Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels?
For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.
The $359 Kindle, which is slim, white and about the size of a trade paperback, was introduced a year ago. Although Amazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books. Now it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Analysts credit Oprah Winfrey, who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and blame Amazon for poor holiday planning.
The shortage is providing an opening for Sony, which embarked on an intense publicity campaign for its Reader device during the gift-buying season. The stepped-up competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device.
“The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven’t done anything,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “But it’s happening now. This is really starting to take off.”
Sony’s efforts have been overshadowed by Amazon’s. But this month it began a promotional blitz in airports, train stations and bookstores, with the ambitious goal of personally demonstrating the Reader to two million people by the end of the year.
The company’s latest model, the Reader 700, is a $400 device with a reading light and a touch screen that allows users to annotate what they are reading. Mr. Haber said Sony’s sales had tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the device is now available in the Target, Borders and Sam’s Club chains. He said Sony had sold more than 300,000 devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006.
It is difficult to quantify the success of the Kindle, since Amazon will not disclose how many it has sold and analysts’ estimates vary widely. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believed Amazon had sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October, before Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement. Others say the number could be as high as a million.
Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr. Hildick-Smith said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds.
So far, publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device — including simple laptop downloads — constitute less than 1 percent of total book sales. But there are signs of momentum. The publishers say sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.
Amazon’s Kindle version of “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski, a best seller recommended by Ms. Winfrey’s book club, now represents 20 percent of total Amazon sales of the book, according to Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide.
The Kindle version of the book, which can be downloaded by the device itself through its wireless modem, costs $9.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. The Reader version costs $11.99 from Sony’s e-book library, accessible from an Internet-connected computer.
Even authors who were once wary of selling their work in bits and bytes are coming around. After some initial hesitation, authors like Danielle Steel and John Grisham are soon expected to add their titles to the e-book catalog, their agents say.
“E-books will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen,” said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.
Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. Some of the most committed bibliophiles maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.
At Harlequin Enterprises, the Toronto-based publisher of bodice-ripping romances, Malle Vallik, director for digital content and interactivity, said she expected sales of digital versions of the company’s books someday to match or potentially outstrip sales in print.
Harlequin, which publishes 120 books a month, makes all of its new titles available digitally, and has even started publishing digital-only short stories that it sells for $2.99 each, including an erotica collection called Spice Briefs.
Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone.
Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.
All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys.
Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format.
Meanwhile, the quest to build the perfect e-book reader continues. Amazon and Sony are expected to introduce new versions of their readers in 2009. Adherents expect the new Kindle will have a sleeker design and a better microprocessor, allowing snappier page-turning.
Mr. Haber of Sony said future versions of the Reader will have wireless capability, a feature that has helped make the Kindle so appealing. This means that the device does not have to be plugged into a computer to download books, newspapers and magazines.
Other competitors are on the way. Investors have put more than $200 million into Plastic Logic, a company in Mountain View, Calif. The company says that next year it will begin testing a flexible 8.5-by-11-inch reading device that is thinner and lighter than existing ones. Plastic Logic plans to begin selling it in 2010.
Along the same lines, Polymer Vision, based in the Netherlands, demonstrated a device the size of a BlackBerry that has a five-inch rolled-up screen that can be unfurled for reading. There are also less ambitious but cheaper readers on the market or expected soon, including the eSlick Reader from Foxit Software, arriving next month at an introductory price of $230.
E Ink, the company in Cambridge, Mass., that has developed the screen technology for many of these companies, says it is testing color screens and hopes to introduce them by 2010.
Many book lovers are quite happy with today’s devices. MaryAnn van Hengel, 51, a graphic designer in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., once railed against e-readers at a meeting of her book club. But she embraced the Kindle her husband gave her this fall shortly after Ms. Winfrey endorsed it.
Ms. Van Hengel now has several books on the device, including a Nora Roberts novel and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” She said the Kindle had spurred her to buy more books than she normally would in print.
“I may be shy bringing the Kindle to the book club because so many of the women were so against the technology, and I said I was too,” Ms. Van Hengel said. “And here I am in love with it.”
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold
Sunday, December 21, 2008
47 Tips for Cutting Costs Without Cutting Staff
With a battered economy dragging down just about every retail sector, a salient fact making headlines has been the ability of discounters to maintain sales growth—a sure sign that the “Wal-Mart Effect” has permeated every corner of the business world, and that raising prices is probably not the way to realize profits. This leaves cost-cutting, which, for obvious reasons, book publishers would like to pursue aggressively without sacrificing either product quality or valued employees. Here are some tips from a cross-section of the publishing world for reining in costs without sacrificing too much in the process.
