There are many experts who can help authors get published, and now Amazon has gathered all that advice on a single site.

Currently in beta, Amazon Author Insights features the advice of many published authors including Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, Bryan Cohen, and Elizabeth S Craig as well as a number of articles by Amazon’s staff (under the byline Kindle Press).

The site is hosted on Tumblr, and is divided into three sections: Write, Publish, and Market. There’s also a fourth section which claims to focus on tools and services, but really just lists various Amazon services (KDP, Createspace, Kindle scout, Goodreads, etc).

Amazon has not announced the site yet, and it’s not clear what they’re trying to accomplish here.  But the articles I read all contained sound advice, so the site is definitely worth checking out.

Amazon Author Insights

Amazon rolled out an update today for its iOS app.

The update adds a new sharing option for iOS Safari, enabling readers to easily convert documents and web pages and save them to their Kindle library.

The other new feature is support for Comixology’s guided view, the frame by frame viewing mode which directs readers along the story.

Amazon bought Comixology in 2014, and then integrated the platforms in 2015 so that users could read their  Kindle purchased comics in the Comixology apps. Now apparently the integration goes both ways.

Changelog:

• ComiXology’s Guided View is now available on Kindle! Experience comics in a whole new way with this breakthrough cinematic and immersive reading mode.
• Send to Kindle – Now you can save documents and web pages to your Kindle library. Tap the share button in Safari and add Kindle as a destination. Web pages are converted to Kindle format so you can adjust the text, font and page color, and read on any Kindle app or device.
• Bug fixes and performance improvements.

You can find the app in iTunes.

image by Marcus T Ward

The media is playing an elaborate game of telephone today with the news that the US gov’t may soon require that electronics be limited on flights from, well, Arab countries.

According to the BBC and other sources, passengers will only be able to bring smartphones with them in the passenger cabin:

Airlines from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa will require passengers heading to the US to check laptops and tablets in the hold. The directive is reportedly the result of a security threat and could be announced as soon as Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to comment on the issue. "We have no comment on potential security precautions, but will provide an update when appropriate," DHS said in a statement to the BBC.

The Transportation Security Administration, which is part of Homeland Security, also refused to comment.

It is unclear which airlines would fall under the ban and how long it will be in place. But Royal Jordanian Airlines tweeted on Monday that it would ban passengers from carrying on most electronics to and from its North American flights, CNN first reported.

I still haven’t found any reports that this story has been confirmed,  but according to a contact, this is not such a ridiculous idea.

Edit: The Guardian has a screenshot of the original TSA memo, but no explicit confirmation.

"You can fit a bomb into a smaller volume than most people realize," they told me. "Banning large electronic devices from the cabin will mean that the gadgets will go through bomb-detecting scanners before being loaded into the baggage hold."

"Bombs have been found in checked luggage in US airports, and the stories rarely make the evening news," they added.

image by LoadedAaron

Cory Doctorow just announced his support for an ebookstore platform that has me scratching my head.

It’s not just that he has apparently abandoned his support for free Creative Commons-licensed ebooks in favor of selling ebooks (welcomes to 2007, Cory!) but also that he believes that authors should be sales staff for publishers.

From PW:

Walkaway has traditional publishers, and it will have a traditional e-book edition. But I’m going to sell that e-book in a nontraditional way. I’m launching an e-book store with the book, a store that I’ve privately developed for the past three years, code named "Shut Up and Take My Money" (SUATMM). SUATMM is what I like to call a fair trade e-book store, in which the writer also serves as a retailer.

There are many small, niche-oriented e-book stores serving highly specific markets, but SUATMM is different. It’s a retail platform that lets authors with traditional publishers serve as retailers for their those publishers, on the same terms as Amazon, Kobo, Google, BN.com, Apple, and other giants. Those stores have resources no individual author (save, perhaps, the delightfully DRM-free J.K. Rowling) can muster. In particular, they can manage a seamless experience that no indie bookstore can hope to match.

Buying an e-book from a website and sideloading it onto your Kindle will never be as easy as buying it from the Kindle store (though if the world’s governments would take the eminently sensible step of legalizing jailbreaking, someone could develop a product that let Kindles easily access third-party stores on the obvious grounds that if you buy a Kindle, you still have the right to decide whose books you’ll read on it, otherwise you don’t really own that Kindle). But a bookstore operated by an author has an advantage no giant tech platform can offer: a chance to buy your e-books in a way that directly, manifestly benefits the author.

As an author, being my own e-book retailer gets me a lot. It gets me money: once I take the normal 30 percent retail share off the top, and the customary 25 percent royalty from my publisher on the back-end, my royalty is effectively doubled. It gives me a simple, fair way to cut all the other parts of the value-chain in on my success: because this is a regular retail sale, my publishers get their regular share, likewise my agents. And, it gets me up-to-the-second data about who’s buying my books and where.

It also gets me a new audience that no retailer or publisher is targeting: the English-speaking reader outside of the Anglosphere. Travel in Schengen, for example, and you will quickly learn that there are tens of millions of people who speak English as a second (or third, or fourth) language, and nevertheless speak it better than you ever will. Yet there is no reliable way for these English-preferring readers, who value the writer’s original words, unfiltered by translation, to source legal e-books in English.

Amazon and its competitors typically refuse outright to deal with these customers, unable to determine which publisher has the right to sell to them. Most publishing contracts declare these nominally non-English-speaking places to be "open territory" where in theory all of the book’s publishers may compete, but in practice, none of them do.

Even in the Anglosphere, readers are often left to their own devices. Told that Amazon U.S. can’t sell the book to them, they must discover for themselves where to find the book on Amazon U.K. But acting as my own retailer, I can easily determine who gets the publisher’s end of the payment: in the U.S. and Canada, it’s Tor; in the U.K. and the Commonwealth, it’s Head of Zeus. Everywhere else—all that open territory—it’s me.

For the other defined territories, it’s a simple matter of calculating the remittances and sending payments and statements to my other publishers, just like any other retailer. The difference being that rather than my publishers sending me 25% of the money due twice a year in the form of a royalty check, I am in control of the money.

In case you are wondering, Doctorow is apparently talking about BookGrail, the (Gumroad slash Aer.io) platform from UK publisher Head of Zeus. (Or at least that platform was briefly mentioned in his post; Doctorow doesn’t explicitly say how his brainstorm would work.)

When I first read this I first thought about taking Cory to task for his anti-Amazon FUD (he blames Amazon for only selling ebooks where suppliers tell it to).

I also thought about pointing out direct sales have never lived up to the hype.

While it is easy to buy ebooks in the Kindle Store, it’s difficult to find much less buy ebooks in niche 3rd-party ebookstores (hence why Harry Potter ebooks are available everywhere, why Baen Books moved into the Kindle Store – not away, and why Hachette never launched its Kindle Store competitor).

But I am not going to make that point because this effort might have enough publicity to succeed. (Plus I want authors to sell direct because they get more money.)

Instead, I want to point out Doctorow’s blind spot: the unwarranted assumption that authors need or even should be doing business with publishers.

The thing about Cory Doctorow is that he was an ebook pioneer. Ten years ago he was advocating that ebooks should be released DRM-free and under a Creative Commons license so that all could gain access (this mattered more in the pre-Kindle era when it was difficult to buy ebooks even in the US). He even went so far as to forbid his publisher from selling the ebook.

But like many pioneers, Doctorow advanced only so far. He never managed to shed his original assumptions and keep up with the times.

For example, Doctorow still thinks authors should do business with publishers.

It’s 2017, and publishers now expect authors to do their own marketing, blog regularly, be active on social media, and ideally already have their audience built before the contract is signed.

And now Doctorow wants authors to also

• Sell ebooks for publishers,
• And handle payments,
• And remit the money to publishers in several countries?

Okay, but if authors are going to do all this work then why sign with a publisher in the first place?

It’s 2017, and authors can control their work completely, they can hire the help they need, and they can cut out middlemen by dealing directly with retailers like Amazon.

Who would they give up control, and a lot of money, just to act as a salesperson for a publisher?

image by Joi

Remember how the Kindle Unlimited funding pool dipped in February in 2015 and 2016?

It happened again.

The KU funding pool dropped to $16.8 million in February 2017, a decrease of a million dollars from January. At the same time, the per-page rate increased slightly, to just under half a cent per page (0.49741 cents, to be precise).

• US: $0.0050 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0034 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0037 (GBP)
• France, Spain, Italy: €0.0049 (EUR)
• Netherlands: €0.0045 (EUR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.01203 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5170 (JPY)
• Australia, India, Mexico, Canada: no data

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million

Self Publisher Bibel, Amazon

image by investmentzen

Since 2013 Bexar County’s Bibliotech digital library has opened two local branches as well as kiosks in a hospital, bus terminal, and on local military bases.

