Sam Iles's Blog

The cheapest new Kindle is $79 in the USA.

The cheapest new Kindle is £89 in the UK.

“BAH,” people are crying “the exchange rate should make the kindle £50.4889116! How dare Amazon!”

But, the Kindles are different. The USA one is subsidised with ads. The UK one isn’t. Without ads, that same Kindle costs $109 in the USA.

$109 at the exchange rate is £69.661916. Add the 20% VAT which we have to pay (and the Americans don’t) and you get to £83.5942992.

That’s only £5.40 off the asking price. Which is easily accounted for with import duties and the “increased cost of doing business in the UK”.

Please, people: let’s use some perspective here.

Amazon are missing a trick here. There isn’t yet a good way to read graphic novels (comic books, you could say) in a digital way. Sure, you can buy graphic novels on the Kindle, but they are few and far between and certainly aren’t the popular ones. There’s no Walking Dead or Watchmen or even the old DC/Marvel comics.

But if they created a proprietary format (like they did for normal Kindle books) which could display comics well on an iPad or any other screen by automatically adjusting to fit the screen size, they could totally own the space.

Of course, there is the fact that most comic book artists like to lay out their books very precisely, with boxes overflowing others and such, but, still, I’m sure Amazon could do something good.

I am currently clearing out my inbox in keeping with one of my new year’s resolutions to be inbox zero whenever I can (really, just killing time while I wait for Merlin’s book). I’ve gotten down from around 550 to just 7 emails in the last two or three hours. It has not been a pleasant experience. But, if I can stay at this level, it should make me much more productive and happier.

Anyway, I discovered an unread email which I sent to myself in 2007. It is so special that I thought I had better share it with you.

Open up Amazon. Go to a category using the navigation on the left. You will be taking to a URL that looks something like this (if you select books, for example):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=samenubo0?ie=UTF8&node=266239

Copy the bit after “node=”. In this case, we would use “266239″.

Then, hit this URL:

amazon.co.uk/gp/search/?node=NUMBER&pct-off=75-99

replacing “NUMBER” with the category you want.

What this does is show you everything in the category which has between 75 and 99 percent off. You can change the 75 or 99, too. So,

amazon.co.uk/gp/search/?node=266239&pct-off=98-99

would show you every book with 98 or 99 percent off. There is no way to do this using the website’s normal features.

One extra point, depending on the category, you may not get the best results (some categories take the individual sellers price of 1p into account). In this case, change the seller to Amazon.co.uk, then you will only see new products which Amazon are selling.

This is great for finding heavily discounted cameras or something. Anyway, enjoy…

I’ve always wanted to get a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and I’ve always put it off, saying, ‘I’ll do it when traffic reaches X’ and, ‘I’ll do it next month’.

But, yesterday I finally bit the bullet and made it happen. As I know that I have a diverse, not entirely technical reader base here and I think CDNs are very interesting, I’ll explain them a little.

When you load a webpage, you aren’t loading one file. You are pulling down the actual page itself, CSS files for styling, JavaScript files to make stuff happen and images. In fact, most of the size of the page is made up of such files rather than the page itself.

My server is located in Atlanta, USA. I chose this location because it is just about in the right place that it can easily serve the whole the USA (where most of my customers are) while still being close to Europe. If you ask for a page in Europe, the data has to be sent all the way from Atlanta, and this takes longer than if the server were in London.

This has never been a problem before, but as my server serves more and more pages (we’re talking monthly figures approaching one million now-a-days) people in Europe and Asia will start to notice a delay.

This is where a CDN comes in. A CDN takes your static files (CSS, images, JavaScript) and stores them around the world at different ‘edge’ servers. For example, my CDN has many servers in the USA, many in Europe and many in Asia. Now, when you visit certain pages on my sites, the HTML content (or PHP page), which is the smallest part, will be loaded from the server in Atlanta, while the larger constituents will be downloaded from your nearest location.

This means that if you are in Europe or Asia you will get much faster page loading. People in the USA (and the rest of the American continents) will get slightly faster speeds as there are extra edge locations within the USA. All of the PHP and HTML comes from Atlanta and all of the database work is done there too, but big data files come over the CDN. I think this is very good.

Getting a little more technical, I upload all of the content via FTP as you normally would to something called the ‘origin server’ at content.smilescdn.com. This website is located on the server in Atlanta. The CDN then pulls the content from Atlanta and stores it in the various edge locations around the world. The URL of the CDN is www.smilescdn.com and is an exact replica of whatever I put on content.smilescdn.com, only it loads much faster. Files are checked by the CDN from Atlanta every 24 hours to see if they have changed (and you can force a file update should you need to). If they’ve changed, the new version is sent to the edge locations.

Oh, one other note, I used Amazon’s CDN, CloudFront. I picked it because you only pay for what you use. There are not upfront or minimum costs. If you only accumulate 1 pence of charges in a month, then that’s all you pay for.

I’ll be doing a more detailed, technical post over on the Deverous Blog soon, so look out for that.

UPDATE: If you are wanting the more technical, review post, it’s here on the Deverous blog now.