Tips from...
Dwight Baker, president, Baker Publishing Group
Baker Publishing Group instituted a series of cost-cutting measures this fall and plans to review their effectiveness after 90 days. Baker says the company has not been forced to lay off staff despite the trying economic climate and is doing “everything possible” in formulating a comprehensive strategy to prevent future layoffs.Short-term:
1. Reduce employee travel.
2. Reduce marketing budgets.
3. Freeze all hiring for new and vacant positions.
4. Reduce inventory levels.
The company is moving to smaller first printings and reprint quantities in offset. “We usually print a 12-month supply of trade books, and a 12- to 24-month supply of academic books. We’re reprinting smaller quantities lately,” Baker says.Baker Publishing also has a digital component that handles about 15 percent of backlist titles, he adds. “We call the program short-run, because it is not technically an ‘on-demand’ model. We carry stock through the entire year, but never more than one carton,” he says.
5. Reduce book-packaging enhancements.
These include fancy covers with foil or embossing.6. Reduce exposure at trade shows and conferences.
7. Make a push to sell overstocked inventory more rapidly.
8. Transfer work from outside suppliers/freelancers to in-house staff.
9. Hold off on all new equipment purchases.
10. Prohibit all overtime hours.
Long-term:
11. Avoid high-risk and expensive book projects.
12. Pace new book releases to match capacity of current staff.
13. Defer publishing expansion into uncertain sales categories.
Tips from...
Cären Yang, creative and production manager, Saint Mary’s Press
Winona, Minn.-based religious publisher Saint Mary’s Press has worked with vendor Transcontinental to realize savings in manufacturing and production by adopting lean manufacturing principles. “It affects how we make decisions,” Yang says, “by considering what’s the best way to implement [a practice] so it’s efficient for my upstream and downstream customers.”14. Add a print-on-demand (POD) center.
For some publishers, it makes sense to add an in-house POD center, which reduces inventory and simplifies order fulfillment. (Saint Mary’s maintains its own shipping/fulfillment area.) “Eighty percent of the products we produce are produced internally,” Yang says. “So it’s a huge cost savings. We keep about one to two weeks of inventory on our shelves for those products.”15. Set up an electronic inventory and warehouse management system.
Smaller publishers benefit from this as much as bigger ones, Yang says. It allows publishers to coordinate efficiently with printers in order to ship to their docks only what they need at a given time.16. Use software to streamline workflow.
Saint Mary’s Press saves time and money by uploading documents via the Web for proofreading and other preflight work, eliminating costs for mailing hardcopy proofs. The system also allows errors to be fixed quickly and efficiently.17. Drop the off-site warehouse.
Thanks to a well-coordinated printing, shipping and fulfillment program, Saint Mary’s now uses a small warehouse in its own facility rather than paying to rent a larger off-site facility.18. Standardize your paper stock.
With so much volatility in the paper market, Saint Mary’s has worked to standardize the paper it uses. “We are ordering larger quantities of one stock for our products. … That’s been huge,” she says.19. Print during off-peak times.
Work with a printer to utilize equipment at a discounted rate when not much business is coming in from other clients. With peak times tied to the religious/education schedule rather than other seasonal determinants, Saint Mary’s has gained significant savings this way.20. Create more efficient PDFs.
Yang recommends asking your printer to share its PDF settings with your preflight specialist. Being in synch with a printer on settings for a print-ready file allows for smaller file sizes and fewer steps in the production process. “These are just little things, but sometimes the little things really add up,” Yang says.Tips from...
Jim Kalajian, president & COO, Jenkins Group Inc.
Jenkins Group is an independent custom book publisher in Traverse City, Mich. President Jim Kalajian believes a cost-cutting campaign should be coupled with (and hopefully mitigated by) renewed efforts to boost sales—in his case, through lowering margins, offering new services and giving special incentives to smaller publishing clients that might be slashing their promotional budgets. “The bottom line, we have had to look at everything we do and determine if we can save money in some areas without affecting client service,” he says.21. Ask for cost concessions from freelance designers and editors.
“Essentially, we have said, ‘If you want to keep getting work, you will need to do it for 20- to 30-percent less than last year.’ These changes are hopefully temporary during these slower times,” Kalajian says. Gaining a small concession on freelance costs can greatly improve margins and allow the company to keep in-house staff employed without reducing salaries or benefits, he says.22. Shift work from freelancers back to salaried staff.
