there's been a lot going on recently with books. i've been watching eric ries and i'm blown away by how successful he's been at promoting his book the lean startup. i saw that @dharmesh wrote about it at onstartups.com, and tweeting out small agreeable little tidbits from the book is genius--i don't know whether this was intentional or not, but that's an awesome idea.

i met noah kagan last friday to catch up over drinks at showdown in sf, and i met someone interesting there: laura roeder. i usually meet people who claim to be "social media experts" (as every hacker reading this rolls their eyes) but this woman actually had a significant following and presence on twitter and facebook, and not one of those fake "follow me and i'll auto-follow you back" type of things. i dropped in on a small video conference she was doing today corresponding to her book launch, which i had not realized she was working on (for some reason, she didn't mention it when we met, even though i had mentioned startups open sourced was paying my rent at this point).

both of these people are promoting books, but i found it interesting that laura was only selling a kindle version, yet she was also holding the #1 spot for books in the marketing category, and i'm not just talking about in the kindle store, but across all books on amazon.com. there are two types of book categories on amazon: "books" and "kindle store", and they are ranked separately, but if you sell a kindle book, it can also "flow over" into the regular book rankings.

and then i saw that the steve jobs biography is coming out, but wondering why the price was so expensive on the kindle (i also wondered why eric ries' hardcover price was the same as the kindle version). the base cost of most printed books are around $10-$15. whatever you want to make as an author per book, as a rule of thumb you just subtract $15 from the unit cost. it's funny because if you scroll down to "tags customers associate with this product", the #1 tag is "publisher price ripoff." it looks like publishers are treating the kindle as if it carried the exact same costs as a regular book--but amazon promotes your book for you and requires zero printing or shipping/handling costs. the only thing they take usually is 30%.

my attitude on this wasn't the same as it was a year ago because the experience has changed dramatically--amazon has really built an awesome consumption experience (although kindle direct is an abomination, even amazon knows it). i wonder: why would you ever buy a physical hardcover book when you can read your kindle version on your desktop/laptop, your mobile device, and even download local copies to read them inside your browser (which is what i'm doing now with an actionscript book i just purchased)? when you stop reading on page 105 inside your browser, it picks right back up at page 105 on your mobile device. i've generally found kindle books to be much cheaper, so i have to wonder: why would you still buy a hardcover?

from the author's perspective--and also the customer's in that case--i can imagine it's nice to do physical launch parties (something i know nothing about since i've never tried) and the goal is to get high rankings and awareness to boost book sales, but if kindle store book rankings are going to flow over into non-kindle store rankings, at some point, your book competes with kindle books for its own ranking, so doesn't that defeat the purpose of going hardcover? and why do people price their kindle books the exact same as their hardcover versions, treating them as the same thing when they're not?