San Antonio Express News reports that Bibliotech will soon open a third branch on the east side of  San Antonio:

Bexar County officials offered a sneak peek Monday of what will become BiblioTech’s third — and largest — digital library, scheduled to open in August at the new East Meadows housing development.

Spanning 4,200 square feet, the digital library at the corner of North Walters and Burnet Street will be equipped with 50 computers and will offer access to electronic books and magazines and other services, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. Membership is free for Bexar County residents.

 The digital library’s arrival to the East Side marks another step in the neighborhood’s transformation, which has made big strides since the Wheatley Courts public housing project was demolished and the mixed-income East Meadows development was built in its place.

“You’ve heard me talk about that vision for San Antonio being a globally competitive city, where everyone has opportunity to connect to prosperity,” Mayor Ivy Taylor said Monday. “We can’t achieve that unless we close the digital divide.

The new library will have few if any paper books and will instead devote its space to a reading room, a community room, a children’s area, a maker’s lab, and two group study rooms.

You can see the first bookless branch in this explainer video:

Anti-piracy firm Digimarc has taken a stab at defining the scale of the ebook piracy issue. They hired Nielsen to conduct a consumer survey on piracy, and found:

E-book piracy currently costs U.S. publishers $315 million each year in lost sales, and the Nielsen survey revealed that people who illegally download e-books are largely ordinary consumers, students and working professionals who access e-books from a wide range of digital sources, including online auction sites and via email from friends. The study highlighted the fact that 70% of illegal downloaders have either graduated from college or have a graduate degree. The most common age-range of an e-book pirate is between 30- and 44-years-old with a yearly household income between $60,000 and $99,000.

"When it comes to book piracy, you can’t prevent what you can’t predict. This is the challenge for publishers as they grapple with preventing illegal piracy," said Devon Weston, director, market development, Digimarc Guardian. "Our new Nielsen data makes it clear these pirates don’t fit a typical criminal profile. They access digital content from a vast universe of web pages, social platforms and file sharing portals. Our aim is to break down the problem for publishers and help them develop an effective prevention strategy."

Digimarc has a financial incentive to convince you that piracy is bringing about the end of western civilization; they sell anti-piracy services.

So this data comes from a highly suspect source, but even so it is the most accurate piracy data I have seen. Where most piracy stats come from analysts' wild guesses, the figures mentioned above are based on a consumer survey.

Real people were polled about their media consumption habits. We don’t know what they were asked (and that is another reason to distrust the data) but or once we have real data on the issue.

And that data tells us that piracy isn’t much of a problem in the ebook realm.

That  $315 million may sound like a lot but going by AAP figures ebooks were a four billion dollar market last year.

No one knows the true size of the ebook market, but we do know that the AAP said that their members earned $579 million from ebooks in the first half of 2016. That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).

That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).

When I ran the numbers, I got a market estimate of $4.1 billion.

And so Digimarc’s best estimate is that piracy accounts for less than 10% of the market.

In other words, it is nothing to worry about.

image by pasukaru76

New data from Japan’s Research Laboratory of the Publishing Science shows that the Japanese publishing industry revenues dropped to 1.47 trillion yen (around US $ 12.8 billion) last year, down 3.4% compared to the previous year.

Book sales accounted for 737 billion yen of that total, and only declined 0.7%. Magazine sales in Japan accounted for much of the rest, and totalled 734 billion yen. PublishNews.com.br notes that this was the first time in 41 years that magazine sales in Japan fell short of book sales.

eBooks, on the other hand, were the bright spot in the market stats. Japan’s digital books market grew 13.2% in 2016, compared to 2015. eBook sales totalled of 25.8 billion yen.

The highlights of the Japanese market in 2016 included the ongoing shift from the paper manga to the electronic manga; the bankruptcy of Taiyo-Sya, which was the fifth largest distributor of books and magazines in the country; and the expansion of the digital magazine reading market.

image by Guwashi999

A new digital writing device called the NoteSlate is scheduled for release soon, carrying a retail price of $99. Although it utilizes electronic paper technology, this gadget is not intended to function as a traditional e-reader. Instead, it is designed specifically as a digital sketchpad and note-taking tool.

The NoteSlate features a 13-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 750×1080. In terms of aesthetics and functionality, the company plans to launch four hardware versions that utilize different ink colors—black, green, blue, or red—alongside a separate model capable of displaying four colors at once. At its core, the device offers a minimalist user experience focused on creating, storing, and erasing drawings or handwritten notes. However, the manufacturers have indicated that a future firmware update will expand its capabilities to include PDF support compatible with Adobe DE DRM.

