As an author with half a dozen projects developing I can’t wait to see how the ebook battles go in 2010. The Nook from Barnes & Noble finally arrived on Christmas Eve while the Kindle was the number one selling gift at Amazon.com. Publishers are freaking out over the increasing power of Kindle book buyers who are boycotting titles that cost more than $9.95. And for the first time in history, ebooks outsold paper books at Amazon on Christmas Day. (Continued below)

The arrival of the Nook onto the marketplace means the bugle has sounded. Techno-geeks finally have a chance to compare apples and apples, and according to one nerd web site, Nook owners have already begun sharing tips on how to hack into the unit’s software.

As a Kindle owner who has not yet handled a Nook, I remain biased, but willing to be thrilled by the Barnes & Noble device. I want B&N to succeed as both a writer and a reader. Although I practically live on Amazon, the Big Guy needs competition. The second screen on the Nook looks handy. It has a teeny color touch screen where the Kindle has that awful mini-keyboard. Anything has to be better than that. But since I almost never use the Kindle keyboard, it may be moot. Both have the same electronic paper display, look and weigh about the same, and function similarly.

Right now the Nook is in the doghouse. B&N oversold, then couldn’t deliver, but managed to get them out in the St. Nick of time. Immediately, according to Internet reports, Nook owners immediately crashed the web site and were unable to order ebooks. The software is apparently glitchy. But Amazon had the same problems, which is why many of us waited for the second-generation device to appear a year later.

What boggles me is how B&N is going to match the selection, ease of use, brand loyalty, and dependability of Kindle when Amazon has to have a larger customers base. (Amazon sold items at a rate of more than 100 orders per second during the holiday peak.) I’m on Amazon daily, not just as a seller and a buyer, but as a researcher. I use Amazon to search inside books before buying them, read their online content, look through digital book indexes, etc. To be honest, as kind as the local B&N store has been to me over the years, I’ve never searched their web site. They haven’t offered me an author page, or a "collectibles" storefront, or an associates account.

But I wish them well. And I will do my best to reach out to B&N even if they don’t know me from Adam -- because I want them to succeed.

I’m not one of those authors who fears the ebook revolution. There will always be paper books. None of my stuff has been Kindelized. Too many pictures. Too much graphic design for a teeny black and white screen. Some books just aren’t meant to be viewed digitially.

It’s the publishers really, who need to sweat, and are sweating even now. Some are resisting the consumer push for $9.95 ebooks. As a writer, I suppose I could earn a little less on an ebook. But most writers earn so little, how would we tell? My sense is that the lower price will increase the number of buyers, which will even out the author income.

The problem for publishers as one critic pointed out in the Washington Post this week, is that they will be getting paid less to do less. In fact, if Amazon gets its way, the publishers in some case will be cut entirely out of the deal when writers publish directly on to Amazon. No paper, no publicist, editor, agent, publisher, printer, distributor, no dead trees, no retail stores. Just the writer, Amazon, and the reader. Many publishers as we know them today, will fade away. Lean, new, scaled-down companies will take their place. Writers will always need help. But the big publishers must change or die, and they’re not cool with that.

The direct-to-reader formula certainly isn’t going to change the world. As Ex Libris and a hundred other digital publishers have already proven, great armies of unedited, self-published authors produce great mountains of crap. But sometimes a genius here or there will rise up out of the dungheap and we will all be better for it. Publishers used to be the people who told us what was good to read. Most have abdicated that role – pushing the big name authors no matter how badly their work – and giving the rest of their stable little attention.

If B&N wants to really compete with Amazon, they need to think like Amazon. And from what I can tell so far, they think like a giant bookstore that also happens to have a online store. Here’s what I mean. 

A couple of weeks ago I saw a bestselling book in an airport terminal in Detroit. When I got on the plane, I ordered it wirelessly on my Kindle. Because my eyesight is so bad, I usually "listen" to the book being read to me. I wear headphones and watch the pages flip by as the robot voice narrates the text. I read a little of the book, then forgot about it for weeks.

When I next pulled up the book on my Kindle (I have about 30 books on there now with room for another 1,000) the text-to-speech (TTS) function was not working on my new James Patterson ebook. As it turns out, the publisher had decided NOT to make this particular book available to Kindle listeners. The function had been disabled.

More and more publishers and authors are freaking out over this feature because some make additional money by selling the audio book – either on CD or as an audio download. Personally, having purchased hundreds of audiobooks, I see little comparison. My Kindle robot sounds terrible when compared to a professional reader. Sometimes I prefer a human voice. Other times I don’t care. Patterson’s publisher has decided I have to buy the audio from them, even though I bought the Kindle version. I feel their pain and I take their point. Money is money.

I posted an annoyed note on the Kindle bulletin board and the next morning I had 20 responses from the "Kindle Community". Then I asked Amazon to give me my money back. With no questions, they quickly credited my account. I called Amazon, and a nice CSR person called me back. While I had her on the phone, I complained gently about a few Kindle features that are pretty lame for low-vision people like myself. I noted that if publishers keep disabling the TTS "speech" feature, I will buy a lot fewer ebooks, since that was why I got the Kindle in the first place. I also said that I didn’t like the idea that Amazon had shut off a feature AFTER I had purchased and used it. That smacks too much of Big Brother.

The next day I got an email from someone else at Kindle. Then I got a message on my phone machine. The tech called again and seemed quite concerned with my problem. We talked for a long time. He said that my TTS feature should not have been disabled. We tried to figure out why it happened.

Two days later I got a call from another guy at Kindle, apparently higher up the food chain. He wanted permission to download my reader logs so that they could study the problem. It took half an hour for me to follow all the instructions and then email him the logs. And during the process we talked about writing, about books, about marketing, digital technoology and publishing.

So far I haven’t heard back from the Kindle people. I know, based on an article I read online, that they are nervously working to make their device more compatible for disabled users. Maybe they just wanted to steal my reading logs.

But I felt pretty good about the whole thing. I had a problem and they solved it quickly. Then a bunch of nice people wanted to know even more about my problem, so that they could provide better service for others like me. That same week I got an email saying that Amazon had greatly increased the battery life on my Kindle. They did it wirelessly, magically, no charge.

I can’t go to Amazon and touch books. I do that at Barnes & Noble and, more often, at the mom-and-pop shop downtown. But when I want to buy used books for a penny, or dig digitally through a hundred titles, or download a bestseller that I’ll never read again – I use Amazon. It’s easy and it’s habitual.

If B&N wants to stay alive in the ebook market, the Nook must be as responsive and as ubiquitous as Kindle. Right now, I assume that their client base comes from people who like to browse for paper books in the real world. These are readers who like readers. They sit and drink coffee as they read. They need miles of aisles and the personal touch. The Nook is designed for those book-social people, and the device even has a wireless rfeature that only works when Nook readers bring their ebook into the store.

Like the robot that reads on Kindle, however, Amazon is a machine. The software is "user friendly" but there is no human contact. Half the time I buy a book from Amazon, it comes from some independent seller who has no more idea what Amazon is than I do. Until those Kindle techs called, it never occurred to me that there are people working there.

For B&N to kick a little Amazon robot butt – which I would love to see -- they need to be as responsive in the cyber world as they are in the store. That means the Nook has to work faster, cheaper, better than the Kindle. And it has to work for customers who are reading at home or downloading in airport. The success of the Nook is not about pastries and well-read clerks. It is about functionality, inventory, and the ability to deliver in the blink of an eye. Being the most efficient bookstore online isn't about who has the most books in stock, the nicest clerks or the best coffee anymore.

So let the ebook battle begin. We readers and writers can’t wait.

© 2009 J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved.