Amazon scored another exclusive today (announced just after midnight) by getting Portuguese eBook versions of 17 Paolo Coelho books exclusively on the Kindle.
This is pretty significant as Mr. Coelho is the best-selling author in Portuguese – ever.
Here’s Amazon’s write-up -
We’re excited to announce that international bestselling author Paolo Coelho has decided to make 17 of his books, including the iconic O Alquimista (The Alchemist), available exclusively on Kindle in the author’s native language. This is the first time any of these editions have been available as electronic books.
The Brazilian author was born in 1947 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Before dedicating his life completely to literature, he worked as theatre director and actor, lyricist and journalist. Paolo Coelho is the all-time bestselling Portuguese language author.
The Coelho page has all the books listed. They include The Alchemist which has hit #1 in a ridiculous number of countries.
Coelho Exclusive is great news for Amazon and Kindle
This is big news on several fronts -
- It’s the first time these books are available as ebooks.
- They’re Kindle exclusives making it the second major author after Stephen Covey who’s done a Kindle exclusive deal.
- It shows Amazon’s committment to languages other than English.
It’s also extremely significant for Kindle sales -
- It’s not just Brazil and Portugal. Portuguese is the seventh most spoken language in the world.
- Wikipedia says 205 million or so people speak Portuguese.
205 million people speak Portuguese and Amazon just got exclusive ebook rights for the best-selling Portuguese author ever.
Should Publishers start getting worried?
Well, perhaps they should wait until B&N and Apple start getting exclusive ebook rights.
We might soon reach a point where eReader companies regularly beat Publishers to eBook rights. The former have a big advantage -
- Publishers work around a model where they can only afford to give Authors 8-15%.
- Even in eBooks they only go to 25% of net proceeds.
- ePublishers and eReader companies can afford to give authors a lot more.
- There are multiple possible efficiencies with eBooks like using sales trends, studying customer behavior, identifying successes early, and so forth that traditional Publishers either refuse to acknowledge or just don’t understand.
Publishers are set up to prosper in a world that is fading away.
The speed of the 2nd Kindle exclusive deal and the enormity of it are both scary.
One last thought – Publishers might decry exclusive deals as bad for reading.
- Actually, they’re bad for Publishers and they’re great for authors.
- We don’t really know what impact they’ll have on reading.
- Video Game consoles have exclusives and that system has worked out pretty well.
Someone wants to pay Authors and value their work. How can that be a bad thing in a world where most content is being downgraded to free?
Filed under: content, kindle Tagged: | kindle exclusives, paulo coelho
The console exclusive thing isn’t really an apt comparison (and it only really works out -well- for the console owners, it’s just been tolerated by everyone else). Consoles have fundamental, hardware and code level differences which prevent the same game from being run on different consoles without specifically spending money, and programming man-hours to make console-specific versions. Even when a game is released for multiple platforms simultaneously, each one of those releases is a separate piece of code.
Ebooks have no active scripting. No direct hardware interaction. The only difference is what format is used to store the raw text that is the fundamental building block of the book. So Kindle exclusivity is in fact equivalent to, say, Walmart getting exclusive rights to a videogame (which they have done, in the past). It means there is only one way to buy it. And that’s -terrible- for consumers. (Although at least in this case, it’s just electronic exclusivity – until the only version of the book is electronic, you still have options.)
[...] another high-profile author to an ebook exclusive: best-selling Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho agreed to give the company and the Kindle exclusive rights to Portugese versions of 17 of his popular novels. None of [...]
I need to know if there are many Kindle books in Portuguese . I read that Coelho has signed up – but how many other books are there now in Portuguese ???
Brian, you’ll hve to check with Amazon or at the official kindle forum (ask if there are any Portuguese Kindle owners)