Wow, this is horrible news for Borders shareholders. What a sad, desperate company it has become. Sell.
Borders Hopes for 8th Day Film Deal – 7/15/2008 12:48:00 PM – Publishers Weekly
[Borders pr] said CEO George Jones and executive v-p of merchandising and marketing Rob Gruen “are managing the film rights.” (Jones and Gruen both have backgrounds in retailing; Jones previously ran Warner Brothers studio stores, and Gruen worked at Target and at Warner Brothers.) The statement added that even with the potential film sale, Borders will continue to focus on its core book business and in executing its cash flow and expense reduction initiatives.
I thought I would share with you the results of an analysis I did of my (historically low) efficiency at monetizing my web site via Amazon Associates.
- Google Analytics page views 1/1/2008 – date: 26032
- Associates clicks 1303
- Associates unit sales 14
- conversion rate 0.0107
- Associates referral revenue $10.04
- revenue/month $2.26
- NB after royalties revenue for referred titles 40
- Total imputed revenue (referrals + publisher comp)= 50.04
- Imputed revenue/month $11.29
- imputed $/page view $0.0019
- imputed $/1000 page views $1.9222
- imputed $/click $0.0384
- imputed $/conversion $3.5743
- bandwidth used (GB) 56.259
- GB/month 12.69
- max GB/month 200
- days covered 133
- months 4.433
- Imputed revenue/GB $0.89
- overage charge per GB $1.99
- Cost of High Volume Plans per GB $0.19
- possible ^ in usage w/o incurring additional bandwidth charge 15.76044129
- possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ usage x15 w/o additional BW charge =15 x imputed rev /month = $177.89 /month
- possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ conversion rate x 5 = $889.46
what all this tells me:
* I could increase the usage of my website by a factor of 15.7 before I hit the bandwidth threshold for my account at Pair
* assuming that revenue increased in linear proportion, and that I could improve the conversion rate, I could increase my Associates & Associates-driven revenue into the several hundreds of dollars per month
* increasing usage by x 15 would be hard work, there are other things I could do that would increase revenue more (i.e. publish more or better books)
My website has always been a bit of a mess because I use it as a combined blog and bookstore. It would be better to have a single purpose store. Right now the website is under construction as I experiment with new Amazon Associates widgets.
Things I have not seen explained yet in the press, or would like to see someone ask Amazon:
- What happened to Amazon’s selection promise — how can you be “world’s greatest bookstore” if you remove tens or hundreds of thousands of titles from your catalog at a stroke because they are supposedly “too hard” to acquire for your customers (via 24-hour POD ??)
- How exactly Amazon proposes for Booksurge to handle the load of 400,000 or more new POD titles that took LSI 10? years to put in print. it is fair to say that booksurge does not have a reputation for operational excellence. not that they couldn’t fix that, but so far they have not said or done anything to indicate that they are serious about accommodating all the business they’re asking for.
- Why won’t Amazon convert books from other POD formats into Booksurge’s — after all, Amazon is a technology company — let them do the work of reformatting tens of thousands of books — much more efficient to do it at the chokepoint programmatically than for thousands of publishers to do it individually. worst case is they have to buy a few extra printing machines and learn how to work ‘em. Not hard for a company with the resources of Amazon.
- Why can’t Amazon just do a deal with LSI to put LSI printers in Amazon fulfillment centers?
- Are your BookSurge reps ever going to be able to threaten anyone with Buy Button removal again, given that there will be an immediate viral response in the blogosphere if they do? given that the Buy Button threat is effectively inoperable — thanks to the power of the InterWeb — why don’t you just withdraw it?
It looks to me as if Angela Hoy is emerging as the heroine of this story. Apart from having the courage to speak out in the first place, which was huge, she is doing the best job of covering all the developments on a rolling basis.
Amazon.com–Print on Demand
Open letter to interested parties:
We wanted to make sure those who are interested have an opportunity to understand what we’re changing with print on demand and why we’re doing so.
One question that we’ve seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?
Yes.
Full bumpf available here
Amazon: you are a technology company. Do not make publishers reformat their entire backlist to conform to Booksurge specs. It is patently unreasonable to ask publishers to reformat thousands of books into Booksurge’s proprietary spec format. If you want to “own” POD, then man up and do the work. Or better yet, do a deal with LSI to put LSI machines in your fulfillment centers.