Weighing just 240 grams, the tablet is expected to offer an impressive battery life lasting several weeks on a single charge. While the developer of the specific epaper technology remains unconfirmed, industry speculation suggests Kent Displays may be the source. This is due to the fact that the NoteSlate’s screen dimensions and resolution are unique in the current market, and its industrial design shares similarities with the Boogie Board, another writing-focused device from Kent Displays.

The device has generated significant interest for its budget-friendly price point, though it has also faced criticism from users who would prefer support for external keyboards and text entry over purely handwritten input. While the initial announcement created a localized media buzz, subsequent reports have noted delays in the product’s development and availability. Regardless, the NoteSlate represents an attempt to find a niche for large-format electronic paper beyond the standard ebook market.

Earlier this week ZDNet and other sites reported that Brazil’s supreme court had reduced or eliminated taxes and import duties on ereaders and ebooks, but I think they are missing the story.

From ZDNet:

E-books are set to become more affordable in Brazil as the Supreme Court has ruled that they will now enjoy the same tax immunity as the pronto counterparts.

The debate on whether e-books should have the same tax treatment as print has been going on since September 2016 and the final ruling on the matter is that print and e-books are indistinguishable from each other.

In addition, reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle will also be tax-immune. However, the ruling stressed that this immunity is not extended to multifunctional devices that may support book reading software such as tablets, smartphones and laptops.

It is expected that in the next few months prices will be lowered across the purveyors of digital content operating in Brazil

According to Wikipedia, Brazil’s standard VAT rate is 42%, while books are tax exempt. This means that Brazilian ebook prices could drop by half in the near future.

And just as importantly, so could the price of ereaders.

Brazil has magnificent import duties which sometimes exceed the price of the imported product by a factor of two. The duties are not reflected in the price of the Kindle, which sells in Brazil for about 30% more than the US price, but 3rd-party ereaders imported by Brazilians can easily cost twice the list price.

Now much of the import duties have been removed (but not all – some Brazilian states impose their own sales taxes).

And that means ereaders are going to get a lot cheaper in Brazil – and Brazilians are probably going to see ereader prices drop a lot faster than ebooks.

After all, how do you know that publishers won’t just keep ebook prices high so they can pocket the difference?

Publish News Brazil

image by Rodnei Reis

eBooks make up a significant share of trade book sales in the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries but things are quite different in Spain.

Dosdoce's Javier Celaya revealed at a PubMagNet meeting last month that ebooks are expected to reach a double-digit share of Spain’s book market in 2016. The final data won’t be available until June, but Celaya said that ebook sales should reach 10%, up from around 6% of Spain’s book sales in 2015.

The Spanish book market as a whole is expected to grow by 3 to 3.5% in 2016, compared to 2.8% growth in 2015. Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales,

Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales, and only because publishers started getting sensible about their digital opportunities.

Celaya also pointed out a peculiarity of Spain’s digital book market: many Spanish publishers have reported that more than 60% of their digital sales are made internationally. Half of those international sales are coming from Latin America, with the US market and Europe accounting for 20% and 10%, respectively.

Spanish publishers are discovering what anyone in a niche national market should know; thanks to ebooks, one doesn’t have to be limited to the local. This is just as true in Spain as it is in South Africa.

Publish News Brazil

images by Genlab Frank,  Contando Estrelas

Eleven-month-old audiobook service Libro.fm launched an Audible-style subscription service last week.

This startup has been selling DRM-free audiobooks since last April, and now customers in the US and Canada can sign up for a monthly $15 subscription and buy one audiobook each month.

"The Libro.fm membership now gives audiobook listeners the opportunity to support their local bookstore every month and discover great audiobooks hand picked by expert indie booksellers," said Mark Pearson, CEO of Libro.fm, in a statement. "Most of us spend hours each day commuting and doing tasks where we could be listening to a book. Audiobooks are a great companion for escaping traffic, rocking your workout, or making the time pass while weeding, which is now one of my favorite activities."

Libro.fm has a catalog of more than 70,000 titles. You can listen to the audiobooks in its iOS or Android apps, and since the audiobooks are DRM-free you can also load them onto your preferred device and listen to them there.

For the past 18 months I have been arguing that  Kindle Unlimited was one of the major ebook channels in its own right just based on what it was paying publishers and authors each month.

