to accept ads on their devices, and indeed the ad-supported Kindles have been Amazon’s best-selling products ever. Special Offers coming to future Kindle Fires is practically a no-brainer. As for already-sold ones, I rather suspect that if Amazon did introduce advertising to pre-existing Fires it would be on an opt-in basis, perhaps offering a $30 (or whatever the price difference is) Amazon gift card in exchange for allowing the company to advertise to you—the reverse of the current system for de-advertising existing Kindles with Special Offers. The company hasn’t offered anything like this to people who bought originally-ad-free Kindles that I know of, but the Fire has been such a popular tablet, with so many more uses than the e-ink readers, that I can see how it might be tempting.

I suspect that if Amazon does it this way, and is able to demonstrate a ready audience, ad agencies won’t stay on the fence for long. And if it makes the Kindle Fire even cheaper, bringing tablets into reach of people who couldn’t afford them before, it could be as good a thing as the ads are for the e-ink readers.

(Found via our sister blog, Gadgetell; also via PaidContent.)

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Ebooks Outsold Hardbacks on Amazon

It was going to happen sooner or later. The power of the ebook rages forward with new authors jumping on the bandwagon every day. Writing and publishing ebooks is an extremely easy process when compared to conventional book publishing and anyone can join in as a part time or full time income.

This ebooks overtaking hardbacks announcement will provoke horror among those who can think of nothing better than spending an afternoon rummaging around a musty old bookshop. In what could be a watershed for the publishing industry, Amazon said sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time.

Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a “tipping point”, with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date.

Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, said the figures from Amazon were “eye-catching”, but added a note of scepticism. He said that while ebooks had outnumbered hardbacks in volume, they were likely to be some distance behind in value. Some of the bestsellers listed on the Kindle top 10 list today were retailing for as little as $1.16 (75p). Free downloads of books no longer in copyright were excluded from the figures.  Original article here.

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Amazon may put traditional publishers out of business says industry insider

On new Silicon Valley news startup Pando Daily, ex-TechCruncher Sarah Lacey posts an email she got from an anonymous publishing industry insider who sees Amazon gunning for the publishing industry with a long-term plan to put big publishers out of business.

By selling books at slim or even negative profit margins, this insider notes, Amazon is targeting publishers own profit margins—if Amazon can convince consumers that books are “supposed to be” cheaper, publishers will have to lower prices sooner or later. And Amazon also has its sights on the books that earn the publishing industry most of its money—celebrity and best-selling fiction writers.

In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books. We all know what the good books are–it all comes down to how much of an advance we’re willing to pay for them. The hotly fought-for books are the ones that sell. And while we might not make huge profit % on these, we make big profit $ on these. They keep the lights on by covering overhead. Better to cover our fixed costs by going all in on a few big books than trying to buy dozens of mid-list books.

But over the years, the amount of advances publishers have been able to pay has declined—and Amazon has moved in to scoop some of these books out from under publishers’ noses for its own new publishing arm by paying ridiculous advances that they’ll never be able to earn back. Even though it’s throwing money away, it’s money Amazon can afford to lose in order to build its own publishing business—and it’s taking away the authors who are traditional publishers’ bread and butter.

I find myself in agreement with Lacey’s comments on this email—the publishing industry has made its own bed over the years, and has no one else to blame if it turns out it didn’t make such a comfortable one after all. Perhaps some new, smaller company can figure out innovative ways to eat Amazon’s lunch just as badly as it’s eating the big publishing dinosaurs’.

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Self-published plagiarism problematic for Amazon

Amazon has a bit of a public relations problem stemming from the prevalence of plagiarized self-published books and e-books on the site, Fast Company reports. Especially in the erotica section, Amazon is rife with republished works taken from the public domain or other authors—and no matter how fast they remove them, the perpetrators continue to perpetrate more.

When PaidContent looked into the matter, an Amazon representative told them that they do use screening software and have “worked steadily to detect and remove” copyright violators, and have removed thousands of such works over time. The representative declined to provide any details, however.

There’s no question that Amazon has been working on winnowing out duplicates, including both copyright violators and PLR (“Private Label Rights”) republished work—as shown by this example from August. But is it doing enough? Fast Company suggests some other things Amazon could try:

Why not require an author to submit a valid credit card before she can self-publish her works on the Kindle? If an author, who could still publish under a pen name, were found to have violated someone else’s copyright Amazon could charge that card $2,000 and ban her from selling again. Amazon could also run content through one of the many plagiarism detectors that are available–such as Turnitin or iThenticate–before an ebook is put on sale.

Of course, the credit card idea might be going too far to the opposite extreme—but as ineffective as Amazon’s efforts seem from time to time, it might benefit by doing something more.

It is questionable whether Amazon could effectively be taken to court over the issue, as legal experts state that Amazon is not legally required to act unless it knows about a specific infringement. Some of the issues PaidContent mentions are, interestingly enough, the same ones that apply to file-sharing site Megaupload which just got taken down by the Department of Justice and may well end up losing its safe harbor protection.

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