Amazon: what happened to your promise of being “the world’s greatest bookstore?”. Are you seriously telling your own customers that if a POD book takes 24 hours to ship to you, it is too hard for you to acquire it for your customers?
 wfzimmerman’s review: “Disappointing — a potted version of modern financial history. No unique sources or perspectives.”
PublicAffairs (2008), Hardcover, 256 pages
Dear readers,
I am pleased to welcome you to the Amazon detail page for
BB-67 MONTANA, U.S. Navy Battleship: Why She Matters Today
This is one of my favorites in the ever-growing Nimble Books list. The cover looks terrific–very realistic, just as if the Navy had really built the U.S.S. Montana! The interior of the book includes:
- pictures and information about the various design concepts that were explored
- the specifications of the final Montana design
- color pictures of a beautiful 1:700 scale model of Montana by Imre Somogyi
- a beautiful color painting of Montana by author and artist Wayne Scarpaci
- a picture of her never-built 1920’s predecessor, BB-51 Montana
- an essay on “Why She Matters Today”; and
- a discussion of Senator Jon Tester’s efforts to get the U.S. Navy to name a capital ship after his home state of Montana.
In short, this presents a unique package of art and text devoted exclusively to one of the most interesting hypothetical ships ever designed.
I’m very happy to see that this book is selling well. I hope you enjoy it.
Cordially yours,
Fred Zimmerman
Publisher, Nimble Books LLC
P.S. if you are interested in reading other stuff about Montana, I recommend two major studies of U.S. battleships:
U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History by Norman Friedman and
Battleships: United States Battleships, 1935-1992 (Battleships) by Garzke.
Both of these books rely on archival sources to give a highly technical history of the ten or twenty different designs that were considered for Montana. My book’s different in that I tackle the issue of “why do we care about this today” head-on.
Dear readers,
I am pleased to welcome you to the Amazon detail page for
BB-67 MONTANA, U.S. Navy Battleship: Why She Matters Today BB-67 MONTANA, U.S. Navy Battleship: Why She Matters Today
This is one of my favorites in the ever-growing Nimble Books list. The cover looks terrific–very realistic, just as if the Navy had really built the U.S.S. Montana! The interior of the book includes:
- pictures and information about the various design concepts that were explored
- the specifications of the final Montana design
- color pictures of a beautiful 1:700 scale model of Montana by Imre Somogyi
- a beautiful color painting of Montana by author and artist Wayne Scarpaci
- a picture of her never-built 1920’s predecessor, BB-51 Montana
- an essay on "Why She Matters Today"; and
- a discussion of Senator Jon Tester’s efforts to get the U.S. Navy to name a capital ship after his home state of Montana.
In short, this presents a unique package of art and text devoted exclusively to one of the most interesting hypothetical ships ever designed.
I’m very happy to see that this book is selling well. I hope you enjoy it.
Cordially yours,
Fred Zimmerman
Publisher, Nimble Books LLC
P.S. if you are interested in reading other stuff about Montana, I recommend two major studies of U.S. battleships:
U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History by Norman Friedman and
Battleships: United States Battleships, 1935-1992 (Battleships) by Garzke.
Both of these books rely on archival sources to give a highly technical history of the ten or twenty different designs that were considered for Montana. My book’s different in that I tackle the issue of "why do we care about this today" head-on.
Ares Homepage
The X-47B Unmanned Combat Aircraft Demonstrator. So much for pilots.
Technorati Tags: X-47, UCAV
MacDailyNews – The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name
Back to the naming issue: Apple’s “iPhone” isn’t really a phone at all. It’s really a small touchscreen Mac OS X computer, a Mac nano tablet, it you will. Here’s how misnamed the iPhone is: some people are complaining that Jobs didn’t spend enough time on the Mac in his keynote! Folks, iPhone is not only a Mac, it’s the most radical new Mac in years! What’s to stop Apple from making a 12-inch (and larger, and smaller) one of these (use the headset for the phone, please) and calling it a Mac tablet?
I don’t want an iPhone. I don’t want to be stuck with AT&T’s pokey EDGE network and I don’t want a 3.5″ browser.
But I’d love an 8 1/2 x 11 iPhone with a hard disk and about a thousand PDF books on it… wouldn’t that make a terrific complement for Google Books? I’ve read rumors that Google and Apple are thinking about working much more closely … an iReader with iBookstore would make a lot of sense. Maybe this is where Google Book Search is going with its long-delayed “online access” option. (I submitted my pricing info for online access more than 18 months ago, and no sign of the feature yet…)
Technorati Tags: Google Book Search, iPhone tablet, tablet pc,
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