New data from the latest Author Earnings Report shows that Kindle Unlimited accounts for a larger share of the US and UK ebook markets than even iBooks.

Correction: Data Guy sent me an email, pointing out that my title is wrong. What he found was that KU earnings, when combined with the retail sales of all the titles in KU, accounted for a greater number of unit sales (which, in my opinion, is a pretty confusing way to measure KU activity).

The main focus of the report is the relative size of each of the five major English-language ebook markets, but a later section delves into Kindle Unlimited’s share of the market.

Indie authors often struggle with the choice of whether to make a particular title a Kindle Unlimited-enrolled Amazon-exclusive or to sell it at all retailers. For those authors, the breakdown of indie sales on the left side of the above chart is a particularly interesting one. But it’s worth keeping in mind that around half of the “KDP Select” indie sales are actually full-read-equivalent Kindle Unlimited payments to indies, rather than straight retail purchases.

So let’s now break those KU full-read equivalents out separately, as shown as yellow pie-wedges in the two charts below:

So what do the above graphs tell us about Kindle Unlimited and indie author earnings?

The breakdown of indie dollar author earnings looks nearly identical to the unit-sales splits shown above. Kindle Unlimited indie page reads (at a current run rate of $180M+/yr) are now paying Amazon-exclusive indie authors far more total dollars than “wide” indie authors are earning from their sales at all non-Amazon ebook retailers combined (a total run rate of roughly $50M/yr in non-Amazon indie author earnings).

So should publishers and authors go all in on Kindle Unlimited?

Maybe, but to be honest I would not make a business decision like that based on the above data.

I am not disputing the validity of the data; my point is that individual authors are so small and the market so large that (with the right marketing) you can make a lot of money with either option.

Hell, there are authors making a living on direct sales or from other channels that don’t show up in the broader market data.

So while Kindle Unlimited’s market share matters on a broader scale, it is less important to individual authors and publishers.

There’s an article in tomorrow’s morning coffee post which I feel merits discussion.

A couple academics at the London School of Economics tried to explain why ereaders took off in the US but not in Japan, only they stumble around the primary causes without actually naming them or really understanding what lead to the rise of the Kindle.

For example, this is mostly true but still misses the most important detail:

In part, the limited availability of e-books in Japan reflected industry perceptions of Amazon’s critical role in the success of the Kindle. Our informants did not believe any single Japanese company could play an Amazon-like role in Japan, in the sense of developing a Japanese e-reader and securing a supply of hundreds of thousands of e-books for that reader. For this reason, publishers and retailers were unwilling to invest large amounts of money developing e-book editions of popular Japanese books.

The availability of Japanese e-books has also been influenced by the interdependence among book retailers, wholesalers, and publishers in Japan. Japanese wholesalers were most likely to be hurt by the introduction of e-books. Publishers and retailers were heavily dependent on the two major wholesalers for sales of paper books. These concerns were amplified by pricing concerns. In Japan, publishers had the legal right to set the prices of paper books, which eliminated price competition for new books. Although the resale price law does not affect the pricing of e-books, Japanese publishers worried about the potential impact of e-book discounting on the performance of wholesalers and other industry players. For this reason, many publishers were reluctant to offer discounts on e-books, despite the success of Amazon’s aggressive discounting in the US.

First, Amazon did not launch the Kindle with "a supply of hundreds of thousands of e-books"; the Kindle Store carried "more than 90,000 books" when it launched in November 2007 and was, in fact, missing the entire catalogs of major trade publishers like Macmillan.

Now that I think about it, Macmillan is a good example of US publishers being as much of a stick in the mud as Japanese publishers. Macmillan didn’t actually get serious about ebooks until well into 2010. It wasn’t just their backlist; Macmillan was publishing new titles print-only in mid to late 2009.

The simple fact is Amazon was not able to sign most trade publishers until after the Kindle took off. But that is a nitpicky detail; the important point is what happened before the Kindle launched.

Amazon was only able to launch the Kindle because it arrived after decades of disruption in the US book market.

Starting in the 1970s, big-box bookstore chains disrupted the market by buying in large quantities and discounting as deeply as they could afford. This forced small bookstores to close, and as a result consolidated much of the US book market in a double handful of companies.

That disruption and consolidation enabled Amazon to come along in the late 1990s and work out deals with publishers (rather than dealing with wholesalers). Amazon used its contacts with publishers to convince _some_ of them to put their titles in the Kindle Store.

