Hasta La Gadget!

There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.

“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”

There are a handful of devotées who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.

Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.

The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)

Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.

When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.

Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]

See Also:

• Kobo Beats iBooks with International iPad Bookstore, App
• How to Transfer Your Stanza E-Book Library to iBooks for iPad …
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Games, Chat, ePub: Imagining the Future of Apps for Kindle …
• Despite Reports, B&N Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle's Space, And Other First …
• Apple's iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …
• Kindle vs. iPad in the Sun
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Kindle for Web, Blackpad, Sure; Amazon Android Tablet, Maybe …

Amazon is announcing that a new kind of content will soon join books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in the Kindle store. Called Kindle Singles, the 30-to-90 page e-chapbooks aim to split the difference between feature-length magazine articles and shorter books.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti. The costs of print production, marketing and distribution have historically driven the page-counts of book monographs up and the word-counts of magazine and newspaper articles down.

Amazon said that Kindle Singles will have its own section in the Kindle store and will be priced “much less than a typical book.” Amazon will also grant authors and publishers the same royalty split for singles as on the Kindle Digital Text platform: 70% on books costing between $2.99 and $9.99.

There are print precedents for 10,000-to-30,000-word works — novellas, chapbooks, long pamphlets, extended journal articles, among others — but they’ve usually been either tied to specific genres or downright exceptions to the form. They’ve never been a central part of the publishing model in either fiction or nonfiction.

Translation Jackets for On Bullshit; Image by Princeton University Press

Kindle Singles is also unusual in calling on publishers to produce stand-alone “born-digital” works that may not ever be traditionally printed. Some publishers may use the form to sell individual sample or advance chapters of longer print books. Individual writers may benefit the most from the program, as it makes it easier for them to self-publish works that precisely for reasons of length can’t find support from traditional publishers.

Two further possibilities, particularly if other e-book retailers follow suit with similar chapbook-length offerings: digital-only publishers (or offshoot imprints) could emerge to produce works specifically for this format, or the additional revenue and marketing stream of electronic publishing could lead print publishers to produce more short-form books in print.

I wouldn’t discount this last possibility. In 2005, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit became a surprise hardcover bestseller. Frankfurt’s “book” was a reprint of a journal article that had already been collected and published in a longer anthology. It sold over half a million copies and spawned a sequel, despite being just 67 pages long and printed in an unusually small 4″ by 6″ format.

See Also:

• Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas
• E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It's Not What You …
• Why Metadata Matters for the Future of E-Books
• What if E-Books Cost Less?
• E-Books King: Stephen the First
• From Rejection to E-Lation
• The E-Book as Print-Edition Ad

Amazon seems ready to get into the app-store business with plans to launch a new Android app store.

The company has reportedly sent welcome kits to some developers to entice them to start signing on to the store, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Engadget.

With its plans to offer an Android app store, Amazon may be hoping to take on the Google Market, currently the app store of choice on most Android devices. Exploding sales of Android smartphones and the introduction of new Android-based tablets hungry for apps may have caught Amazon’s attention and had it clamoring for a piece of the action.

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Smartphones running Android OS were more popular than iPhones among new U.S. buyers in August, according to a report from the Nielsen Company.

Currently, Google’s Android market has about 90,000 apps, compared to Apple’s App Store with 250,000 apps.

Upstart, independent challengers such as AndSpot and SlideMe are slready trying to create their own Android app stores. It’s all kosher because, unlike Apple, Google allows for multiple app stores to exist on the Android operating system. These independent app stores hope to lure users with the promise of better search and user interface, greater availability internationally and increased revenue.

Amazon may be betting on something similar, and it certainly has the clout and the brand to be more popular than the upstarts. But winning over developers may not be easy.

“From the developer perspective, its trial-and-error to see how effective they really are. A lot of these app stores — whether from Verizon now or Amazon in the future — are yet to prove themselves,” says Paul Chen, director of business development at Papaya Mobile, an Android games developer.

Still Chen says his company is open and willing to embrace any distribution channel that could increase the visibility of its apps.

Though Amazon has been extremely tight-lipped, here’s everything we know so far — based on the leaks — about Amazon’s plans:

Look and Feel

Amazon’s app store is likely to be a lot like Apple’s: carefully curated and targeted at consumers who are tired of the chaos in the Google Android Market. Spam, poor quality of apps, and the inability to easily find apps are major problems in the Android Market. But what Amazon’s app store will be called, look like, or the kind of features it will have are all still under wraps.

