With all the gold medals being handed out at the Olympics, let’s reserve one for the e-book business. The International Digital Publishing Forum and Association of American Publishers have released stats for December 2009, and sales set the bar for E-Books’ greatest month ever, $19,100,000. That figure more than doubles the previous December’s mark and tops the best month to date, October ’09 at $18,500,000.

How high on the podium are e-books standing? The industry reported more sales in the fourth quarter of ’09 ($55,900,000) alone than the total sales for all of ’08 ($53,500,000).

And let’s not forget that these are stats just for the downloads. Add sales of Kindle and other e-reading hardware in the holiday season and you have a performance nothing short of dazzling, in this or any other economy.

The true sales numbers may be even higher than the above chart indicates. Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”

RC

Two representatives of Aptara, the digital solutions company, have offered a terrific scenario of a typical school room of the future in which everybody’s using a tablet. It’s just what we imagined when we first laid eyes on a tablet back in 2003.

Here’s the opening passage of Aptara’s scenario developed by John Ott and Eric Freese:
*****************************
Welcome to class. Take your new tablet— your only textbook this semester— out of your backpack. It’s about the same size, but lighter and thinner than your old textbooks. It’s also battery-powered, similar to a big touch-screen, like your iPhone.

Use that touch-screen and download the first chapter of your first lesson. That’s right—your lesson is an app. Plug in your earbuds and tap the screen to begin the introductory video.

Cool, the presenter is that famous scientist from the cable show…

Now the video goes into full documentary mode; scenes from real life. Major ideas from the lesson appear as text at the bottom of the screen; so do vocabulary words. Now the presenter is back and he’s working out a big idea step-by-step on the whiteboard…

Video over. Time to read…
**************************************
Has anyone figured out the flaw in this projection? Consider: with digital technology you don’t have to go to class – because there’s no class to go to. You can “attend” school in your bedroom, living room, dorm room, bathroom or car.

Digital technology is the great disintermediator. Among the things it disintermediates is place. There is no school room, at least not one with geographical coordinates. It exists in the cloud. In Gertrude Stein’s immortal phrase, there is no there there. Unfortunately, Stein used it to characterize Philadelphia, but it’s the mot juste for a virtual school room.

University trustees had better begin thinking about discounting tuition for students auditing classes from their bathrooms…

Aptara’s complete article can be seen on the Digital Book World website, and if you haven’t signed up to receive DBW’s newsletter, do log on. You’ll be at least one light year more informed than your neighbors.

Richard Curtis

iPad Default Application Checklist

Calendar – check
Contacts – check
Notes – check
Maps – check
Videos – check
YouTube – check
iTunes – check
App Store – check
Settings – check
Safari – check
Mail – check
Photos – check
iPod – check
E-Books – um….E-Books?

Well, no, not exactly. You need to upload the E-book reader app, according to Ubergizmo. True, it’s free, but Ubergizmo thinks that those who expect to start reading the moment they unwrap their iPad will be annoyed. For one thing, “iBooks probably won’t be available in the App Store in countries where apple doesn’t have any content to offer,” And how about this one: “If you’re giving it as a gift to someone who’s not familiar with tech (such as a relative), the lack of the app might be troublesome.”

It bears repeating that after games and entertainment, news and books constitute the third biggest application projected for the iPad. For a manufacturer that has been instrumental in forging a new publishing paradigm, you would think that the least Apple could do is embed an e-book reader app into the iPad. So? How about it, Steve?

RC

A Credit Suisse analyst has downgraded Amazon’s market share of e-book sales over the next five years, reports Matt Phillips in the Wall Street Journal blog. Downgraded it big time, from 90% to 35%.

“Near term, we suspect that the iPad and the new eBook agency pricing model, which requires that Amazon increase retail prices to be more consistent with Apple’s pricing, will provide Kindle with the most market share headwind. Going forward, we can envision a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market. Therefore, we expect Amazon’s share of eBooks business to fall from 90% currently to about 35% over the next five years.”

Driving Credit Suisse’s projection is the shift by many publishers away from retail model that propelled Amazon to a huge lead in the e-book space. And lurking in the shadows is a Google tablet rumored to be in development.

RC

“In a year when the iPod moment for books looks increasingly likely to happen,” writes journalist Danuta Kean, “failure to pass the Digital Economy Bill isn’t a lost opportunity, it’s a tragedy.”

