From CNN:

One thing appeared certain when Barnes & Noble announced Thursday how much money its Nook e-readers brought in over the past three months: The news would be lousy.

And it was. Revenue from the company’s Nook division for its fiscal 2013 third quarter declined 26% from the same period a year ago, primarily as a result of slumping sales of the devices.

Is the bookseller just losing ground to rival Amazon and its market-leading line of Kindles? Perhaps. But many tech analysts see something else happening: the booming market for tablet computers is starting to make the dedicated e-reader obsolete.

“It’s not that the Nook failed,” said James McQuivey, a digital analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s that the world of tablets exploded, going faster than anyone expected, putting us in a place where tablets are now a fundamental part of our computing and lifestyle entourage, not just a handy device to consume a bit of media.”

. . . .

Competitors struggled to come up with a worthy alternative until late the next year, when Amazon — already a leader in the e-reader market – rolled out its simpler, smaller Kindle Fire, priced at $199, far lower than the iPad.

. . . .

Anyone interested in a tablet now probably has a price point with which they’ll be comfortable. And tablets, which are priced similarly to top e-readers, also work well for reading e-books. Throw in Internet, apps and e-mail — all on a full-color tablet screen — and e-readers suffer by comparison.

This trend has been particularly unkind to the Nook.

. . . .

But analysts expect that even Amazon’s success with dedicated e-readers will fade.

“It’s a rough market to compete,” said Michael Gartenberg, a tech-industry analyst with research firm Gartner Inc. “On one hand, devices like the iPad dominate the consumer tablet experience which includes reading. On the other hand, less demand for dedicated devices had helped Amazon, which already established a strong brand presence with Kindle as part of a much larger personal-cloud ecosystem.”

. . . .

And unlike Barnes & Noble, which is strongly branded as a bookstore, Amazon has created its own online universe of sales, McQuivey said.

“As part of Barnes & Noble, the Nook is stuck as a media device offered to media consumers when in reality the tablet business is poised for much more than this,” he said.

Many reviewers actually liked Barnes & Noble’s response, the Nook Tablet, better than the first-generation Kindle Fire. But, as McQuivey notes, its lack of an expansive ecosystem hurt it.

. . . .

The general consensus among observers is that they haven’t caught up to the dedicated e-readers in text quality quite yet, but give them time.

“If you love reading and are looking to invest a chunk of money into a device as a dedicated e-reader, then the iPad is not your best bet,” Cesar Torres, of CNN content partner ArsTechnica, wrote last year in a review comparing the third-generation iPad to e-readers such as the third-generation Kindle. (That iPad has the same screen as the most recent one).

“The value you can get from devices like the Kindle (or several other competitors like the Sony Reader or Kobo), will allow you to save money to spend on what is presumably your main passion: books.”

Link to the rest at CNN and thanks to Brad and others for the tip.

PG has a Nexus 7 tablet with which he’s very pleased, but still prefers his e-ink Kindle for reading books and longer essays/articles because the tablet is notably heavier than the Kindle.

Additionally, the tablet’s shiny surface, which makes video and photos look great, tends to reflect PG’s face back to him when he’s reading in bed whereas the Kindle screen does not. Perhaps if PG were more narcissistic, this wouldn’t annoy him.

OTOH, Mrs. PG is very happy reading on her Kindle Fire HD and says the weight doesn’t bother her.

From Yahoo News:

Companies very rarely warn twice in 40 days about the same problem. When it happens, it usually indicates that something so unexpected is taking place that executives just cannot wrap their minds around it.

. . . .

Barnes & Noble [released two] Nook warnings on January 2nd and February 13th.

. . . .

The January 2nd warning was stiff — it said that Nook revenue would likely decline by 12% from the previous Christmas period. You would think that when a company sees a debacle like that, its full-year estimates would be extremely cautious.

. . . .

Yet in January, Barnes & Noble still believed Nook Media would match the previous year’s $3 billion in revenue during fiscal 2013.

On February 13th, a little more than a month later, B&N came out and said that Nook sales will be lower than $3 billion. This is very strange. The fiscal year ends soon — how is it possible that B&N did not know that Nook sales would miss the $3 billion mark after the crucial Christmas season tanked so badly? Has the Nook sales decline steepened so much in just one month from the already grim -12% pace?

. . . .

Several UK retail chains including Carphone Warehouse and Argo recently reported surprisingly strong Christmas sales, and they actually cited Kindle as a key driver. Amazon does not break down Kindle sales volume, but its eBook sales growth during the Christmas 2012 was torrid.

. . . .

The international momentum Amazon has gained over the past six months is only going to tighten the screws on Barnes & Noble in 2013.

Link to the rest at Yahoo News and thanks to Beverly for the tip.

From Business Insider:

Amazon’s Kindle business is one of the more intriguing businesses in technology.

Amazon reveals almost nothing about its sales or profits, so we have to rely on the estimates of analysts. Scott Devitt at Morgan Stanley did his best to break it down, and he believes the Kindle business is highly profitable for Amazon.

He believes 34 percent of Amazon’s consolidated segment operating income is coming from the Kindle.

. . . .

Amazon’s annual Kindle profit was $565 million last year, according to Devitt, so we’re not talking about an Apple-esque performance. He sees it jumping to $620 million this year.

Link to the rest with a chart breaking down Kindle income at Business Insider

PG hasn’t tried this, but it sounded interesting.