This is not a review of the Kindle, but of the entire Kindle platform. I don’t read tree books anymore, only Kindle books as they’re better for the environment and I find them generally more convenient. Being able to buy a book and have it on your device in under 60 seconds really is great.

The store full of books – hundreds of thousands of them. If you want a book, it will nearly always be in the store. Books are usually cheaper than their paper counterparts, too. Some newer books are a little more expensive (often the same process as the hardback if that’s all they are available in). But, there are also books that are much cheaper for example, you can buy all 60 entire books by Dickens for just a couple of pounds. This would cost a few hundred pounds if you bought them all in paper form. There are many collections like this. Dickens, Shakespeare, Lovecraft, Wodehoouse, Austen, Wilde and thousands more for a few pounds. I think these incredibly cheap collections more than make up for some slightly expensive newer books. There are, however, somembooks which aren’t available, some very notable. For example, Harry Potter is nowhere to be found, and nor is James Bond. This are books which really should be in there, but I expect they will be soon.

I have the second generation 3G Kindle, which I got just over a year ago now. I think it is a fantastic device. It is very light and thin (with the new third generation Kindle being even thinner). The keyboard isn’t that nice to type on, but the third generation’s is said to be much nicer. I find the screen of very high quality, but the refresh rate in undeniably slow. Again, the new Kindle is much better. Moreover, the new Kindle is just £109. If you read books: it’s worth it.

The Kindle iPad app is well designed and works great. It offers all the features you could need and allows highlighting and bookmarking. Your place is also synced between the iPad app and the Kindle, meaning you can switch between them effortlessly. If you own an iPad, I really see no reason that you would use Apple’s iBooks for reading. The Apple iBookStore has very few books, and is far more expensive than Kindle books. Plus, with iBooks you’re tied to Apple iBooks. Sure, it’s available on the iPhone too, but if you buy a Kindle book, you can read that one books on the Mac, PC, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and more. It just makes so much more sense than iBooks.

The Mac app is simple, but does what it says. I use it rarely, as I don’t see much of a reason to read on my Mac. However, it would be perfect for, say, a programming book. I’ll never buy a programming paper book again. It makes a lot more sense to have it on the iPad and Mac (because it’s searchable and highlightable).

I’ve decided to write a book, for no other reason than I think it will be fun. I always wanted to be a journalist. And I don’t really do anything else with my life, so I figured it’d be relaxing too.

I don’t really expect to finish it – or to even attempt to get it published in the sense of sending manuscripts to people. But, if I decide to I will publish it to the Amazon ebook store so that anybody with a Kindle or iPad or iPhone or Mac or PC can read it – and everyone has at least one of those…

The book is about something I’m passionate about – animal rights. That makes it really interesting to research, if nothing else (it’s amazing learning about all the people who cared about animal rights too, like Albert Einstein).

To write the book, I’m using Scrivener, which is simply amazing. It is one of those few Mac apps that feels like it was developed by Apple and that is really quite perfect. I love it and would recommend it to anybody doing any kind of slightly long writing project – you won’t regret it.

I’ll keep you updated…

eReaders are bigger than ever right now. It seems tech – and non tech – companies are talking about them everyday. At CES this year many eReaders were announced. It isn’t just Kindle and Sony anymore.

But in this post I don’t want to talk about the hardware – just software. Specifically, the book prices. That’s probably the major problem holding people back right now.

In terms of store availability Amazon has to win. They have the most books from the most publishers. It’s around 300,000 books now.

In delivery mechanism, Amazon also wins. Other eReaders use wifi or plug into the computer, but Amazon use cellular data networks which allows you to get a book in under 30 seconds from nearly anywhere in the world. This means you can take your Kindle on holiday and download books in any country on the beach. That’s great.

But the big problem is pricing. Many eBooks cost more than print books right now. This really should not be when you compare the costs: print books require paper, ink, printing machines, staff, rent for facilities, delivery to book shops. eBooks require nothing but the costs of the cellular network data.

So why aren’t eBooks cheaper? Well, most are. Most new realease best sellers are less than $10. And out-of-copyright books are much cheaper. I recently bought all 51 books Charles Dickens has ever written for my Kindle at the incredible price of around $2. That’s insanely good value compared to what that would cost in print. At least $150.

But some books are much more. The infamous $9.99 boycott has gained some momentum on Amazon now. People who believe eBooks should not cost more than $9.99 take advantage of Amazons user features and tag them ‘9.99 boycott’. I do them same, I must admit.

Remember, the price of eBooks is set largely by publishers. They don’t want to sell more e than print, so they price highly. But many big publishers now say their eBook sells account for around 15%.

But I don’t think publishers should be worried. If they at least set their price the SAME as print then people would still buy them – what is the difference if they spend their money in e or print? The publisher does not have to worry about people sharing books – becaus they can’t with eBooks.

If they sell 100,000 eBooks for $7.99, what’s the difference to selling 100,000 print books at $7.99?

The much better delivery mechanism would only lead to more sells, yet they are still afraid…?

But then, I have a Kindle, so I guess I am biased…