For consumers, it will be exciting if Amazon can bring features such as recommendations, wish lists and deals to its app store.

Cost, Control and Availability

Developers will reportedly have to pay $100 to sign up — just as they do with the Apple app store.

Unlike the current Google Android Market, where any developers can publish apps as long as it follows the company’s guidelines, Amazon will decide what will get into its store, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Apps can either be free or paid. Paid apps will have to be competitively priced. That means developers can’t charge more for the same app on the Amazon app store than in other markets.

Amazon’s app store will likely be available only in the United States, though it won’t be long before Amazon extends it to other countries. After all, Amazon has all the necessary payment systems in place to make this happen, even as Google Checkout remains limited.

Support and Distribution

This is where things get confusing. It is not clear which Android devices Amazon’s app store will support or how it will be distributed. Google’s Android Market comes preloaded on all Android smartphones. But Amazon will have to ink deals with device makers to get its app store in there.

We’ll also have to see if Amazon’s Android app store and Google Market will coexist on a device. If they do so, it could cause consumer confusion and give rise to app store fragmentation.

Also, with the availability of tablets and hardware boxes running Google TV, which is based on the Android platform, it will be interesting to see whether Amazon limits its app store to just smartphones or if it is willing to go where Google fears to tread.

See Also:

• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers
• Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market

Photo: (astanush/Flickr)

There’s now little doubt that Amazon — for reasons that may or may not be borne of sound mind — is hard at work setting up its own app store ecosystem for Android devices. We’ve got a tiny bit more evidence of that today in the form of the complete welcome kit being sent out to prospective developers; there’s not anything too mind-boggling in here, but let’s break down some of the key points:

• From the wording, there’s no question that the system is exclusive to Android — at least initially.
• Amazon is already accepting submissions, but only of promotional materials and other non-app assets; presumably, they’re trying to make sure they’ve got critical mass before deploying.
• Oh, and here’s another reason they’re only taking non-app assets right now: the “App Packaging Tool” that binaries will need to be run through prior to submission isn’t yet ready. The nuts and bolts of the tool aren’t yet clear, but Amazon says that it will “ensure that the apps will install properly on customers’ devices and… enable the digital rights management (DRM) policies outlined in the developer agreement.”
• Speaking of DRM, turns out it’s not required. It’s up to the developer whether to enable it.
• Developer-submitted videos will be supported in the app product pages, which is kind of nice — neither the Android Market nor the iOS App Store support that.
• Naturally, it’s at Amazon’s sole discretion what will be allowed and disallowed in the store; “offensive content” won’t be permitted, and the company says that “what [it deems] offensive is probably about what you would expect.” Neither pornography nor “hard-core material” are cool.

So there you have it — Amazon is expecting to ingest actual app binaries “in a few weeks,” so it looks like this will be ready in time for the holidays. App store fragmentation seems like the last thing any mobile platform needs right now, but we’re sure that these guys — with the huge opportunity for showcasing apps on a site network that gets tens of millions of views per day — would just love a slice of that multi-billion dollar pie.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Amazon sends ‘welcome packet’ to prospective app store devs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Oct 2010 02:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the market for a MacBook Air? Well, now may not be the best time. Apple Insider is reporting indirect sales channels (read: non-Apple stores) are running out of the thin-and-light with no indication of a replenishment. Indeed, we just checked Amazon, Best Buy, and a few other online retailers and were consistently greeted by limited- and out-of-stock notices. So, you know what the means — new hardware rumors. Or rather, old ones resurfacing, such as the 11.6-inch display from late September. Compounding the community’s curiosity would be vague tweets from famed company insider John Gruber, who casually mentioned “the imminent” new MacBook Air as a possible reason for the recent Apple Store downtime. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case, and for all we know it could just mean some refreshed specs — if even that, really.

AI reminds us that October has been historically the month of refreshed Mac hardware in the lead-up to holiday shopping… but that doesn’t mean it’s the case now. All we really know now is that third-party outlets aren’t currently stocking the Air and it’s unknown if they’re getting anymore shipments of this particular model — which, we know, isn’t nearly as exciting as the imagination. Sorry about that.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

MacBook Air supply dwindling for online retailers, rumor mill raises an eyebrow originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Oct 2010 20:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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