Amazon's new Kindle has better margins than the company does

“There must be something in the water at Amazon.com, given its commitment to price-cutting whatever the short-term pain,” remarks Martin Peers in a Wall Street Journal report. He explains that “The retailer’s decision to introduce a new, cheaper Kindle, just weeks after slashing the price of the existing version of the device, confirms that once again Amazon is taking the long view in trying to boost its share of a market—this time, e-books.” But it could also explain why the company continues to post lower-than-expected numbers, making Wall Street still wary.

As Peers also notes, “At $139, the new device is about a third the price of the original Kindle and nearly half what the second iteration was selling for just five weeks ago.” However, “That doesn’t mean the Kindle will become ‘mass market,’ as Amazon suggests; an occasional book reader is arguably no more likely to pay $139 for an e-reader than $259 ….”

What’s more, as he continues, there’s the fact that “Amazon also faces intensifying competition. Foremost is Apple. Its iPad, while pricier, offers far more functions than simply e-reading, and some may find it more user-friendly than the Kindle. Through June of this year, 3.3 million iPads had been sold.”

There’s also the Barnes & Noble Nook, which, says a New York Times report, is about to undergo a massive promotion campaign. According to Julie Bosman,

the chain will begin an aggressive promotion of its Nook e-readers by building 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all of its stores, with sample Nooks, demonstration tables, video screens and employees who will give customers advice and operating instructions.

By devoting more floor space to promoting the Nook, Barnes & Noble is playing up what it calls a crucial advantage over Amazon in the e-reader war: its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores, where customers can test out the device before they commit to buying it.

And the coming price war, says Peers in the WSJ, might “damp investors’ appetites for companies. Amazon may be following the only path open to it, but it still risks scaring those who don’t trust the company’s commitment to the bottom line.”

Meanwhile, one player says it’s staying out of the price war: “Sony won’t sacrifice the quality and design we’re bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader,” says the company’s  “vice president of digital reading,” Phil Lubell, according to a Forbes report.

Nonetheless, most are predicted the $99 ereader is just a question of time.

Amazon head Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, in a USA Today report, says, “I predict we [Kindle] will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover.”

And I predict that he won’t show any proof whatsoever of that. And that everyone will believe him and print it as fact nonetheless.

Hans Fallada

MobyLives‘ proprietor Dennis Johnson will be appearing on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show today at 12:35 pm ET to discuss Hans Fallada — who, by the way, was born on this day in 1893.

You can stream the program live here, or listen to it on 93.9 FM if you’re in the New York area.

It’s Independents Day, at least in our neck of the woods. We’ll be back tomorrow.

It’s the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., and we’re trying to make it memorable by reading and not responding to outside stimulus …. Back tomorrow ….

“Oprah Winfrey’s production company wants a federal judge to force a prominent Boston law firm to provide information about one of its former attorneys to bolster its case in a patent-infringement lawsuit against her book club,” says a Boston Herald report by Donna Goodison. Attorneys for Winfrey’s Harpo Productions claim “The lawsuit poses serious threats to the entire publishing industry ….” and they want the firm, Fish & Richardson, to be forced to give a deposition about its former attorney, Scott Harris.

According to the report, “Harpo is being sued by Illinois Computer Research, a Chicago holding company that bought Harris’ 2006 patent for Internet technology that allows readers to review digital excerpts from books prior to buying them.”

Harpo is claiming they are victim to an elaborate scam:

Harpo wants Fish to comply with a subpoena, because it was party to a similar patent lawsuit that ICR filed against Google, then a Fish client, in 2007.

ICR, which is tied to Harris, added Fish as a defendant in that lawsuit after Fish forced Harris’ resignation several days following its filing.

In court documents, Fish claimed Harris used Fish resources to build a portfolio of patents and cash in on them by selling them to parties that he knew would file infringement cases against companies that included his own law firm’s clients. The suit was settled in 2008.

Harpo believes Fish has information showing Harris knew companies already were putting book excerpts online before he applied for the patent.

“It would invalidate the patent,” Babcock said. “Barnes & Noble was doing it, Random House was doing it, some smaller publishers. In fact, Harpo was doing it before this guy claimed he invented this.”

The case is set to go to trial in July.

Lorin Stein

MobyLives‘ “literary parlor game” (so named by New York Magazine) is over: Lorin Stein, currently an editor at FSG, is taking over the editorship of The Paris Review.

We had previously engaged in two bouts of “irresponsible speculation” over who might get the job, but — despite naming nearly every editor in New York — failed to guess Stein. According to a source at the magazine, one of our guesses came close: Meghan O’Rourke, Slate culture editor and the poetry co-editor of the Paris Review, was a finalist for the job.

Stein, in an interview with the New York Times, said he was thrilled: ““Part of what The Review is for me is not just a place for writers to publish things and for readers to read them, but at its best it can be a gateway drug. My whole life has been in the shadow of that experience.”