What’s the Digital Economy Bill? It’s a piece of legislation aimed at regulating the nascent British e-book business. A key provision is a three-strikes-you’re out clause aimed at terminating Internet access for file-sharing e-book pirates. Copyright theft has contributed to a 30% drop in music revenues over the past six years and the bill’s framers want to nip it in the bud before it does the same to books.

Slam dunk, right? Wrong. The House of Lords is not happy with it. It seems that libraries, businesses and other institutions are worried that they will be culpable for the felonious behavior of individual users. The British Library, for instance, noted that “Because public institutions often provide internet access to hundreds or thousands of individual users, the complexity of our position in relation to copyright infringements must be taken into consideration.” Which is a civilized way of saying the Brits are afraid to punish e-thieves.

Kean expressed her frustration with milords this way: “Well, hello! If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be a punishment.”

“Those who claim file-sharing is a blow against big business that does not harm small, independent players, should think again,” she says citing plummeting music sales in nations lax on piracy. “Ah but books are different, you might think. Well, no. A study released last month by Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the internet for pirated content, provided startling data on the impact of file-sharing on books. It estimated that publishers were losing as much as $3bn to online book piracy. You didn’t misread that: it said three BILLION dollars, more than the total value of the UK book market. As more readers move to digital formats, that figure will only get worse.”

What happens in UK could well affect what happens in US, so we’ll be following this unfolding story with keen interest. Here it is in detail: If the Digital Economy Bill fails, we’ll all pay.

Richard Curtis

While the digital revolution has redefined such terms as “book”, “author”, and “publisher”, the bestseller list has remained more or less immutable. It’s still pretty much the Sunday New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and a few other well respected gatekeepers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

There are countless imitators and emulators but until last year they were all based on the same fundamental principle, the velocity with which print books flow through checkout counters. They offer a snapshot of what the public is reading. But – given the growing popularity of e-books, are the old BS lists beginning to sound like…well, BS?

The e-book camel got its nose under the bestseller tent last July when USA Today announced it would include Kindle sales in its metrics. This week the newspaper added the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony’s Reader™. According to the paper’s press release, USA Today‘s “list ranks titles regardless of genre or format, providing one of the best assessments of which books are most popular among readers and consumers each week.” USA Today boasts a daily print circulation of almost 2 million. It’s website, usatoday.com, claims to reach over 6 million daily.

How much will the addition of e-books impact on the bestseller lists of t0morrow? It will be interesting to find out. With Google, Amazon, Sony and B&N claiming e-warehouses of between 500,000 and 1 million books, the influx of titles into the list may skew the rankings like an elephant sitting on a see-saw.

Here’s the press release: USA TODAY’S Best-Selling Books List Continues to Add Digital Sales Information

Richard Curtis

“There are lots of schoolkids in the world,” writes Tyler Cowen on the Marginal Revolution website.

We were thinking the same thing. In fact, we were thinking it a decade ago when we leaped into the e-book space: the medium is perfect for textbooks. But education had to wait for hardware and software to catch up.

It’s caught up.

Hardware: Apple will lead the way. “The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys” says Cowen in My predictions about the iPad. “In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle.”

Platform: We’ve been reading up on a San Francisco startup called Inkling. “Stacked with pedigreed veterans of Microsoft and Google, Harvard, MIT and Stanford,” writes Paul Boutin of VentureBeat, Inkling surfaced after Apple’s iPad launch with $1 million to seed development of software aimed not just at student’s learning needs but their pocketbooks as well. The company is working with a number of textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson.”First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.”

Inkling offers color, interactivity, highlighter capability, social network sharing features, talking text and dynamic quizzes. And all of this delivered lightning-fast. “The iPad’s A4 chip is even faster than the Android G2 that gets geeks so excited,” says Boutin, “so rich layouts and interactive illustrations run quickly.”

“But the real breakthrough,” he writes, “is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks.

Are you listening, students? Modular bundles so cheap they’re not worth ripping off!

Here are some details from Inkling’s “About” page:

• Interactive figures. Inkling lets you directly manipulate objects to explore them. Want to know if two molecules bond? Use your fingertips to pull them together and see what happens.
• Custom spine. Inkling organizes content based on your assignments. It shows you everything you need to do, all at once, no matter where the content is from. It’s like a custom textbook, just for you.
• Reader. When it’s time to read a traditional textbook, Inkling does an amazing job. Dog-ear your pages, skip from chapter to chapter with gestures, and jump from figure to figure with your finger.
• Quizzes. Measure your progress with interactive tests that deepen your understanding of the content.
• Note following. Ever borrow a classmate’s notes? Borrow them in realtime with Inkling NoteSync™. Annotations, highlights and comments from your friends show up alongside your own, instantly.
• Device sync. Want to finish up a reading while waiting in line? Anything you’ve got on your iPad appears right on your iPhone or iPod touch, too.

