Coming Around to the Kindle Paperwhite

I like to make my buying choices intentionally.  I support the ecosystems that I think are best for the user, usually in terms of user rights and flexibility.  Not just for myself; I want ecosystems that respect the users' interests over centralized control to exist and be well supported.  This is why I initially bought HD DVD over Blu-ray, and refrained from buying iPhone (and every other Apple product).

This is also the reason I chose to avoid the Kindle.  Amazon has their own proprietary format and DRM for e-books; they don't support other vendors' books on their readers, nor their books on other company's readers.  I have found, however, that this restriction is easy to get around, with the right software.  I am free to buy e-books from any vendor and load them on a device from any vendor, Amazon included. 

In the 11 months since I bought my Nook Simple Touch, the market has evolved.  Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon have come out with lighted e-ink readers.  Both companies have tablet-style readers.  Barnes & Noble is spinning off their Nook division to a separate company.  An antitrust lawsuit has resulted in actual price differentiation in the e-book market once again, and Amazon once again clearly has the lower prices and best promotions.  In fact despite my owning a Nook, most of my e-book purchases have been from Amazon.  I have only purchased one (non-free) e-book from the Nook store.  The rest have been from Kobo, StoryBundle, and the Humble Bundle (and also one from Google for 25 cents).

I got a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas from my parents.  I have loaded it onto my account, but I haven't spent any of it yet.  Every e-book purchase I want to make, it's never the best price.  I will probably use it to get the next installment in the Game of Thrones series (whenever that eventually comes out), since new releases tend to have the same price in most places.

There is also the issue of Amazon Prime.  Last summer, I switched from Netflix to Amazon Prime for streaming video.  Our Blu-ray player has built-in support for both.  The selection of free streaming movies isn't nearly as good, but they do have an excellent selection of TV shows, including all of Star Trek, Firefly, and several other sci-fi series.  The free two-day shipping from Amazon with no minimum order (which I was able to extend to four additional friends' accounts) makes it an excellent deal.  I'm hooked.

The value of Amazon's streaming would definitely be increased if I had a Kindle Fire.  Thus far, Amazon has not released their Instant Video player for Android.  This despite the facts that Kindles are built on Android, and they have a player for iOS.  Their excuse is that Android isn't secure enough, and their video partners wouldn't let them stream their content if they had an Android player.  This doesn't seem to have stopped Netflix, Flixster, RedBox, the Google Play store and several others from offering streaming players on Android. The transparent artificiality of this restriction alone makes me not want to buy a Kindle Fire.  It's simply a bad way to treat your customers, and it makes me want to look elsewhere.  The Kindle Fire devices aren't that good when compared to other tablets.  If I'm going to spend money on a dedicated tablet, I would much prefer a Nexus device.  All things considered, my actual plan for tablet functionality is to get a touchscreen Windows 8 convertible laptop/tablet.  My current laptop is nearing the end of its life, and I'm keeping my eyes open for devices like Lenovo's Yoga and Helix lines, which are full PCs, but also have tablet functionality and form factor, and a tablet app ecosystem that I believe will do well over time.

The other benefit of owning a Kindle device is access to the Kindle Lending Library.  The best way to take advantage of this would be with an e-ink reader, which is definitely my preferred reading medium.  If I were to get a Kindle Fire, I would want to keep my Nook around for most actual reading.  That's another reason I'm not very interested in the Fire.

When I purchased my Nook, I was aware that a GlowLight version was coming down the pike.  I chose not to wait and spend the extra money just for that one extra feature. Looking at the landscape now, the Kindle Paperwhite offers several advantages over my Nook Simple Touch:

• Higher resolution, higher contrast e-ink screen
• Built-in illumination - at the time I bought my Nook, I didn't want to be doing a lot of reading in bed.  These days, mostly because of how Shoshana's condition has effected our lives, I have been doing a lot of reading in bed when Elizabeth and I have different sleep schedules, and in darkened hospital rooms while Shoshana sleeps.
• Access to the Kindle Lending Library
• Kindle-specific features, such as "X-Ray", Whispersync, Time to Read, and upcoming Goodreads integration (Amazon is buying Goodreads). 

I don't regret buying my Nook.  It was a good decision at the time, and it was fun to root it and customize it. Managing the rooted environment has become somewhat of a chore, and it is a definite drain on battery life.  If I buy the Kindle Paperwhite, I will be able to sell my Nook Simple Touch for at least $50.  Including the skin and case (and the option of root or not) should increase that price.  I have some birthday money still burning a hole in my pocket.

I will miss the Nook's physical page turn buttons and wide grip.  I will miss the ability to supply my own screensaver images.  I will not miss the Nook ecosystem.

My folder of Nook screensavers.  Definitely preferable to Kindle's ads.

Humble Bundle Data - Results

In my previous post, I said I was going to finish collecting data for the rest of the Humble eBook Bundle at humblebundle.com and post the results here.  

The results are in.  This was probably the most successful Humble Bundle to date, based on the ending average price.  Let's look at the data for the Average Price over Time.

Average Price over Time

You may notice that bump in the middle of the graph.  That is the point in time when several PDF comic books were added to the Humble eBook Bundle.  This had the effect of pushing a lot of fence-sitters over the edge to purchase the bundle, as well as increase the margin by which purchasers were willing to "beat" the average price.

Total Purchases over Time

You may notice that the Total Purchases graph has some missing data at the beginning.  This is because initially I only collected the Average Price (and I was over an hour late in starting that collection).  The bundle started at 10:00 AM PDT; I started recording the average price at 11:30 AM, and I started collecting the total number of purchases at 5:30 PM. 

Total Revenue over Time

With those two numbers, I was able to calculate the total revenue collected.  Later, I added direct collection of this figure.

As you can see from the graph.  At no point did the average price go down much at all (there were a few times it went down a penny or two).  This answers the question I was initially asking, at least for this bundle:  should I wait for a lower price?  The answer is of course emphatically no.  If I was going to beat the average price, the time to do it was as early as possible.

I do seem to recall bundle average prices going down in past bundles, but this may have been due to abuse by people pumping the system for free and/or very cheap Steam keys.  That practice seems to have been cracked down upon with CAPTCHAs (remember: only use your scripting powers for good), and the momentum of the price and interest in the bundle seems to have been maintained by the addition of the bonus content.  I would expect similar measures in the future.

As it turned out, I when the extra bonus content was added, it was also added to the account of everyone who had previously purchased the bundle, whether they beat the average or not, so I ended up with all but the initial two bonus books.

These marginal rates were all calculated from the previous values.  It would be interesting to have better data at the beginning of the data set.  I'm curious to know how the profile of the initial wave compares to the second bump.  You can't really tell with the first seven hours missing, unfortunately.  My suspicion is that the secondary bump was sharper than the initial wave, mostly because I believe that the secondary wave was largely fence-sitters who had not bought because they thought the price was too high for the content offered.  When more content was offered (and considering the content), they immediately jumped on it.

Marginal Purchases (every 15 minutes)

Marginal Revenue (every 15 minutes)

Marginal Average Price (every 15 minutes)

It should be noted that the website data is far from perfect.  The totals sometimes went down from one reading to the next, and after the bundle had ended, the numbers were still in flux for several hours, but at the scale of these graphs, the fluctuations are insignificant.

If you would like to look at my raw data, I will provide it for download in its unprocessed CSV format generated by my script, as well as the Excel spreadsheet that I used to calculate the missing values and create these fancy graphs.

Here is the data:

• humblebundle-ebook.csv
• humblebundle-ebook-2012-10-23-1615.xlsx

Here is the final form of the script I used to create this data:

• humble-bundle-price-tracker.sh

Enjoy!

Humble Bundle Data - Collection

Today was the launch of the Humble eBook Bundle.  The way that Humble Bundles work is that the site lists a collection of downloadable items (traditionally games, but lately they have branched out into music, and now books).  You can pay any price (including free, if you choose) for the bundle, and it's yours.  You can even tweak how much of your purchase price goes (directly) to the content creators, the Humble Bundle site, and a few charities.

Well, not all of the bundle is yours at any price.  There are bonus items, which are typically the best of the bunch.  To get these items, you are required to beat the average price of the bundle so far. 

Well, I like bundles, and I like e-books, so I decided to get the bundle.  But I wasn't prepared to pay the price at the time to get the two bonus books.  They looked good, but the average price was then just over $9, and I thought that if I was going to spend that much money on an e-book, did I really want the ones offered?  I would be willing to bite--but only if the price went down.  Humble Bundles typically hover around the $5-7 range for unlocking the bonus content, which for my money is a better impulse purchase for content I didn't get to pick out myself.

Funny thing about having to beat the average price:  a lot of people do it, and that will have a tendency to create a constant upward trend in the price to unlock the bonus content.  It got me wondering, though.  I fully expected the price to trend up for the first couple of days, but then does it dip down again?  My gut told me that there would be an initial spike, a dip, and then a spike at the end of the two-week window when the bundle was offered.

But I couldn't find any data on the subject.  There are several websites where data on the various Humble Bundles can be found, but a graph of average price over time was nowhere to be found.  "Well," I thought, "I'll make one then."

So I did.  Or rather, am.

My data collected at the end of day 1, showing average price and total purchases over time.

I whipped up a quick script on my Linux box that uses links -dump to grab a text-only version of the web page.  It then successively greps this page for the data I'm after, and appends a line of data to a CSV file.  Initially, I only collected the timestamp and average price, but I decided that the total quantity sold at that time would also be a valuable and relevant piece of data.