Vicotria Espinel

Did you know the country had a copyright czar? We didn’t either, but we do — officially, Victoria Espinel’s title is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, a position created under the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (PRO-IP). Recently, she took to the White House blog (we didn’t know about that, either) to explain herself:

My job is to help protect the ideas and creativity of the American public.  One of the reasons that I care about this is because I believe it is enormously important that the United States remain a global leader in these forms of innovation – and part of how we do that is by appropriately protecting our intellectual property.  Our intellectual property represents the hard work, creativity, resourcefulness, investment and ingenuity of the American public.  Infringement of intellectual property can hurt our economy and can undermine U.S. jobs.  Infringement also reduces our markets overseas and hurts our ability to export our products.  Counterfeit products can pose a significant threat to the health and safety of us all.  Imagine learning that the toothpaste you and your family have used for years contains a dangerous chemical.  U.S. Customs officials have seized several shipments of counterfeit toothpaste containing a dangerous amount of diethylene glycol, a chemical used in brake fluid, and that in sufficient doses is believed to cause kidney failure.  All of these are reasons why your government has renewed its efforts to challenge this illegal activity.

My job is to help coordinate the work of the federal agencies that are involved with stopping this illegal behavior.  We are going to work together to develop a strategy to reduce those risks to the public, the costs to our economy and to help protect the ingenuity and creativity of Americans.  We want to be able to reduce the number of infringing goods in the United States and abroad.

Espinel — an Obama appointee (see the press release) — asks for help from the public in getting the data that will help her agency enforce copyright laws (and her mandate is only for enforcement, not for, say, re-thinking copyright laws). Says Espinel, “As a first step, we are issuing a notice to the public asking for your input.  Here’s a link to this request (pdf).  You can send your comments to intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov.  We look forward to hearing from you.”

But as Cory Doctorow points out in a comment at Boing Boing, “a standardized, rigorous way of reporting infringement would be a good recommendation — remember that the oft-cited statistics for job-losses due to piracy are an outright (and admitted) fabrication, as are the stats on college downloading. Getting some rigor into the numbers game would do a world of good.”

Tonight’s “Publishing in the Age of Blah, Blah, Blah: The Future of Book Journalism,” has been cancelled. We are, meanwhile, retitling the series. The new series — “Publishing in the Age of Snow” — will include the journalism, at a date to be determined. Stay tuned, and stay warm.

A few months back, we engaged in some “irresponsible speculation” about who might be in line for the editorship of The Paris Review. The magazine’s current editor, Philip Gourevitch, announced in November that he would leave his post in April. We threw out a number of names, including former and current staffers (who Gourevitch hinted might be considered), as well an array of others we thought might have a chance at the job. Our list of internal candidates and former staffers included Meghan O’Rourke, Jonathan Dee, Nathaniel Rich, and Matt Weiland. As for outsiders, we came up with Ben Metcalf, Elissa Schappell, Ben Marcus, David Kipen, Art Winslow, George Packer, Lawrence Wright, Deborah Treisman, and Ruth Reichl.

MobyLives readers rallied around one of these candidates: David Kipen, the former director of the NEA’s Literature program and a past editor of The San Francisco Chronicle’s book section. Another, New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, took some hits, with one reader saying Treisman had “staled the New Yorker’s fiction; the Paris Review doesn’t need that.” Another suggested that “it would be worth allowing [Treisman] to ruin the Paris Review’s fiction section in order to opening up the possibility of a New Yorker fiction renaissance.”

Readers also added some other names: Thomas Beller, Stephen Elliott, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Galassi, Robert Gottlieb, Charles McGrath, Daniel Menaker, Jack Pendarvis, Alice Quinn, Ben Sonnenberg Jr, Pat Strachan, Jean Stein, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Lynne Tillman, and Joanna Yas.

And now, there’s a new contender: Roger Hodge, until recently the editor of Harper’s Magazine. His name has been tossed into the discussion by Claire Howorth at Vanity Fair. The magazine reports that one whisper “gathering steam” is that “he’ll fill the editor’s chair at The Paris Review.” (Others say he’ll go to GQ.) “George Plimpton’s esteemed literary quarterly would be the perfect landing pad for an editor with Hodge’s highbrow chops.”

Updated, updated: The Millions thinks the man for the job is Dave Eggers. They also suggest Kurt Anderson, Keith Gessen, Dan Menaker, and Meghan O’Rourke.

Fergie and Little Red

Once a duchess, always a duchess, but once a bestseller, not always a bestseller. Or at least, that seems to be the lesson for Sarah Ferguson, the original Fergie and ex of the England’s Prince Andrew. After the divorce, the still-called-Duchess of York made money as a shill for Weight Watchers before writing a bestselling series of children’s books about Budgie The Little Helicopter. But as a Daily Mail story by Andrew Buckwell rather gleefully reports, her decision to start another children’s series about someone named Little Red doesn’t seem to be working: Nielsen Bookscan says her newest book in the series — Little Red To The Rescue — has sold only 159 copies.

Bookscan — which, apparently, is “respected” and covers 90% of the market in the UK, unlike here in the US, where it’s maybe 60-70%, and as for respect, well — is wrong wrong wrong, say “Sources close to the Duchess.” They claim “a technical hitch involving the code numbers carried by each book meant that not all sales had been properly registered,” and they sold “far more” in the US anyway. A spokesperson for Ferguson’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, “said the company could not immediately supply sales figures.”

Then there’s the movie deal:Ferguson sold movie rights for Little Red to Handmade films … which last month “suspended trading in its shares.”