Look for iPads utilizing the Inkling platform on campuses as early as next fall.

Richard Curtis

A Valentine’s Day gift for Janet Dailey fans: E-Reads is happy to bring back her classic novel Aspen Gold.

Kit Masters, born and brought up on an Aspen ranch, left to pursue an acting career in Hollywood but she still possesses a strong sense of family, loyalty, and integrity and has deep ties to the land where she grew up. After ten years, she returns home to settle her father’s estate and realizes she must choose between her career and Tom Bannon, a man she has not seen for ten years, the man who broke her heart by marrying someone else—the man she still loves. Kit has gotten a golden opportunity, the lead role in a movie opposite famous actor-producer-and legendary seducer John Travis. The movie will be filming in Aspen. She meets Bannon again and they rediscover their romance even though she still feels the pain of his betrayal, while he is haunted by the memory of his dead wife. But now, Travis has begun to pursue Kit ardently.

E-Reads publishes over fifty Janet Dailey novels. Visit her author page for a full selection.

This book that will enable you to watch the final convulsions of civilization from the veranda of your country estate. When the last trumpet sounds and the end of the world is nigh, remember to pick up your dry cleaning, cancel your subscriptions and call your mother. And don’t forget to pack your copy of Richard Curtis’s How to Prosper In the Coming Apocalypse. It’s available in e-book and will be in paperback before long.

From the introduction.

“The most important things for you to concern yourself with in the coming bad years is, Who’s responsible and how can I get even? It is essential that we find someone to blame and really beat the hell out of him. Sure, the tragedy of the past is that we are condemned to repeat it, but does that make you feel any better? No! Your first task is to find a scapegoat.” (You can click here to read the complete introduction, “What is an Apocalypse, and Why Can’t People Just Call It Doomsday?)

And if you enjoy Curtis’s brand of whacked-out humor, read his satires on authors, agents and publishers in The Client From Hell.

I’ve often said that the e-book revolution will not reach its tipping point until there’s a tablet under the arm of every student on campus. Though the Apple iPad is the first significant advance in that direction, however, tablets have been around for about a decade.

The first one I ever saw (pictured right) was made by Microsoft, and it created a storm of excitement with a really slick demo showing doctors making hospital rounds with tablets (they still do – one of the few applications that got picked up) and pianists reading a score on a tablet propped up where the sheet music usually goes.

Year after year I waited for Microsoft’s tablet to sweep the country but it never happened. And now I know why. You will, too after reading a New York Times op-ed column by Dick Brass, a former vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004. Brass describes himself as “the fellow who tried (and largely failed) to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago.”

Though his piece is ostensibly about how MS dropped the ball when it had a chance to tablify the world early in the new century, it’s really about “why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.”

What happened? “Unlike other companies,” says Brass, “Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation.” Bizarrely, Microsoft remains one of the world’s leading technological companies, having made a $6.7 billion profit in the last quarter alone. Yet even that may not be enough. “While the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present,” concludes Brass, “unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future.”

You can read his analysis in its entirety in Microsoft’s Creative Destruction. It may explain why Microsoft’s introduction of the HP tablet early in January – predating the release of the Apple’s iPad by three weeks – seems to have laid an egg. Here’s PC World’s take on it: “The HP tablet is basically a color e-reader running Amazon Kindle software, with few other details besides a sub-$500 price point and an estimated arrival on the market by mid-2010. So disappointing was the release that Microsoft and HP’s shares fell yesterday according to BusinessWeek.” (Another HP tablet is being used by designers on Project Runway to good effect. Check out the HP Touchsmart tm2 tablet PC.)

The sad thing is that the original tablet PC could, with some refinements, have evolved into the gold standard for the tablet. Instead it looks like it’s become the…um…Brass standard.

And yet…Microsoft has a chance to redeem itself with the forthcoming Courier, which Gizmodo leaked just recently. Maybe MS will not only get the tablet right this time, but will find the fire in the belly that Brass says has been missing from the corporate culture. Check the below video (actually a series of videos) and determine for yourself.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.