Kindle News: The coming Amazon smartphone. Expanded textbook rentals? Reports on the Digital Book World Conference.

More rumors of an Amazon smartphone soon and a widening of Kindle textbook-rental offerings, plus reports on Digital Book World Conference

There aren't many news stories the last few days except the ones that say that, according to the usual Taiwan news sources, Amazon will release a smartphone by summer 2013 and that it'll probably cost between $100-$200 without the need for a long-term contract.  They suggest that Foxconn has already signed a deal and that the "initial order for the very first Kindle Smartphone is said to total 5 million units."

Without a contract? That would be a no-brainer for buyers who just see no need for the latest whizbang smartphone.  As one who enjoys the Samsung Galaxy S2, and its ability to give a few devices WiFi via the tethering feature, I wouldn't be one of that target market, but it's a big segment from what I've seen from friends and family who have no interest in the fancier phones but who do want a smartphone and who don't want to tie themselves down to a 2-yr plan to get a decent price.
  I did get my Samsung for a penny when Amazon Wireless had one of those specials.

  A big-selling smartphone would be another draw for app developers.


Speaking of apps...
 Business Insider's Business Intelligence is selling a full report on "How Amazon is Trying to Create A Huge Mobile Business" and offering a free trial on what would be a $300 to $400 yearly subscription for businesses needing that kind of information.  In the column describing this, they say:

' Software sales:  The Amazon Appstore has been a huge success on the Kindle Fire.  Developers make almost as much revenue per active user as they do on iOS, and Apple executives reportedly worry that Amazon's controlled, iTunes-like approach makes it more competitive than other app stores, including one operated by Google.

  Given strong early results, Amazon shouldn't have a hard time convincing developers to bring their apps to an Amazon phone. '

Amazon and book rentals? - an expansion of textbook rentals
There also has been some excitement about Amazon's apparent testing of book rentals (see Dave Zatz's "Zatz Not Funny" page for the first example cited).  I saw a couple of more rentable non-fiction Kindle books over the weekend but didn't note the names.  The kicker for those hoping that this will include novels is that every Kindle book noted, as well as the two I've seen, is a non-fiction book recommended for classrooms.

Textbooks have had rental plans at Amazon for some time.

I first explained how it works on July 19, 2011, in the blog entry "Amazon's Kindle Textbook Rentals - Up to 80% off"  And this is still something many families don't know about, so it's worth a read 1.5 yrs later.

 The recent ones, though, are "softer" textbooks in that they're not the heavy-duty $100+ textbooks you normally see but they're, so far, published by more academically-inclined publishers.  Would the Big5 publishers be interested in this for the fiction titles? We'll see, but I'm not optimistic.  Still -- better only a few dollars (for rental) than no dollars.

But for now it's good to see the alternative spelled out on the product page for some of the non-fiction books that are not the usual hardcore textbooks.


The Kindle Chronicles' Len Edgerly Details the Digital Book World Conference
The Kindle Chronicles' Len Edgerly offers an extremely thorough three days of detailed LIVE blogging of the DBW Conference that anyone interested in Publishing today should peruse.  This Conference and Expo took place January 15-17 in NY.

  It's capped off by the weekly podcast's interview segment, which this week involves seven interviewees at DBW, including David Burleigh from OverDrive (which handles the Public Library lending of e-books).

  Len links to the work of all those interviewed.  In that list, I saw that Paul Biba, Former Editor-in-Chief of Teleread, reported on the Conference also, as he has for years.  Paul's view of the proceedings is an intriguing read, describing what worked for attendees and what didn't.  You can also read other blog articles he's written for Goodereader.

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Current Kindle Models for reference, plus free-ebook search links.
NOTES on newer Kindles.

US: Updated Kindle Fire Basic  7" tablet - $159 Kindle Fire HD 7" 16/32GB - $199/$249 Kindle Fire HD 8.9" 16/32GB - $299/$369 Kindle Fire HD 8.9" 4G 32/64GB - $499/$599 Kindle NoTouch ("Kindle") - $69/$89 Kindle Paperwhite, WiFi - $119/$139 Kindle Paperwhite, 3G - $179/$199 Kindle Keybd 3G - $139/$159, Free but slow web Kindle DX - $379 $299, Free, slow web

UK: Kindle Basic, NoTouch - £69 Kindle Touch WiFi, UK - £89 Refurb'd Kindle Keyboard 3G, UK - £149   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB Kindle Paperwhite, WiFi - £109 Kindle Paperwhite 3G, UK - £169 Kindle Fire 2, UK -  £129 Kindle Fire HD 7" 16/32GB, UK - £159/199 Canada - Amazon Canada Kindle Basic, NoTouch - $89

OTHER International Kindle NoTouch Basic - $89 Kindle Touch WiFi - $139 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB France Boutique Kindle Deutschland - Kindle Store Italia - Kindle Store Spain - Tienda Kindle Brazil - Amazon Brazil China - Amazon China Japan - Amazon Japan

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Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

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Kindle News - 10/21/11 - Kindle Format 8. EFF 'clears' Amazon's Silk browser, Android tablet market share: big jump, Steve Jobs on Android, Amazon to do ao phone?