That disruption and consolidation did not happen in the Japanese book market, and so it did not set the stage for a company like Amazon to come along and launch a platform like the Kindle.

Next, the economists also misunderstood the impact of contracts:

Copyright law has also influenced the availability of e-books in Japan. Since the 1990s, American publishers have typically secured the rights for paper and e-book publication at the same time. In Japan, however, books are often published based only on verbal agreements. Moreover, even with a written contract, authors generally retain the copyrights to their works. As a result, the publication of an e-book edition of a paper book typically requires a separate agreement with the author or authors. One publisher told us that in most cases these agreements must be negotiated in face-to-face meetings. Moreover, concerns about piracy often make authors reluctant to permit the publication of e-book editions of their works. As a result, relative to the US, the process of bringing an e-book edition to market is often more expensive and time-consuming in Japan.

That contract issue was still a problem in the US book market even after the launch of the Kindle; in fact, the paranoia about piracy was also true long after the launch of the Kindle.

And those are not the only similarities between the two book markets which the researchers misunderstood; they also failed to grasp basic details about file format incompatibilities:

One example of a technological factor that influenced consumer adoption decisions was the existence of two incompatible file formats, both designed to accommodate unique aspects of written Japanese. As a result, files designed to be read on a Sony e-reader could not be read on a Sharp e-reader and vice-versa. This incompatibility decreased the perceived value of e-readers for many Japanese consumers.

When Amazon launched the Kindle Store, there were six primary ebook formats in the US book market: Adobe PDF, eReader, eBookwise, Mobipocket, Sony Reader, and MS Reader.

Thanks to the quirks in Kindle DRM and other technical details, the  Kindle format was the seventh ebook format in the US ebook market.

The US ebook market was even more balkanized than the Japanese market, and yet Amazon somehow overcame the technical problems and quickly dominated the market.

O O O

The blog post discussed above was based on a recently published paper. I can’t see the paper (it’s behind a paywall), but I hope the researchers were more thorough in their investigation and analysis than their blog post suggests.

If not then the world would benefit from the paper being retracted and fed through a shredder.

Industry specialists overwhelmingly agree that podcasting has become a premier marketing channel. To effectively reach an audience today, individuals are encouraged to either launch their own series or appear as a recurring guest on established shows. However, successfully navigating a guest appearance—ensuring the experience is engaging for the audience while meeting your personal promotional goals—requires more than just showing up.

Drawing from eighteen months of experience and several guest appearances, veteran web publisher Nate Hoffelder shares the following insights on how to avoid common pitfalls and excel in the podcasting space.

### Content Preparation
The most significant factor in a successful guest spot is preparing your material in advance. While podcasting often feels conversational, it is actually a form of spontaneous public speaking. Sounding natural and authoritative requires significant groundwork.

If you have experience speaking at professional conferences, you have a head start. Most presentations can be converted into talking points for a digital interview. If you are starting from scratch, consider these steps:
* **The Pitch:** Research the podcast to understand its format and target demographic. Your proposal to the host should clearly explain how your presence will provide value to their listeners.
* **The Script:** A useful strategy borrowed from traditional broadcast media is to provide the host with a list of potential questions and your prepared answers. This helps guide the conversation and forces you to synthesize your knowledge into accessible segments.

### Technical Requirements
Investing in the right hardware is essential to ensure a professional broadcast. While requirements vary, a high-quality headset with a noise-canceling microphone is the most critical purchase. Relying on built-in laptop microphones or lapel mics can lead to audio interference and echo issues.

Furthermore, because many podcasts now record video for social media or live streaming, a high-definition webcam is necessary. Standard integrated laptop cameras often lack the clarity needed for professional-grade video.

### Testing and Strategy
Technical difficulties are common and often take longer than ten minutes to resolve. To mitigate this, guests should advocate for a "dry run" with the host at least one week before the actual recording. This rehearsal ensures that the software, audio levels, and internet connection are all functioning correctly.

In addition to technical checks, guests should study previous episodes to understand the show’s dynamic. It is vital to know if the host expects a formal interview, a casual chat, or a deep-dive educational session. Communicating directly with the host about their expectations and their level of familiarity with your topic will help you tailor your responses effectively.

### Final Considerations
In the podcasting world, you rarely get a second chance to record an episode. Production schedules are tight, and hosts are unlikely to re-record a segment if the guest was underprepared or the audio was poor. Because of this, the preparation phase is the most critical part of the process. Investing time in your equipment and content strategy is the only way to ensure the final product serves both the host and your own professional brand.