Welcome to the Good e-Reader Radio Show with Michael Kozlowski and Peter Carotenuto. Once a month, the boys give you a sense of all of the latest news in the audiobook, ebook, e-reader and e-note industry. Today, you will understand why audiobooks and digital books are so expensive and some of the reasons why this has occurred. Audiobooks have always cost more, even going back to cassette and CD days. Engineers, well known voices and billable hours is what drives costs up and audiobook sales are the fastest growing segment in digital publishing for the past five years.
Kobo is going to be announcing a brand new Clara HD 2 sometime in the next few weeks. It will be similar to previous generation, except it will be waterproof, have a USB-C cable and Bluetooth compatibility for listening of audiobooks. It will be the first e-reader that is made of 100% recycled plastic, which will be one of the big marketing messages to customers.
Why has Good e-Reader been reporting on lots of Kindle news lately? People have been sending emails and leaving comments on our news articles and even our new Forum. One of the reasons why, is that it is the most popular e-reader in the world and lots of new readers have been checking out the website and are turning into regular readers. Most of the Kindle news online is either buying guides, or reviews. We try and provide new information or a series of tutorials that are not available anywhere else. Kindle drives views and this is how a niche website like Good e-Reader can continue to pay all of our staff and our growing expenses. Recently we gravitated from a dedicated server to Amazon AWS and EC2, so we are 100% in the cloud now. You might have noticed that our website speed has dramatically increased in the past two months, this why.
Lots of tech blogs have been reviewing our InkNote Color that we designed, in conjunction with Bigme. The ratings are generally 4/5 which is really solid and we are proud.
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Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.