Staffers are now covering some design and editorial work that a year ago would have been sent to freelancers. Kalajian’s creative director will begin helping the marketing team with promotional material, rather than sending it to outside designers. “We also write 24-30 press releases a month for small publishers as part of our publicity-service offering,” he says. “Instead of sending all those to a freelance writer, we now have an in-house staff member write half of them.”23. Reduce UPS costs bysending files to printers via FTP.
24. Use digital proofing more often to save on the cost of creating and shipping proofs.
25. Cut marketing spending that is not showing a positive return.
Kalajian recommends giving campaigns such as lead-generation or Google AdWords no more than six months to show results.26. Switch Web site-maintenance services to a firm that bills in quarter-hour increments.
Jenkins Group has found that some firms charge $100/hour in half-hour increments, while others charge the same hourly fee, but allow quarter-hour increments—a significant savings when only a small tweak to the Web site is needed.27. Cut office cleaning staff from once a week to twice a month … and do more clean-up yourself.
28. Modify a phone plan.
Money-saving measures can include cutting unused 1-800-number fax lines, and eliminating cell phone and pooled minutes across the company.29. Reduce monthlycompensation of principles.
30. Reduce travel costs.
Kalajian reports a dramatic reduction by eliminating all marketing trips to New York.Tips from...
Susan Spilka, director, corporate communications, John Wiley & Sons
STM publisher Wiley has been on the cutting-edge of cost-cutting, lately forming partnerships with other publishers and institutions to deliver services and information efficiently.31. Electronically disseminate comp copies.
Working with other higher-education textbook publishers, Wiley has developed CourseSmart, a service providing digital course materials to consumers. Spilka says Wiley saves money by using Course-Smart to fulfill comp-copy requests, rather than having to mail print copies.32. Offer supplementalmaterials on-demand.
Wiley has put textbook supplement transparencies in an on-demand program, whereby professors choose a transparency online, and orders are printed and shipped one at a time. This avoids inventory obsolescence for these expensive-to-produce items.33. Institute a well-functioning content management system (CMS).
“Developing a companywide content management system … allows us to cost-effectively repurpose our assets” Spilka says.34. Offer online options.
For journal customers, Wiley promotes the option of online-only subscriptions, which helps move toward shorter print runs and lower materials costs.35. Move CD content to a Web site.
Some publishers have found savings by taking expensive four-color graphical elements and putting them on accompanying CDs. Wiley has taken this a step further by moving such content to Web sites associated with textbooks and other releases.Tips from...
Dan Tucker, president, Sideshow Media
Sideshow Media is a small, independent book producer, creating illustrated books for publishers and corporate entities.36. Expect more from your employees.
With today’s efficiency tools at hand, publishers should expect employees to wear more hats than in years past. Sideshow hires smart people and trains them well, says Tucker (who is also president of the American Booksellers Association), allowing them to work more efficiently and do more in less time than would have been possible a few years ago.37. Keep an eye open for new suppliers.
“We are always looking for [lower-cost] suppliers,” he says. “We do a lot of manufacturing in China, and with costs going up, we are looking at other possibilities, such as India and Egypt.”Tucker says he is willing to consider suppliers closer to home if the value of convenience and time/cost savings in shipping equals or exceeds the lower manufacturing costs available in Asia.
38. Be flexible.
Smaller publishers should leverage the assets that come with maintaining a leaner, more malleable supply chain, Tucker says, meaning they should always be on the lookout for better deals in printing or shipping, and ready to take advantage of these, especially in a volatile world market. “The difference between how we operate from a [major publishing house] is that, for them to alter the supply chain, I imagine is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around in a pretty narrow straight. We are more like a small powerboat.”39. Consider alternate staffing arrangements.
Sideshow has had success with employees working in remote locations and other positions being converted to half-time. These arrangements have led to some cost savings, according to Tucker.Tips from...
Alex Holzman, director, Temple University Press
Temple University Press specializes in books on the humanities and social sciences. Holzman says university presses are used to operating frugally, but nevertheless can be subject to unexpected budget mandates from their parent institutions. “When cuts have to be made … they aren’t always made wisely,” he notes.40. When you cut, cut judiciously.
Holzman advises thinking through the impact of any cuts on net revenue, noting that an in-house efficiency that results in declining sales is not a good idea (unless it somehow increases margins). “This probably sounds mundane and obvious, but it’s necessary to at least make an effort to avoid encountering unexpected consequences,” he says.These consequences can ostensibly be non-monetary, yet affect sales and profits in the long run, he warns. An example would be a cost-cutting measure that damages author relations.
41. Embrace POD.
POD and “born digital” printing allow for tighter inventory control and fewer write-downs, Holzman says. “POD [also] helps with distribution overseas as one can print a book … [overseas] rather than shipping across the pond.”42. Use electronic marketing tools.
