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Amazon Announces Kindle 2
Mac Slocum
February 9, 2009
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I've got just enough time between TOC tutorial sessions for a quick Kindle 2 post.
As anticipated, Amazon unveiled Kindle 2 this morning. The $359 update is thinner (0.36 inches) and lighter (10 ounces) than the original Kindle. It also includes updated navigation, more storage (2GB; approximately 1,500 titles) and a screen capable of handling 16 shades of gray. Kindle 2 will be released on Feb. 24.
The one feature that really caught my eye is the Kindle's new text-to-speech function:
You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free.
Engadget and CNET live-blogged the announcement.
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Safari Books Online Goes Mobile
Allen Noren
February 9, 2009
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Like much of the publishing world, I'm eager to hear about Amazon's latest version of the Kindle. But that's not the only news today. I'm sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he's showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. (In full disclosure, Safari is a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson.)
The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it's fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter. It's got a couple of bugs, and I don't like that I can't read our highly designed Head First books, but it's a Beta.
The mobile version will be released on 23 February, and if you're a Safari subscriber and have feedback, send it to safarimobile AT safaribooksonline DOT com. If you're not already a subscriber, you can get a free trial.
Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books
Andrew Savikas
February 5, 2009
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Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search:
Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the Google Book Search index for free on their mobile phone, from anywhere with Internet access. It's possible for a commuter on a passenger train to read classics like Pride and Prejudice right along with lesser known works like Novels and Letters of Jane Austen, or for a student in India to read Shakespeare's "Hamlet" on her iPhone, all via a simple website accessible from your mobile phone.
So far, the mobile edition only offers browser-based access (Web-style scrolling, no offline access, no remember-my-place), but an interesting addition to the emerging and important mobile reading space. Screenshot below (or click here if you can't see the screenshot).
Google will be at next week's TOC Conference talking about the past, present and future of GBS.
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The Economic Realities of Digital-Only Newspapers
Peter Brantley
February 2, 2009
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Alan Mutter has an incisive analysis explaining why an all-digital strategy would be unacceptably painful for the majority of established newspapers:
Because newspapers on average derive approximately 90% of their sales from print advertising, the only ink-on-paper newspapers that can afford to attempt digital-only publishing are the ones that are irreversibly losing money. Moving to digital publishing is the last, best hope to salvage at least some value from their waning franchises.
But those web-only franchises would produce far less cash than their print predecessors, reducing the value of those businesses by several magnitudes. How much less? A conventional newspaper moving to online-only publishing might produce at best 10% of the cash generated by its print-plus-online predecessor.
This would be catastrophic for any of the newspaper companies that operate today on the premise of selling both print and interactive advertising. This is especially true for the many publishers that borrowed billions in recent years to finance acquisitions that for the most part have not produced sufficient profits to service the loans.
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New York Times Settles Linking Suit
Peter Brantley
January 27, 2009
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In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated aggregation of Gatehouse content on Boston.com's affiliated properties (Boston.com is owned by the Times Co.). It is not clear why the settlement was reached, since precedence was on the side of the Times' operation.
Mathew Ingram examines the settlement at the Nieman Journalism Lab:
Because while the settlement is not a legally-binding precedent -- the one piece of what might be called good news -- it still involves the New York Times voluntarily refraining from what many would argue is perfectly defensible behaviour. As Joshua Benton notes in his post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, that could well embolden other publications to launch similar cases, on the assumption that if the NYT caved then someone else might too. [Links included in original post.]
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- GateHouseGate: Why Did the New York Times Wimp Out?
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- Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions (2000): Tickemaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.
- Wired (2002): "Public Protests NPR Link Policy"
Amazon Dropping Non-Amazon Ebook Formats (Sort of)
Andrew Savikas
January 27, 2009
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Via Publishers Weekly, Amazon announced Monday it will stop offering ebooks in formats other than Kindle and Mobipocket:
In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.
A contact at Amazon has clarified that apparently this change only applies to the Kindle:
This does not apply to eDocs because they are not DRM-protected. This only applies to DRM-protected eBooks.
A follow-up question about Kindle support of EPUB resulted in a polite but firm redirect to "the Kindle team."
I know Amazon is a big company, and I know all too well how difficult intra-office communication can be even at a much smaller company like O'Reilly, but with Amazon in particular it's really easy to get the sense that the left hand has very little idea what the right hand is doing (or perhaps "third left tentacle doesn't know what the right tentacle is doing" is more appropriate).
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"None of this is good or bad; it just is"
Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009
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Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:
Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.
And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But [Lisa] Genova and [Brunonia] Barry and [Daniel] Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.
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Film Criticism and YouTube Don't Play Nice
Mac Slocum
January 16, 2009
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In an essay catalyzed by YouTube's removal of a film criticism archive, which included ripped clips from copyrighted movies, Matt Zoller Seitz addresses the disconnect between takedown policies and the gray areas of digital culture:
There should be a way to distinguish between piracy-for-profit (or unauthorized, free redistribution) and creative, interpretive, critical or political work that happens to use copyrighted material. And there must be an alternative to unilateral takedowns. The issues aren't just legal, they're practical. History has demonstrated that there's no copyright protection that can't be defeated, no corporate edict that can't be subverted. And given the technological sophistication that permits digital watermarking, there ought to be a way to make sampling of any sort, authorized or not, scaled to suit the filmmakers' means, profitable for the rights holders, and as fully automated as the copyright-infringement-scouring that's currently happening all over the Internet.
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"Amazon Tax" Moves Forward in New York
Mac Slocum
January 14, 2009
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A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press:
The law applies to companies that don't have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent -- someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.
In this case, "agent" is synonymous with "affiliate." Amazon and other online retailers share a cut of revenue generated by affiliate referrals. If further appeals go against Amazon and, as expected, other states jump on the sales tax bandwagon, affiliate programs of all sorts could take a major hit.
The AP notes that the law applies to "companies that have $10,000 or more in New York sales." There's some confusion around this $10,000 figure -- does it apply to companies that run affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon) and generate $10,000 or more in New York-based sales, or does it refer to affiliates who earn $10,000 through revenue share agreements? According to Law.com, the company that sells the products is held to the $10,000 standard. As such, a company could not skirt the law by cutting off individual New York-based affiliates before they reach $10,000 in referral sales. To avoid collecting New York sales tax altogether, companies would have to limit the combined income from all New York affiliates to less than $10,000.
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Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data
Peter Brantley
January 12, 2009
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In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access:
Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it is accessing in the cloud. And herein lies the most important difference between the webOS and Apple's iPhone OS: the iPhone was originally designed under the assumption that the canonical source of a user's data (contacts, calendar, music, tasks, etc.) is a Mac. Palm's webOS, in contrast, presumes that cloud-based services are the canonical source for your data (with the possible exception of media, which we don't know about yet) ...
Palm's webOS does not presume any sort of tether at all. The company has totally ditched the idea that you will use this phone in conjunction with a specific "main PC" that contains the canonical, authoritative repository of your data. Instead, webOS draws seamlessly on a variety of data services--not data repositories, but cloud-based services that actively feed the device both data and critical context.
This is a deep, fundamental break with both the iPhone and previous, repository-based smartphone usage models, and it's important enough that other smartphones are bound to follow.
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Google Doesn't Have Answers for Newspapers
Peter Brantley
January 8, 2009
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Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:
Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?
No. They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.
So what else can Google do?
We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We've tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours. We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base. We have tools that make that easier. I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamentally solve the problem.
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Newspapers Pursued New Tech with Wrong Intentions
Mac Slocum
January 6, 2009
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In a column at Slate, Jack Schafer says newspapers' overcommitment to form and content lock-in led to the industry missing Web opportunities:
From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.
Related Stories:
- Steve Yelvington: "Early to the game but late to learn how to play"
- Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
- News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
- Guccione: Print Downturn Traces Back to Pre-Internet Era
- How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors
Peter Brantley
December 15, 2008
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A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market -- and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK:
Lyndsay Williams -- who has already developed the PC sound card, SmartQuill, and SenseCam -- is now working on SenseBooks, and the first of a series will be published next year.
SenseBooks are a hybrid of paper and computer intelligence, and will have MP3 quality audio from an ARM processor and a gigabyte of storage. Williams says SenseBooks "will know when the user picks up the book and looks at a page":
A proximity sensor detects this and can light up pages or make music. What is also useful is the book has sensors to know what page it is on, can send a wireless message to a PC and open up a web page with more information on. Current applications include children's teaching books, music books, cookery books etc.
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Report: 300,000 Sony Readers Sold
Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008
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The e-reader guessing game may be in its final stages. According to theBookseller, Sony confirms it has sold 300,000 Readers globally since 2006:
So far three million books have been downloaded from its online library, which is home to 57,000 titles. The electronics giant said it planned to grow its online library to 100,000 titles by the end of the year.
The Reader is available through a variety of channels, including U.K. retailers. The Kindle is currently sold only through Amazon to U.S.-based buyers.
Sony is prepping a wireless-enabled Reader to compete against the Kindle, but theBookseller says there's no firm release date. The third-generation Reader -- a faster model with more storage but no connectivity -- was announced in October.
(Via Walt Shiel's Twitter stream.)
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The Inevitability of Newspapers' Downturn
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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In a post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky takes issue with the newspaper industry's slow adaptation to digital and its propensity for playing the victim:
I'd only arrived on the net in '93, a complete newbie, and most of my opinions about newspapers came from talking with Gordy Thompson of the NY Times and Brad Templeton of Clarinet. Instead, what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.
Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine. [Emphasis included in original post.]
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Magazines Now in Google Book Search
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog:
Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.
Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google Book Search results. Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for. For now you can restrict your search to magazines we've scanned by trying an advanced search.
The Associated Press says Google will share advertising revenue generated by Google ads with magazine publishers. Embedded advertising from the original print editions remains intact as part of the overall archive. It'll be interesting to see how Google and magazine publishers coordinate on ads if/when publishers seed current editions into the service.
In recent months, Google also released a similar newspaper archive through Google News and a large collection of photos from LIFE magazine.
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History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
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A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.
The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.
It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.
Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?
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Penguin 2.0 Mashes Up Essays and Short Texts
Mac Slocum
December 8, 2008
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Penguin's new project -- dubbed "Penguin 2.0" -- incorporates elements of customization and remixing found in Web content. Jeff Gomez, Penguin's senior director of online consumer sales and marketing, discusses the program with the New York Observer:
... in 2009 the company will introduce a program that allows customers to choose from a variety of short stories, essays, and other short standalone texts and combine them into custom-made collections. Mr. Gomez said the program is part of Penguin's effort to incorporate elements of so called 'Web 2.0' into publishing without abandoning print ...
... He cautioned, however, that he "would never want to break apart an entire book" and thereby render the full-length volume obsolete the way iTunes has done to the 74-minute LP.
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800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader
Peter Brantley
December 6, 2008
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iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads:
Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten a rocket boost from the Dutch firm iRex Technologies, which announced it has made a deal with NewspaperDirect to deliver 800 newspapers on iRex's Digital Reader 1000 ...
The iRex/NewspaperDirect partnership will undoubtedly cause some headaches for Amazon.com, too. A visit to Amazon's Kindle newspaper web page shows 28 listings. The 800 titles to be carried on the iRex 1000, dubbed 'Kindle Killer' by some, will obviously dwarf Kindle's offering. Of course, many of them are foreign language papers like Le Figaro and Die Welt. But 800 is 800 and that's good news for the environment.
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Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog:
The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.
Human-generated Mechanical Turk results can be a wildcard -- and the lack of instant gratification is a disadvantage -- but this method could theoretically expand mobile product apps beyond text messages and barcode readers.
(Via Paul Miller's Twitter stream)
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