This is a resend. The last three disappeared.
On Feb 7, 2009, at 7:00 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I have been talking to Steve Krivit about uploading his book to
Kindle.
I have not actually used a Kindle, but looking over the standards
and limitations of the gadget, my hunch is that his book might be
more suitable for the Kindle than mine.
I think these electronic reader gadgets are the wave of the future.
But the format of the first-generation devices is too limited for
technical books. The screen is too small.
It is unclear how many Kindles have been sold, or how many are
actually in use. I imagine there are a number of them sitting
around unused in drawers. Amazon.com is a closed-mouthed company.
It may be that the audience is small and only a handful of books
will sell. One source estimated that they sold 240,000 Kindles as
of August 2008:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/we-know-how-many-kindles-
amazon-has-sold-240000/
That's not a big audience, since only a handful of those people is
likely to go searching for information on cold fusion. Steve's book
is already available at Amazon, making it visible to a larger
audience, so adding a Kindle edition might bring in more readers
than having only a Kindle edition.
I have Steve beat on price! It turns out the book costs only $0.80.
That's close enough to zero that it will not prevent anyone from
downloading it.
- Jed
Jed, I love the price!
Current estimates for Kindles sold is 500,000:
http://industry.bnet.com/media/1000818/smashwords-ceo-evaluates-e-
book-market/
http://tinyurl.com/aexnh4
It might be worthwhile to produce a Stanza readable format too,
although a Mobipocket reading version of Stanza (a free iPhone app
with 1,000,000 distribution currently) has been promised:
http://www.ereads.com/2009/01/has-mobipocket-stood-up-easy-date.html
http://tinyurl.com/buzz7x
I would have bought a Kindle long ago because the download cost is
zero, but they can't download where I live.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