Holzman reports success in steering people to online seasonal catalogs, thereby reducing runs for printed versions. Temple has also experimented with sending PDFs to book reviewers, though Holzman notes such practices must come with appropriate safeguards to avoid the risk of piracy. Marketing efficiencies are also realized by having books on Google Book Search and Amazon Search Inside the Book, he says.43. Incremental workflow efficiencies add up.
Temple University Press uses Blackboard technology to transmit projects to its editorial board, cutting paper use. It also utilizes electronic copyediting tools and is starting to use XML workflows. “The former, of course, saves time and paper; the latter saves coding later,” Holzman says.44. Leverage institutional talent.
University presses can sometimes benefit by drawing expertise from other departments, avoiding expensive consulting or service fees that commercial publishers often face when introducing new efficiencies. “For example, a university IT department can often provide very helpful guidance whether or not it also implements any change being contemplated,” Holzman says.45. Trim paper costs.
There are many ways to incrementally decrease the amount spent on paper, such as, in manufacturing, considering alternative stocks and eliminating jackets for some hardcover titles. For in-house paper use, he says, “We use two-sided copying wherever possible. We try to send electronic files rather than create and then have to ship printed manuscripts. None of this is earth-shattering; you just take every bit of incremental saving you can get.”
Tips from...
Larry Bennett, vice president, Spanish language materials and POD, Replica Books
Replica Books, a division of Baker & Taylor, provides solutions for publishers looking to combine short-run printing of older titles with marketing and distribution services.46. Use POD to automate the reprint process.
47. Shop around for the best POD solution.
Work with a digital printer to save money by setting up an automatic reprint system for some “long-tail” titles, whereby books are printed and orders fulfilled without passing through a publisher’s hands. Bennett says this makes the most sense for expensive, low-volume titles such as textbooks and art volumes. “Your cost savings comes in avoiding inventory obsolescence and remaindering, and in the inventory-carrying costs. The more expensive the book, the more it makes sense,” he says.
Different publishers have different needs, and one printer’s fee structure, manufacturing and shipping capability, and distribution network may make more sense from a cost-saving standpoint than another’s, Bennett points out.
I see the light...
- publishing is not dying, it's just evolving, and hopefully for the better;
- without excess inventory and returns, our industry would be a lot healthier.
Read below and decide for yourself.
Borders Group Inc. has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio—the HarperCollins imprint started by former Hyperion Books publisher Robert S. Miller—on a nonreturnable basis, according to The Wall Street Journal. When Miller, who serves as HarperStudio's president and publisher, joined HarperCollins in the spring to develop the new publishing group, one of the goals of the group was to eliminate the practice of allowing book-sellers to return unsold copies of books.
"Returns have never made sense in our business, and with the recent economic downturn, publishers and book-sellers are more open than before to experimenting with models that might decrease waste and increase profit," says Miller.
Under the terms of the deal, Borders will receive a greater discount on initial orders of books published by HarperStudio—58 percent to 63 percent off the cover price instead of the usual 48 percent—in exchange for not returning any unsold books to the publisher.
"The idea of taking inventory and then shipping it back isn't a good idea for anybody. We're open to all publishers to discuss alternatives to the traditional return model," says Robert Gruen, Borders' executive vice president of merchandising and marketing.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Digital Directions: Does Design Matter in Digital Distribution?
An important characteristic of digital content is its ability to deliver to multiple platforms simultaneously—to print, Web and mobile channels. Invariably, the same content will look different when viewed on various output devices, and it should. Each device has its own display characteristics, and the design of the presentation should be optimized for that device. I can hear the groans from publishers already.
Reach for the ibuprofen now, because it gets worse: Content also varies within the same delivery medium. For example, content may be syndicated on the Web to multiple delivery partners, whose respective delivery models require alterations to the design. Even large-print paper editions require repagination and other adjustments.
This raises fundamental questions about the role of design in digital publishing:
• Do our production and design departments need to grapple with all these new modes of delivery?
• Should design of electronic content be the responsibility of the distribution partner or other external service provider rather than the publisher?
• For that matter, is design strategic at all? Is design an important competency for publishers to have internally?
These are tough questions. The answers are not obvious and will vary from organization to organization.
We were able to dodge this bullet somewhat when digital distribution and marketing programs initially asked for only Web-ready PDFs, digital facsimiles of what was printed on paper. “How nice,” many thought. “We can use the same design as the book. This won’t be so hard.”
