Interesting piece here from iReaderReview:

For Authors: Hard Way to get kindle readers

Help Kindle Chronicles Podcaster Len Edgerly Put the Kindle on the Agenda at SXSW Interactive 2010

SXSW Interactive 2010, March 12-16 in Austin, will feature "five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs" including one, if Kindle Nation citizens vote early and often, by friend, colleague and The Kindle Chronicles podcaster Len Edgerly (below right with his wife and fellow Kindle enthusiast Darlene).

SxSW employs a democratic "Panel Picker" device to allow interested people to vote for the conferences they would like to see included, and Len has generously shared the following steps for Kindle Nation citizens who wish to cast a vote for his proposed panel, "Taming the Kindle: Guidance for Readers and Authors:"

Hi Steve,
Here are the steps for the PanelPicker:

1. Go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
2. Enter information to create a new SxSW account. Click on "Sign me up."
3. When activation email arrives, click on activation link in the email.
4. At the "Welcome amigo" web page, enter the following URL: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2368
5. Just below the title of Len's proposed panel, "Taming the Kindle: Guidance for Readers and Authors," click on the thumbs-up icon.
6. You should see a message above the panel title saying, "Your vote was saved successfully."
6. If you'd like, you can scroll down to the comment field and add a comment.

The panel picker seemed to be overwhelmed earlier today but is working okay tonight. Thanks for offering to pitch this to your readers, Steve. Much appreciated!

Len

Around the Kindlesphere This Week

There are a million posts (and podcasts) in the Kindlesphere, and here are a few that caught my eye this week and seemed worth sharing with you:

• BlogKindle has a fun post referencing this very retro "new" Kindle case for the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX from Busted Typewriter. I have two recommendations for the very imaginative entrepreneurs at Busted Typewriter: (1) get these listed on Amazon's Kindle Accessories page pronto! and (2) whatever you do, don't offer one of these cases in the form of a copy of Gray's Anatomy!
• If you want to follow up on my piece last week on textbooks for the Kindle and other devices, it's worth a trip to the Kindle Worlda thoughtful analysis and plenty of information concerning some recent developments in the e-textbook sector.
• "Steve Shank of Arizona is a Kindle fan with 35 years of experience introducing new technology, dating back to his days as an early employee of Apple," says the show notes page at The Kindle Chronicles, and Len has a relaxed, fascinating interview with him as the centerpiece of this week's podcast. Extra bonus: great audio of the waves lapping the shore at Len's summer retreat on the Maine coast at the end of the show.
• Over at my own indieKindle blog for authors and independent publishers, I rolled out a suite of services to help interested authors and publishers bring their books and articles before millions of ebook readers.
• Abhi's iReaderReview blog weighs in with a piece on Amazon's latest Kindle controversy in a piece entitled Cons of sharing Kindle subscriber information with publishers. I filed my own view of the controversy here.

blog, where Andrys has

Free Software Foundation Launches Campaign to Persuade Amazon to Go DRM-Free

Defective by Design, an anti-digital rights management (DRM) initiative founded by the Free Software Foundation in 2006, has launched a petition drive aimed at persuading Amazon to remove digital rights restrictions from the books that Kindle owners purchase and download from the Kindle Store. The DRM issue has been a contentious one since the Kindle was launched in November 2007, and took on an uglier dimension when Amazon surreptitiously and wirelessly removed two George Orwell novels from its customers' Kindles earlier this year. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos later issued a very strong apology for the way Amazon handled the Orwellian book removal.

The Defective by Design petition, located online here, reads as follows:

We believe in the freedom to read

We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.

That is why we readers, authors, publishers, and librarians demand that Amazon remove all DRM, including any ability to control or access the user's library, from the Kindle.

Amazon's assurances that it will refrain from the worst abuses of this power do not address the problem. Amazon should not have this power in the first place. Until they give it up they will be tempted to use it, or they could be forced to by governments or narrow private interests. Whatever Amazon's reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public's freedom to use books without interference or supervision.

You can add your online signature to this petition here, if you wish.

Here is a list of Kindle books that have been tagged as DRM-free by their authors and publishers, and here is another with DRM-free tags placed by readers.

As an author, a publisher, Kindle owner, and reader, I have been a supporter of these campaigns. But it is worth stating again here my belief that ultimately Amazon will change its tune on Kindle DRM both because of campaigns such as the petition and DRM-Free tagging and because it will be a good business decision, just as it has been a good business decision for Apple, after years of consolidating its position, to remove many of the DRM constraints it has placed on iTunes tracks:

Just as a time came when Apple was able to locate its corporate self-interest in allowing customers to remove DRM from their iTunes store audio purchases for a price, a similar time will probably come for Amazon with respect to customers’ Kindle Store purchases. In both cases, the timing seems to require that some critical mass of the applicable publishers reach a certain nuanced understanding of and experience with the changing revenue streams and marketing channels that digital publishing and distribution allow. It’s not exactly dialectical materialism, but it is a world in which changes in politics must be driven by, rather than be the drivers of, changes in economic relationships.

We can’t all be Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow, and neither Amazon nor Apple will ever be Google, Creative Commons, or Project Gutenberg. Most publishers possess little understanding of Lessig or Doctorow or anyone else who has discovered the viral (and, often, easily monetized) marketing power of setting one’s words free in selected venues, and many probably label them as the “free books crowd” and shut down reflexively in the face of any opportunity to listen to them or learn from them. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe that Jeff Bezos does possess some nuanced understanding of these issues, and in time, armed with the larger and larger payments his company’s Kindle division is making to publishers, will be in a better position to bring them along into a future where there is a wide acceptance of DRM-free electronic publishing standards. But on the Darwinian path to that future, it would be very uncharacteristic of Amazon not to continue to consolidate and strengthen its position.

Is It a Kindle World? 28 Million EBook Readers Projected by 2013

We all know that a picture is worth 1,000 words, even in this economy. But are charts like these worth 28 million Kindles?


Thanks to David Rothman's heads up at TeleRead, they come tied to a juicy tidbit of Kindle projection from a pretty credible source:

The well-respected and extremely popular Tech-On blog (Tech and Industry Analysis from Asia, based in Japan, with a current Alexa traffic rank of 1,007) has a cover story today projecting a worldwide installed base of 28.6 million Kindles and other ebook readers within four years:

A number of promising proposals are popping up in the eBook market, almost as if it remains unaffected by the worldwide economic downturn that began in the second half of 2008. For example, the quantity of eBook readers shipped by companies like Amazon.com and Sony has soared from the end of 2008 through 2009. And right in parallel with that growth has been significant growth in the scale of the eBook content market, also from the second half of 2008.

Growth forecasts for the eBook market are rosy, too. According to a recent report from survey company In-Stat of the US, total global shipments of dedicated eBook readers will hit 28.6 million units in 2013 (Fig 1b). Considering that 2008 shipments were only about one million units, this represents a 30-fold increase in only five years.

And here I will add a few juicy projections of my own:

1. About 20% of those 28 million ebook readers will be Kindles.
2. The 20 million other ebook readers will not spell problematic competition for the Kindle, because the vast majority of them, by the end of 2013, will come with Kindle apps or some other kind of key to the front doors of Kindle Stores in half a dozen of the world's most populous markets, er, nations.
3. In addition to 28 million ebook readers, there will be at least twice that many other mobile devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, netbooks, Blackberries, and Swiss army knives?) running Kindle-compatibility apps.