Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years

Yes! It's the book of the blog! As I mentioned in one of last week's traffic-destroying booky posts, I was giving a workshop at The Archive's 'Day of Books' (nice to see HH Sheikh Mohammed dropping by and commending Safa Park's finest book haven and café) on how to use self-publishing platforms.

Trouble was, I didn't have a book to use as a sample. And then it hit me - pull the blog into a book format. It took a tad longer than I had anticipated, but resulted in the best bits of my first two years of bloggery being poured into a nice booky book shaped mould. So now you can buy Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years as both a print book or ebook.

I found the whole process fascinating. For a start, going back over stuff you dashed down five years ago means quite a few surprises - I enjoyed myself reading over posts from that time when Dubai was overheating like a lunar capsule re-entering earth's atmosphere and then noting the transition to abandoned cars and vicious, clueless articles in the UK's media about the Downfall of Dubai. I think that period of turbulence is quite neatly documented (but then I would, wouldn't I?).

For the workshop, we uploaded the book to Createspace - which means you can buy a printed paper booky book of the Blog from Amazon for £8.99 with next day free shipping. It then went up onto Kindle Direct Publishing, which means a Kindle book can be yours for £0.77 (Amazon's minimum price). And then we uploaded the files to Smashwords, which supports the important ePub format (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and iBooks), again pricing the ebook at $0.99. All in about 90 minutes.

One interesting learning for me was that the Kindle Direct Publishing people came back to me as a result of their validation process because they had found the content in my book was already available on the Web. They wanted to know why - and that I owned the rights to the content - before they would proceed with publishing the book to the Kindle store. They were the only one of the three platforms to do this.

I might play around with the booky book price a little, but you can quickly see how the production cost of a paper book forces the price into the stratosphere compared to ebooks. It's one reason why I now refuse to pay publishers the same price for a Kindle book they charge for a paperback. They're just being greedy and lazy. As most will know, Amazon pays a 70% royalty if you charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook, but otherwise (from $0.99 to $2.98 and $10 to $200) it pays only 35%.

It all goes to show something frequently overlooked, but actually, IMHO, quite important. You can create an ebook out of almost anything - content can make its way into peoples' hands in seconds flat and archive material, as long as it's of interest to someone, anyone, out there can be turned into a globally distributable and available asset for an investment of pretty much nada up front.

Anyway, you can now buy a bit of this blog to put on your mantelpiece or wherever else you display precious things. If I sell more than ten, I'll do a sequel!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords

Who's Afraid Of The Kindle Fire?

Image via WikipediaIt hardly seems worth adding to the squillions of words being written about Amazon's Kindle Fire announcement last night. Engadget's real-time updates were fascinating enough, but this morning pretty much every gadget blog and site is looking at 'what you should know about the Kindle Fire' and analysing what this new thing means to us all. The papers (the serious ones, I mean) are all busily providing their much-vaunted 'context and analysis'.

It's all a  bit of a kerfuffle.

Personally, I've been flirting with the idea of a tablet since last year, when I decided to go Kindle. At the time of its release, Amazon's e-reader certainly had its detractors - all of them making like the wide-mouthed frog right now. The Kindle has not only been a brilliant success, it has transformed the publishing and writing world and continues to do so, injecting a great deal of fear and loathing into an industry that has been shaken out of its cosy leather armchairs. At the new $79 price point, it will only continue to do so. The Kindle touch, at $99, adds a touch screen, although it's not a 'full' touch screen, you tap it to move a page rather than swipe it. Which is a shame, as every person I have ever handled my Kindle to has first tried to swipe it to turn the page.

But it's the Kindle Fire that's really got people, well, fired up. The Fire is undoubtedly the one tablet device that is going to challenge Apple's dominance of the tablet market. Not because it's a really cool physical product (although it is), but because it's linked to the world's largest content repository. Amazon not only has millions of books, films and pieces of music to sell us, it has our credit card numbers (and our trust), our addresses and frequently the addresses of our friends and family too. With Whispernet, it is already delivering instantaneously accessible content to millions of people around the world. The Kindle Fire is the device that can access that content, as well as the services Amazon is building around it.

Sure, you can get stuff on Kindle for the iPad, but it's not the same. The Kindle Fire is integrated into Amazon. We're couch potatoes - we'll go for the easy stuff every time. For everyone who doesn't have an iPad right now, the Kindle Fire is a no-brainer at $199.

So where does that leave our, now age-old, argument about wanting to curl up with a good book rather than a slab of electronics? Well, Kindles just became a load cheaper and more accessible. And, at the high end, they got a whole load sexier. That means new consumers, new readers who can choose to download our work as e-books. We've already seen that American 'core readers', those who buy more than twelve books a year, have in the main migrated to e-readers. Now there are pretty compelling reasons for the mass market to follow in their footsteps. It's increasingly the case that in order to reach a wide readership, a writer needs to have an e-book.

It's not very good news for traditionally minded publishers. And it further cements Amazon's unbearably tight grip on the publishing industry. Amazon pretty much dominates the business of distributing books now, between the physical book sales and the e-book market. It is set to expand that dominance exponentially.

Sadly, those of us not born in the land of the free and home of the brave will have to wait a while for our new toys to arrive. Available on November 15th in the USA, the Kindle Fire cannot be shipped anywhere else in the world. And, of course, here in the Middle East we cannot sign up to download Amazon content. Yes, of course there are ways around that - but you're missing the mass market when you're making people jump through hoops like that.

Which is frustrating. As the world migrates to e-readers, the Middle East is left behind in the Paper Age simply because the biggest, most dominant players in the content reader device and distribution businesses, Apple and Amazon, do not give a hoot about the Arab world. And likely never will. Tragically, every move as brilliant and innovative as the Kindle Fire in this industry just widens the gap.