Amazon nudged the experience of reading books ever-so-slightly further into the future today. The company announced a new feature for its Kindle reading platform that lets readers ask authors questions about their books as they're reading.
The new program, called @author, lets Kindle users highlight a passage and then ask the author a question about it via their Amazon author page or Twitter. Only questions as long as 100 characters can be asked from within the e-book itself, but more in-depth curiosities can be posted to the author's official page on Amazon.
The digital age just gave birth to something few of us were clamoring for, but that might turn out to be a worthwhile experience: books with soundtracks. Booktrack, a startup that publishes e-books containing movie-like soundtracks, went live with its first few titles yesterday.
The result is a Kindle-style e-book with music and sound effects that play in the background as you read. The books are sold as stand-alone mobile applications, currently for iOS with Android support reportedly underway.
Microsoft announced today that it will discontinue its Microsoft Reader e-book service. New e-books in its LIT format will be discontinued on November 8, and the app itself will be unavailable effective August 30, 2012, although existing customers will still be able to access it.
Reader has been around since 2000, long before the e-ink displays that power modern e-readers like Amazon's Kindle became commercially available. The format was intended for PCs and later extended to Windows-powered mobile devices. It uses Microsoft's ClearType rendering technology to improve reading on small screens.
Today Amazon launched an HTML5 browser version of its market leading eReader application, Kindle. Called Kindle Cloud Reader, it's a direct response to the 30% cut of sales that Apple now takes from in-app purchases and subscriptions via iOS apps. The 30% Apple toll hits businesses like Amazon hard, because the margins on book sales are slim enough as it is.
The HTML5 Kindle site appears to be optimized for the iPad. It's accessed from the Safari browser in the iPad, so it routes around Apple's App Store. That means Amazon doesn't need to give Apple 30% of an eBook sale. Because the HTML5 site is very close to the functionality of the iPad Kindle app, this is going to have huge ramifications for Apple. Yes, Apple's walled garden has just been structurally weakened. I'd go as far as to say that it's a matter of months, not years, before Amazon pulls its iOS Kindle app from the App Store.
Amazon announced this morning that it is releasing a Web-based version of its Kindle application called the Kindle Cloud Reader. The app is built from the ground up in HTML5 and is designed to be used in whatever browser environment a user desires. The initial rollout is available in Safari for iOS, Safari for Mac and Chrome. Amazon is one of the first major application makers to create its own dedicated HTML5 app that purposefully skirts around the Apple App Store and its levy on in-app purchases and subscriptions.
Ostensibly, the Kindle Cloud Reader is just another initiative in the "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" strategy that Amazon has with all its Kindle applications. It can do everything that a normal Kindle app can do, such as synchronize your library, your last page read and bookmarks. Yet, the Kindle Cloud Reader is more of a reaction to the draconian app store rules instituted by the Cupertino giant than it is a dynamic new version of Kindle.
Just in the nick of time, the Google Books Ngram Viewer has graduated from Google Labs to become a full-fledged part of Google Books. The Ngram Viewer allows users to see how often a word or phrase has been used in books across history. Google Books contains millions of books dating back to the year 1400; "over 10% of all books ever published," according to the Ngram Viewer announcement.
Last month, Google announced that Google Labs, which allowed Google developers and users to "field test" experimental Web projects, will be phased out. Many Labs experiments will be sidelined, but the Ngram Viewer made it.
Kindle Profiles is a social service that was quietly launched by Amazon in March of this year. Its existence was little known, probably because it wasn't very useful as a social tool until Amazon recently added connections to Twitter and Facebook. I myself only discovered the service after VC Fred Wilson blogged about it the over the weekend. Kindle Profiles appears to be gaining some early traction now, thanks largely to Kindle Profile users auto-following people in their Twitter and Facebook networks. As Wired pointed out, this is a somewhat dodgy tactic, because the user cannot turn off this auto-follow behavior.
Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.
The CEO of OverDrive, which distributes e-books and audiobooks to libraries, has dropped a pretty obvious hint that the Kindle will join other major e-readers in public libraries in September. EarlyWord reports that Steve Potash looked "like a kid with a delicious secret" at OverDrive's Digipalooza conference last weekend, saying that he was "not allowed to announce a date ye[t]," but he included this blunt clue in his "Crystal Ball Report" during the final session:
Streamlining (both downloading and ordering)
Explosion (we have gone from two reading devices to 85 and more are coming)
Premium (the library catalog as the most premium, value-added site on the Web)
Traffic (enormous growth coming by year's end)
CoverCake, a service that tracks online conversations about books, is launching a new Web-based dashboard app tomorrow, turning its vast library of data into an analytics tool for publishers, authors and fans alike. The new analytics features will enable publishers and authors to measure the impact of promotion, publicity and social media campaigns by seeing the conversations they generate.
"Everybody loses" with the enforcement of Apple's new in-app payment rules, argues The Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield in a post chronicling how consumers, e-reader companies and perhaps even Apple might suffer. As we wrote about yesterday, Apple made the move over the weekend to enforce e-reader apps' compliance with its new in-app payment rules, prompting Kindle, Nook, Kobo and the like to all remove links to their associated e-bookstores so as to avoid giving Apple a 30% cut of sales.
But if there's a winner to be had in the fallout, it may be the Web itself as Apple's new rules are now prompting more and more publishers to build HTML5 apps rather than rely solely on native (iOS) apps.
