On the surface this looks like a nice deal, and it probably is, but you know that Amazon is in it to make money and dominate market share. Their M.O. has always been to make it financially irresponsible for anyone to compete with them in a market segment that they intend to dominate. If you’re  a Trek fan, think of Amazon like the Borg. Little shops are either assimilated (become Amazon partners and give a cut of their business in exchange for not being disintegrated) or they fail. There are obviously exceptions but overall this is how it works.

Amazon’s plan here looks a lot like a plan to cut Apple off at the pass.  Apple has been in talks with Harper that we know of, which means they’ve probably been in talks with other publishers as well. The iTunes store is currently the largest media distribution hub on the planet, and certainly the most profitable. Apple is about to unleash a Tablet on the world, a 10″ piece of technocandy that will have geeks fauning and eReader lovers drooling. If Apple is allowed to create eReader buzz with their tablet, hook it up to the iTunes store so that downloading books from the tablet is as easy as downloading stuff for an iPhone, and Apple gets a bunch of publishers on board with eBook distribution through the iTunes store – you can see where this might end: with Apple dominating the eBook market the same way they dominate legal music downloads. If this happens, then the Kindle will become 2nd fiddle in a market that is rapidly expanding and gaining in popularity. Amazon doesn’t want that.

So what do they do? They offer a 70% royalty deal that includes a clause to prevent you from offering digital copies of your book anywhere outside the Kindle store to intice people into their camp. Lowered eBook prices could generate a huge increase in sales volume for eBooks, which will make publishers see more profit potential in eBooks and the entire thing becomes a self-feeding, beneficial cycle, the “network effect” as it were.

A lot of people in the publishing industry might not know this, but 70% is what application developers get as royalty from sales in the iTunes store. What this really means is that for an indie developer, the entire production chain is taken care of for them – the only thing they need to concern themselves with is building the software. There is no distribution cost to them, and Apple only taking 30% is actually a bargain considering what the independent developer might have to pay otherwise to get their application out in the world.

The conspiracy theorist in me figures that since the developer royalty rate on the App Store for the iPhone is 70%, and Apple is about to unleash a Tablet, and Apple has been talking to publishers, and Apple is currently sitting on the biggest media hub on the planet, that Amazon figures Apple’s going to offer a 70% royalty rate as well. This is why I think they’re trying to cut Apple off at the pass. They get people to start coming up with plans to adopt Amazon’s DTP, Amazon gets their hooks in, and by the time people get ahold of the Apple Tablet, they’ve sold their souls to the Kindle.

This whole business reminds me of the HD-DVD/BluRay format wars. Do I get a Kindle and read only Kindle books? Do I get a Nook and read only Nook books? Do I get an Apple Tablet and read only iTunes eBooks? At some point the house of cards will fall and there will be one winner. Only time will tell if any of this is good for the consumer and how it will change the publishing industry as we know it. As I’ve said before, the bottom line is that if authors and publishers do not embrace change, adapt, and move forward they will be left in the dust.

Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case?

Regardless of the answer to that question, that’s still the wrong question to be asking. Lots of people are worried that printed books are going to disappear the way CDs have “disappeared” (I use quotes here because you can still buy CDs in stores, they are just losing popularity). What happens to writers if printed books go away? Are we all just going to go extinct like the dinosaurs? From talking to some people and listening to their fear, one would think that one day all writers on the planet are simply going to sink into a tar pit and disappear, to be replaced by the proverbial “thousand monkeys” sitting in a room typing out Shakespeare (eventually).

We’re not looking at an extinction here. Everything evolves, including the art of storytelling. Writers can either put themselves on or ahead of this evolutionary change or they can be left behind. There will never cease to be a market for storytelling, the only thing that changes is the medium through which the story is told. Primitive cultures that had no written language told stories, including oral histories, to each other. Once people figured out how to paint on cave walls, stories depicting great hunts were painted on those walls. When people figured out how to write on papyrus, great stories were told on papyrus. When man invented the printing press, great stories were told to larger numbers of people. When man invented the eReader, great stories were told to people riding buses, sitting on trains, or wiling away the hours on a beach.

Writers will always write, and people will always crave a great story. The medium through which people crave those stories is going to evolve as technology evolves and people’s lifestyles change. It is my opinion that writers need to embrace these new mediums and be part of the evolution of those mediums, helping bring about fantastic new ways to tell stories. Historically, artists who cling to the “old ways” and refuse to accept new mediums are left behind.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think that our books are all going to disappear. I don’t think that we’re going to lose the pleasure in visiting a library that smells like books or visiting a big book store and spending hours just browsing. We are, however, going to have more options available to us that are tailored to our specific needs and lifestyle and that represents great new opportunities for writers, not a death knell.

First and foremost the thing I noticed was that the device was terribly slow. I usually have a pretty high tolerance for low speed devices and I know that eReaders are not PDAs and are not meant to be treated like the iPhone (where you yell at the device when it takes more than .0005 seconds to come up with a Google Map). That said, the device still felt really sluggish. Searching through the book catalog felt slow, even skimming through search results felt slow. Additionally, I was actually confused at times trying to navigate through search results and local catalogs. If the device can confuse and confound me, I can’t imagine what the device would do to my father, a self-professed luddite but one who might actually like an eReader.

The other thing that really bothered me was that while reading, the device would do what I can only imagine is some kind of e-ink refresh. The entire screen reversed itself into the negative and then back again, but it did so at a snail’s pace. I sat down and tried to read a few pages this way and I found that I was continually drawn out of the reading experience by this refresh as well as the lack of responsiveness. If I have to sit around and tap my shoe waiting for the page to turn, then the eReader certainly offers me nothing over the traditional piece of printed paper where I typically have little to no trouble turning the page.

The bottom line here is that I was so upset by my use of the Nook that I decided I’m not getting my wife one for Christmas and I’m not getting myself one. I will seek out some friends who might have a Kindle. If the Kindle’s reading experience is even marginally better than the Nook then that’s the device I’ll be buying. If it’s on par, then I’m just going to have to stick with printed paper for another year or so until the technology gets better.

Call me crazy, but I love the smudged thumbs I get from a 3-hour reading session where the real world ceased to exist and it was just me and my alternate reality, lovingly prepared for me by my favorite authors. I love the smell of books and the feel of curling up with a book in a comfortable chair with a ridiculously strong coffee.

Lately, however, after having moved a few thousand pounds of books from an apartment into a house, I’m considering a less analog solution. The big bonus to the eReaders is instant gratification – the shipping time on an eBook is roughly 60 seconds and there is no shipping cost.

The Amazon Kindle 2 is a great device. You can download any book from their roughly 350,000 book large collection. It comes with the ability to get magazines, newspapers, and you can even hit Wikipedia from the device.

Personally, I think the device looks decent, but it doesn’t draw me in. It doesn’t feel like something that could substitute for my need to curl up in my favorite chair with a good eBook.

Book prices are reasonable and it comes with the usual pile of acoutrements that you would expect from an eReader. The new offering from Barnes and Noble also seems to have the usual amount of goodies that you get with standard eReaders. Of course it uses “e ink”. If you’re not familiar with this, it isn’t the same thing as a computer monitor. You can read eInk in full-on glare and sunlight without a problem, just like a regular printed page. The thing that I find really appealing about the B&N Nook is that they’re trying some new innovative stuff. First and foremost is the ability to lend books to your friends. That’s right, if you buy a book from your Nook, you can send a lent copy of that book to a friend of yours with any eReader (Nook, iPhone, Windows, Mac, Blackberry, and more) for 14 days of free unlimited reading. This is a really cool feature because I hate how DRM (Digital Rights Management, the encryption technology that protects media) normally inconveniences legitimate owners more than it does pirates.

Another thing the Nook does is when you go into a Barnes and Noble, you can use the Nook to preview the contents of virtually any book in the store over the free in-store WiFi. This is really appealing to me because even if I do take the plunge and get an eReader, I still love the feeling of being in a book store and making my eReader give me bonuses for physically being in a book store is really nice.

Technically speaking, there are very few differences. The Nook has a second touch-screen that is full color that lets you browse content by book cover whereas the Kindle has nothing like that. The Nook weighs a couple ounces more and has 10 days of battery life whereas the Kindle has 14. Kindle is $279 and the Nook is $259.

From a writer’s standpoint, there are intriguing possibilities for eReaders of all kinds. I would like to see this technology used to shorten the life cycle between when the final manuscript is finished and when readers get a copy of the book. Safari, a website for computer programming books, does this already – you can see the contents of a book well before it is published and then purchase the print copy for a discount. I’d also like to be able to bring my eReader (say, my Nook) into a public library and be able to take out library books by putting them on my eReader and then the book just disappears after the 2-week take-out period.

To make a long story short, I’m leaning toward the Nook this holiday season both as a gift for my wife and possibly to get one for myself. It just looks cooler than the Kindle, B&N is offering 1,000,000 books to Kindle’s 350,000, and anything that gives me more reason to hang out in the in-store Starbucks and browse book catalogs is a huge bonus.