I added a line in my crontab file to run the script every 15 mninutes (which is plenty of granularity over two weeks, and also very reasonable to the remote server), and viola:  data!

It will be interesting to see how this little experiment turns out.  It may be that the price will almost always trend upward.  I know that with certain past gaming bundles, games from previous bundles were added to the current bundle as bonus items in order to motivate people to pay the higher price and keep the average up.  I suspect that these items were added at times when the average price was dipping in order to bring it back up.  I don't know that there are any books in reserve for this bundle, so that may not be an option.

If it does happen, that will be interesting to watch in the data.

Side note:

• Another bundle site of note that just got started specifically for e-books is StoryBundle.  StoryBundle is slightly different, in that they set a minimum price ($1), and the bonus books can be unlocked at a constant price ($7). 

I will post an update to this blog when the bundle is over with the full results of the data I collect. 

Update: Here are the results.
Enjoy!

Rooting my Nook Simple Touch

Note: This post is mostly about my technical experience of rooting the Nook.  I'm planning to write a less technical post about actually having and using the device on my main blog sometime soon.

I recently got a Nook Simple Touch.  This device is running on Android 2.1 (Eclair) under the covers, and I wasted no time getting control of my device so that I could install my own apps and customize to my heart's content.
 First, I backed up the internal memory.  You should always back things up if you plan to mess with their innards in ways that could turn them into a brick.  In fact, that's exactly what I ended up doing.  Read on.

Here's a guide to backing up your Nook Simple Touch.

I ended up doing a Linux dd to write the nookie image to the MicroSD card, because I kept getting an error whenever I tried to do it from Windows 7 or Windows 8 preview, regardless of which tool I was using. 

Also of note:  the disk images produced by this backup method are 1.82 GB in size.  While you're not actively using the backup images, I recommend compressing them, since they're mostly empty space.  I was able to get the factory fresh image down to 237 MB by Zipping it up with 7-Zip.  I also tried the 7z format instead of ZIP, which got it down to 207 MB, but I just got 25 GB of free SkyDrive space to play with, and the compression took a lot longer to process.  As you add files to the Nook, the compressed size of the images will go up.

I'm going to say this again: BACK UP!  And back up your backup!

I had created my initial backup, and rooted it following this guide.  I had to track down my own copy of uRamdisk_rooted, since the link they provide is dead.  This method only gets you root, however; it doesn't install the Market or anything else, so this wasn't what I wanted. 

I then found this thread, which was exactly what I had been looking for.  I was at the step where it says to follow the on-screen instructions.  The instructions said to wait until the screen flashed black, remove the SD card, and reboot.  I did that, or at least, I did what I thought that meant.  It was really quick--too quick:  the screen immediately flashed black and back to white, and then it sat there for a while doing nothing.  This looked like a normal screen refresh, but was that it?  Spoiler: no. 

I had just bricked my shiny new Nook. 

Not to worry!  I had a backup.  I then proceeded to restore it to its factory-fresh state.  I booted the Nook to the nookie-flashed SD card, fired up Roadkil's Disk Image, and pointed it at the backup file and the Nook's drive, and clicked "Start".  All appeared to be going smoothly, until I realized that I was overwriting my only good backup with an image of a corrupted system!

Thankfully, that file was sitting in my Dropbox folder at the time, and had been there long enough for its 1.82 GB to have uploaded to the cloud.  As fast as I could, I moved the file out of my Dropbox folder, and then went online and restored the deleted file, and re-downloaded it.  I then copied it to my Linux box, and used that to copy the image back to the device using the dd command (since, as I mentioned, hitting "Start" with the correct settings in Windows only resulted in an error.).  (Actually, since my current Linux box only has USB 1.1, It was faster to copy the file to the media PC, boot that to a Linux LiveCD, and dd the image from that environment.)

After that, I re-initialized the device, updated its firmware from Barnes & Noble, and correctly followed the instructions to root it, creating several backup images along the way.  One annoying thing about creating backups is that in order to do so, you need to boot from the nookie-imaged SD card (which is different from the touchnooter image used to root it, and also different from the way the Nook sets up files on it during normal operation).  I only have three MicroSD cards: two of them are in Liz and my phones (and are therefore in use), and the remaining one is for the Nook.  There are no extras, so whenever I need to make a backup, I have to somehow preserve what's on the card (if it's valuable), flash it with the nookie image, create the backup, and then restore it to a semblance of its previous state.  I've considered getting another microSD card.  I've got my eye on a 32GB one for my phone, thus freeing up the current 8GB card and giving me lots more space for pictures, video, and music.  This has the disadvantage of being unnecessary in the strict sense, and possibly more trouble than its worth at the moment since I would need to wait for it to arrive, and so I'll still need to use the old method "this time".  That, and they keep getting cheaper, so I want to hold off.