However, it soon became evident that an image of the paper-page was by no means an optimal experience for Web delivery. For starters, the aspect ratio doesn’t match. And for mobile e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, they don’t work at all.
Moving away from the use of Web-ready PDFs is a daunting prospect. It requires design departments to understand and deliver multiple designs for different modes of delivery. So daunting is this prospect that many digital-delivery initiatives assumed that this production and design challenge was too great for book publishers to undertake, and the task was off-loaded to the channel partner. Programs as diverse as those of Questia and Project Caravan assumed that the publisher would deliver original-application (manuscript or layout) files from which the channel partner would create the final design for delivery.
The decision to off-load digital-content design from publisher to distributor was a pragmatic one and helped get these programs off the ground. But it raised the question of whether publishers should be doing design at all. The content was what the market wanted, after all.
Is Design Important?
Tim Jones, art director at Harvard University Press, thinks so. “It is strategic. Our mission is facilitating communication of ideas, and design—both how the information is structured and how the page is visually designed—is an important part of that. It is not about being the coolest kid on the block,” says Jones, “but in facilitating communication.
“Great book designers are great at framing communications,” Jones observes. “We are going to be bringing back an edition of the ‘Songs and Sonnets of John Donne.’ The designer [of the previous edition] did such a wonderful job 50 years ago in making an extraordinarily complex layout effortless for the reader. We owe it to readers to ensure that this kind of thoughtfulness isn’t lost.”
The value of design in aiding communication will resonate with all of us who have suffered through a poorly designed book or Web site. And Jones’ position is certainly consistent with the publisher’s mission of facilitating communication. However, what of economic realities? Is there a sufficient return on the increased investment for digital design? In other words, can we afford to do all this?
“We can’t afford not to,” asserts Sylvia Hecimovich, director of production and design for The University of Chicago Press Books Division. “Chicago has an award-winning design department that has proven abilities in successfully designing works across a wide spectrum of subjects. This has always been a selling point in acquiring authors as well as marketing finished works.”
While clarifying the strategic and economic importance of design in publishing organizations, both Jones and Hecimovich acknowledge the need for selective investment. Not all titles require—or warrant—the same level of design complexity. While works of fiction and standard scholarly monographs can be translated to digital delivery relatively easily, complex reference works require much more investment to work well across platforms. “When you take something like ‘The Chicago Manual of Style,’ which is both critically important to this organization and incredibly complex, we need to take direct involvement and great care to successfully bring it into digital distribution,” says Hecimovich.
The ability or desire to invest and develop competency in digital-content design will vary from organization to organization. Indeed, it may vary across publishing programs within an organization. However, some common themes emerge:
• Strategy: Design is of strategic value. Design facilitates communication of content and is necessary to support the publishing organization’s brand to authors and the marketplace. Design is in the publisher’s vested interest.
• The hard truth: Each delivery device and platform will require differential design treatment to some degree.
• Technologies: “Web-ready” PDFs are not a long-term solution. PDFs allowed for some quick wins in digital delivery, helped everyone get their feet wet, and primed the digital ecosystem. But paper-page design will not provide optimal cross-platform presentation. Moving toward XML-based-production approaches will help support cross-device delivery, but the hard work of designing for different delivery modes remains. XML is a component to success, but not a panacea.
• Resources: Internal design staff needs to understand the design implications of the various digital channels and devices, whether they are directly involved in designing for these platforms or not. Digital design skills are key for all publishers.
Not all works can support high levels of direct staff design involvement—decide which titles and programs warrant it. If design is to be handled by distribution partners, your distribution agreements should include sign-off by staff designers before going live. If application files are submitted to distribution partners, ensure that licensing for fonts, illustrations and other embedded design components are consistent with such a hand-off.
I’ll be the first to admit it: This is a big deal for publishers, an area of long-term, fundamental change. It is also a key factor for successfully making the leap into digital content.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Don't judge a book by it's cover...or by it's container
I understand that in this economical climate publishers cannot print as much, nor necessarily print backlist that makes sense, but what I don't understand is why this was not made available via POD.
And then I read this blog entry by TOC which perfectly captured the problem.
I know change is scary and oftentimes hurts, and I personally will always prefer a printed book to an e-one, but that doesn't mean that the printed book need be printed before I pay for it.Publishers: Let the Containers Go
In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:
Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."
The publishing industry finally has a chance via POD and e-books to right the two wrongs that have been slowly bleeding the industry dry--returns and having to pay for COGS prior to any sales--and I'd think the large houses that could afford to experiment would be the first to do so... Instead, Amazon Marketplace got my dollars and probably several other readers' dollars.