Tuesday, May 27, 2014

The magic of digital reading and the success of Kindle – Tiscali

One of the most interesting events of the International Journalism Festival , held a few weeks ago, as always, in Perugia, was the meeting with Russ Grandinetti , vice president of Kindle Content Amazon.

Grandinetti manages the sale of eBooks, newspapers and magazines customers Edition all over the world and is also involved, including Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Publishing (KDP), the service of self-publishing Amazon.

Who better than him to take stock of the situation on the new digital tools at the service of publishing ?

Although it has been reluctant to predict the future of journalism, Grandinetti said that Kindle has created a system that makes millions of satisfied customers the use of a digital text , and that this could be a great starting point for journalism. He said: “ In the publishing industry, as in journalism, the digital transition will probably be the biggest change we will see in our time .”

People are choosing to spend more and more time reading rather than do anything else, and this is also due to the introduction of e-book reader.

In the United States and in the United Kingdom, the 30% of the proceeds from the digital industry publishing. The other European countries are a bit ‘further back, since the e-book technology was launched a few years later, but head up to the same estimate.

The Kindle is born in 2007 , and up to three years ago it was sold only in the United States.

The success of the Kindle was to propose a device that was just an e-reader, which had a screen similar to a page of paper, but high-resolution, low cost, with a long battery life, easy to carry anywhere .

Grandinetti says that anyone who buys an e-book reader does not want the device allows him to control the ‘e-mail or access to social networks, which would be grounds for distraction. He says: “ The magic of reading is that when you open a book you get lost, you can immerse yourself completely and lose track of what’s going on around “.

Reading is not a daily habit for most people, but that small percentage that law usually worth much. And more and more readers prefer to buy a book in digital rather than its printed version. “ Buying books online is now the rule, not the exception ,” he says with confidence.

what are the against?

People like libraries, are the shops where consumers prefer to spend their time . So, in the digital world as it should be the shopping experience in-store?

One of the next targets of Amazon is trying to convey in the digital experience in- store buy a printed book and vice versa. Anyone who enters a library will still have a smartphone in your pocket, in your bag or a tablet, so it is important to involve experiences with secondary compared to buying.

With Waterstone in the UK trying to make the live experience and digital closely related, for example by offering a discount on the issue of a digital book with the purchase of one printed.

But the biggest difference between a printed book and a digital one is the impossibility, in the second case, pay a book to a friend.

Grandinetti admit that this is one of the main issues in the sector. It’s a question of intellectual property and trying to protect the interest of the publisher and the author. You run the risk of piracy then it comes to finding a balance. Grandinetti explained: “Of course readers are our customers, but also our customers have the authors “.

Regarding the self-publishing Grandinetti pointed out that the authors of KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) know their audience. “ The most famous example is 50 shades of gray . It is a book that traditional publishers would not have published and has sold 250,000 copies of KDP. This is an example of someone who knew his audience . “(Text and translation of Simeon Nunzia Falco)

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