“Publishers Lunch has discovered metadata streams from Amazon that confirm listings of “Kindle Edition” offerings for a variety of books, newspapers and magazines–the first tangible signs of the company’s building e-reading initiative following the discovery of an FCC filing for the Kindle last September. Nearly all of the mentions we located are not live on the Amazon site itself, but are found in web services feeds that query the Amazon computers for data that’s posted on other sites. (Indeed, we found the first mention of a Kindle Edition through our own Amazoom tool, which brought up a Kindle match for Hill Harper’s Letters to a Young Brother.)” – PL.
The TeleRead take: Great detective work! Now, here’s the really interesting part, beyond PL’s belief that the Kindle e-book reader (ugly prototype shown here) will pop up in the fall. “Nearly all of the hardcovers and recent releases we found have ‘list prices’ of $16.99 or thereabouts–already lower than the hardcover prices–and the site further ‘discounts’ from a variety of list prices to an apparent standardized selling price of $9.99. This will naturally make people wonder if Amazon is trying to establish that price point as a common listing, as the closest they could come to a system akin to iTunes dollar-per-song model.”
Big question #1: What about the differences in lengths and production costs of books—all kinds of variables?
Question #2: I hope there won’t be any gotchas in terms of formats. Will Mobipocket work ok on the Kindle? And how long until the IDPF format works. It’s coming to Amazon, huh?
(Big thanks to Jane.)