AMAZON'S NEW "KINDLE FORMAT 8"  (KF8)- with HTML5 Support ... Also, Android tablet sales growth

Despite what has effectively been a one-tablet market, FierceWireless' Phil Goldstein writes that research firm Strategy Analytics is reporting that the Android tablet market share grew from 2.3% to 26.9% in 12 months.

  And that's before the Kindle Fire hits.  The Kindle Fire is of course Android-based.  Google just intro'd Android 4.0, called "Ice Cream Sandwich" enticing buyers again with powerful memories of childhood's ideal-food types (which I didn't outgrow).  Android 4 bridges the differences between Android smartphones and "Honeycomb," which was designed to optimize use of tablet space.

  Andy Rubin, Google's sr. vp for mobile, said this week that there are 6 million tablets running Android but readily concedes that it's dwarfed by Apple's 30 million.  The operating system version "Ice Cream Sandwich" will eliminate the need for tablet-specific apps.  There's a link at the end of this blog entry to the news story on Steve Jobs'  promise to focus on destroying Android for stealing from Apple's work.

Kindle Format 8  ('KF8')
I first heard about the Kindle format enhancements from a tweet by the vigilant Mike Cane leading to his take on it.

  Amazon's announcement
  Amazon's MOBI format and the ePub format are HTML-based, but Amazon's addition of HTML5-based options will add flexibility and layout control missing from the current Mobi version7 at a time when ePub revision 3 has  finally been put in place to make for a more consistent experience on different reading systems.  (HTML5 is the base language of ePub3.)
  The KF8 format change from Mobi7 is also timed with the release of the Kindle Fire Android tablet.

The types of books that will benefit from KF8 are those that benefit from complex graphic layout -- textbooks, children's books, comics, graphics-oriented books, cookbooks, etc.  There'll be over 150 new formatting capabilities, including fixed layouts, nested tables, sidebars, etc.

  You can see the List of supported HTML tags and CSS elements, which will be very familiar to HTML programmers and gives an idea of what they'll be able to do in the way of page layout.

Essentially, the HTML5 support includes the following (from Amazon's table):

CSS3 support	Floating elements
Fixed layouts	Text on background images
Embedded fonts	Numbered and bulleted lists
Drop caps	And much more

Some important points in Amazon's KF8 FAQ

• Embedded fonts are supported, so those of us who couldn't stand the TOPAZ format (preferred by publishers who felt they wanted more control over the Look but who didn't seem to know how ugly those books could be and the software problems they could cause) have reason to be hopeful.
  
  
• The Kindle Publisher Tools for KF8 including KindleGen2 and Kindle Previewer 2 will be available soon. Publishers can still submit only what they did before and the conversion (w/o the special features) will be done, but they'll be getting, soon, Guidelines on how to take advantage of the new capabilities.  
  
  
• The Kindle Fire will be the first Kindle device to support KF8, and in the coming months Amazon will roll out KF8 to their latest generation e-Ink devices as well as their free Kindle reading apps.
  
  
• Mobi files: "All currently supported content will continue to work."
  
  
• "ALL Kindle books currently available in the Kindle Store will be available on Kindle Fire."
  
  
• Publishers won't have to provide two versions of titles, since the upcoming updates to the publishing tools will take care of that.  KindleGen2 will convert submitted content "so that it works on all Kindle devices and apps."
     Publishers will be able to preview, with Kindle Previewer 2, how their titles will look on the range of Kindle devices and apps.
  
    This would mean that current Kindles would be able to read the books formatted with KF8 but without seeing the enhancements that allow the many new features mentioned.

OTHER NEWS
I'll just give links to these for those interested in the many Kindle-related news stories on the Net over the last two days when I couldn't be here. The shorter links are noted at the end of each for Kindle-edition subscribers.

CNet's Seth Rosenblatt's headline is "Amazon's Silk browser: Now EFF approved. Really!"
  Customers can turn off the "cloud acceleration" feature if they have privacy concerns.  Most of it is aggregated information and it's more important that the Silk browser get you to secure sites fast (since they have slower processes) than to bring you back to their servers first, etc.  But some concerns remain.  (Link: cnet.co/silk-eff-ok )

Will Amazon produce a Kindle phone? (Link: cnet.co/amznphonemaybe )

Steve Jobs reveals to biographer Walter Isaacson his strong intent to destroy Android.  (Link: tcrn.ch/sjobs-android )
  The reactions in comments are interesting.  There's a fine line between "inspired by" and "stealing from"... (Two words: Xerox, PARC)



Kindle Touch 3G   Kindle Touch WiFi   Kindle Basic   (UK: KBasic)   Kindle Fire Kindle Keybd 3G   (UK: Kindle Keybd 3G)   K3 Special Offers   K3-3G Special Offers   DX

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones   Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1 UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones     Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!