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From Publishing Trends:

Though the holiday sales rush is over, there’s still no shortage of talk about ereading devices. The only problem? The market and technology has grown so much in the past year that “ereader” has come to mean so much more than dedicated devices such as the Nook Simple Touch or Kindle Paperwhite. This past month brought a lot of speculation as to whether or not the tablet has more or less killed the ereader. With tablet sales soaring, signs point to ‘yes,’ but some predict that ereaders will bounce back in the new year and that heavy book consumers still prefer the simpler device.

. . . .

“As more Android-based tablets are set to release in the coming months, Finvista Advisors’ analyst Sameer Singh believes that 2013 will likely mark the year iOS will lose its tablet dominance to the little green robot. However, that projection is based on an 18% drop in iPad sales for Q3 2012, when people were waiting for Apple‘s iPad mini announcement. Now that the mini has been released and deemed a bona fide success, it’s unclear if 2013 will be the tipping point, after all.”

. . . .

“A chirpy Kobo has claimed it now has more than 12 million registered users, four million of them creating ebook buyer accounts with the company during 2012.

It lauded its device sales too – well, its e-ink kit, not its Android-based tablet offerings – insisting it had captured 20 per cent of the world ereader market in 2012.”

–Tony Smith, The Register (1/17/2013)

“Sales of the iPad 4 were not expected to be harmed by the smaller, sleeker and cheaper iPad Mini. As the king of touch screen devices, Apple was thought to be the one company that could overcome any risk of cannibalization.

According to Reuters, that may not be the case. The publication reports that Sharp (one of Apple’s largest display suppliers) has significantly reduced the production of screens for the full-size iPad.”

–Louis Bedigian, Forbes (1/1/2013)

Link to the rest at Publishing Trends

The Apple Dilemma:  Marketshare or Margins

“Steve Jobs famously got Apple back on track by reducing the number of products Apple had down to a reasonable number in order to create product excellence.

“Focus, focus, focus.

“Excellence, excellence, excellence.

“That’s why it’s was a huge, huge deal when Apple finally — after Steve Jobs fought against it — launched the iPad Mini. The press and consumers went crazy for this product when Amazon had had the Kindle Fire out for 13 months and Google had had the Nexus 7 out for five. It was a big deal not because of the product itself, but because the app ecosystem was finally freed to embrace a new footprint.

“Steve was right about focus while simultaneously wrong about the smaller tablet footprint — long live cognitive dissonance and a tolerance for ambiguity!”

*****

“This week someone handed me a BlackBerry 10. It’s basically as good as the iPhone 5, in fact some would argue the finish feels better in your hand.

“Anyone who has used the Microsoft Surface will tell you that while the Microsoft app store is far behind Apple’s, the interface and the hardware are as good or better.

“Finally, a bunch of dorky friends of mine have been praising the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, an absurdly large smartphone (or tiny version of the iPad mini). After lunch with David Eun of Samsung at CES I said screw it, I’ll buy that really dorky looking phone.

“Now I love it.

“When reaching for my iPad Mini, iPhone or Note, I most frequently reach for the Note.”

Read the rest here at:  Launch

I actually love my Android.  Julia

From The Digital Reader:

When Amazon released the new Kindle Touch and called it the Paperwhite I like many assumed that they would drop support for last year’s model. Boy was I wrong. Amazon has released a new update for the Kindle Touch which gives it some of the software features that it lacked and the Paperwhite had.

. . . .

[T]he 5.3.2 update does add a number of nice features:

• A new user interface
• Whispersync for Voice
• Enhanced Parental Controls
• Book Covers
• Time-to-Read
• Recommended Content
• Enhanced book samples
• Navigate graphic novels, and comics

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader

From The New York Times:

Michael Cronan, a San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who placed his stamp on popular culture when he created the brand names TiVo and Kindle, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 61.

. . . .

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Patricia for the tip.

From the Amazon Media Room, a variety of facts about Kindle sales in 2012 and Amazon’s holiday sales season:

- 23 Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their books in 2012. Top sellers this year include Hugh Howey, author of the New York Times best seller “WOOL,” Stephanie Bond, author of “Stop the Wedding!,” the #2 best-selling book in the Kindle Store in December, and Barbara Freethy and CJ Lyons—both members of the Kindle Million Club.

. . . .

- Selection in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library in 2012 grew from 75,000 books to over 250,000 books—books that Kindle owners with a Prime membership can borrow for free with no due dates in the US, UK, Germany and France.

- More than 175,000 exclusive books were added to the Kindle store in 2012.

. . . .

- Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for digital downloads across Amazon’s selection of over 23 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks, and popular apps and games.

. . . .

Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available onAmazon worldwide since its introduction 15 weeks ago

Link to the rest at Amazon Media Room

The press release is filled with lots of sales info, but it’s interesting to PG that Amazon chose to highlight the number of indie authors who sold more than 250,000 ebooks through KDP in 2012 and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which is primarily used by indie authors.

From MIT Technology Review:

The tablet market has taken off this year, and it appears to mark the beginning of the end of dedicated e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle. IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, expects around 15 million e-book readers to be shipped this year, down nearly 40 percent from last year. “I’ve never really seen anything quite like this. In the world of consumer electronics, things appear and disappear quite rapidly, but never really as meteoric as the e-reader market is,” says Jordan Selburn, the author of the IHS iSuppli report.

. . . .

E-reader sales rose in 2011 even as tablet sales jumped sevenfold. But now it appears the versatility of tablets is winning out. “People want to do other things on their devices besides read books,” says Selburn.

The popularity of tablets forced Amazon, by far the dominant seller of dedicated e-book readers, to cut into Kindle reader sales by offering its own tablet, the Kindle Fire. “If Amazon doesn’t sell tablets and cannibalize Kindle readers, someone else will,” Selburn says.

Link to the rest at MIT Technology Review