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[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
August 26, 2008
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20 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
Amazon Acquires Shelfari
Mac Slocum
August 26, 2008
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Amazon is turning its investment in Shelfari, a book-centric social network, into a full acquisition, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Financial details haven't been released, but Shelfari CEO Josh Hug confirmed the acquisiton on Shelfari's blog:
We've got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon's expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you'll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you've always known and used on the site.
Amazon earlier this month acquired AbeBooks, which is a minority investor in Shelfari's chief competitor, LibraryThing. As the Seattle P-I notes, LibraryThing had a few choice words about Shelfari's business practices in 2007.
Update 8/26/08, 11:25 a.m. Tim Spalding from LibraryThing weighs in on the Shelfari deal. (Via the Reading 2.0 list)
(Via Jose Afonso Furtado's Twitter stream.)
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Analyst: Amazon Downplays Rumored Kindle Sales
Mac Slocum
August 25, 2008
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Recently reported Kindle sales estimates are off the mark, according to McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Bueneman. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Amazon officials gave McAdams Wright Ragen analysts the impression that high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable.
Amazon managers "told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by company,'" Bueneman wrote. [Links added]
TechCrunch is standing by the shipping estimates in its original story:
We're sticking by our sources on the estimates of units shipped from the factories in China. Amazon is correct that we didn't "run them by company" prior to publishing, but since they don't comment on non-public sales figures, it wouldn't have been a useful exercise anyway.
Harping on an old point -- if Amazon and Sony refuse to share e-reader sales, publishers are best served developing an overall digital gameplan rather than hedging bets on a particular device.
Also from the Seattle P-I: Bueneman says new Kindles are in development (release dates not revealed) and, as anticipated, Amazon sees opportunity for Kindle adoption among college students.
(Thanks to Tom Marhoefer for links.)
Related Stories:
- TechCrunch: "We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000"
- MarketWatch: "Amazon's Kindle could be next iPod, analyst says"
- The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game
- Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?
- Which Game is the Kindle Changing?
- Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights
- Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In
Piracy and Advertising: An Unlikely Union that Just Might Work
Mac Slocum
August 25, 2008
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In a surprisingly progressive move, a number of major publishers are using YouTube's Video ID tool to monetize pirated content. The tool flags questionable material and presents copyright owners with a choice:
Copyright holders can choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even--if a copyright holder chooses to partner with us--create revenue from them, with minimal friction. [Emphasis added.] -- (From YouTube's Video ID about page.)
YouTube's phrasing seems overly optimistic, but the New York Times says some publishers are choosing the partnership option:
David King, a product manager at YouTube, said in an interview that 90 percent of the copyright claims made using the identification tool remain on the site and are converted to advertising inventory. The other 10 percent are either removed from the site or tracked by the content owner.
The Times article notes that at this point advertising revenue from Web video is miniscule and publishers using the tool are still skeptical. Nonetheless, it's encouraging to see a piracy approach that doesn't default to heavy-handed tactics.
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News Roundup: The Crowdsourced Cat Book, Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book, EBay vs. Amazon (Round 2)
Mac Slocum
August 22, 2008
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Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:
The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:
1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.
2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun! (Continue reading)
Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book
James Bridle discusses the near infinite malleability of digital books. From booktwo.org:
Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again. (Continue reading)
EBay is moving into Amazon's territory. Citing reduced consumer interest in online auctions, eBay is refocusing on fixed-price "Buy It Now" products. From the New York Times:
Among the changes being announced Wednesday [8/20/08] is a new pricing plan for sellers who offer fixed-price items in eBay's "Buy It Now" format. Starting in mid-September, sellers will pay only 35 cents to list an item for 30 days, a reduction of about 70 percent in upfront fees. EBay also announced that it would no longer allow most customers to pay by check or cash, a change aimed at curbing fraud. Users will need to pay with a credit card or through eBay's PayPal online payment service.
Direct competition between eBay and Amazon is nothing new. Amazon tried to capitalize on eBay's success by launching its own auction business in 1999, but by 2001 it had scaled back its auction efforts.
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Going Digital Gives Publishers Safety Net
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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Sarah Lacy provides an articulate and approachable list of digital lessons for book publishers. Her passage on going "electronic from the get-go" is an important reminder about the vital efficiences of digital content:
You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.
That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic-- even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.
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TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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On Being Positive in August (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions)
Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either be available for free (sponsored by advertising) or because someone wants to buy, give, or rent it.
A New Model for News (pdf) (Associated Press Report)
A key question for news planning today is "How can this story be told?" Increasingly, the answer can be found outside traditional storytelling formats. In one popular example in the 2006 U.S. elections, an AP multimedia producer "mashed up" excerpts from political attack ads with a musical mix. The result garnered more than half a million hits after going viral and getting passed along from the customer sites that displayed the piece. (p.61)
Mygazines.com: The Magazine Industry's "Napster Moment"? (Joe Wikert, Publishing 2020)
This is a golden opportunity for the magazine industry to see how a Napster-like platform for periodicals could and should work effectively. Mygazines is essentially doing e-content R&D; for the entire magazine industry; I just hope the industry takes the time to study and understand the results before they look to kill the service.
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Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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Ebook files and e-reader software usually exist as separate entities, but Tom Peck of AppEngines merged the two to create individual ebook applications for the iPhone App Store. In the following Q&A;, Peck discusses his ebook software development process, consumer response to his apps, and future ebook projects.
Why did you opt to bundle individual ebooks as software applications rather than create a single e-reader program?
I have been reading ebooks (mostly from eReader.com) for many years. I wanted to make a book reader program for the iPhone that was as simple to use as possible. I feel that the way existing ebook solutions work is too complex for many users: they have to download the ebook software, then go to a separate Web site and create an account, enter credit card data, and then find and purchase content.
The iPhone App Store sales and distribution process makes it simpler and more convenient to have an ebook reader as part of an ebook itself. Developers can only distribute applications through the App Store; there is no way to distribute data files like ebooks. Therefore, it made sense to me that each book had to be a complete application.
Although this is more convenient for App Store customers to get a book, the process of making each book into an app takes more time for development. Each book becomes its own Xcode project, requires testing, and requires time to load all of the data (descriptions, screen shots, application file) to the App Store. I have developed tools and techniques that automate as much as possible, but each book takes several hours to complete, not counting the many hours spent writing the ebook reader itself.
Have you used any of the e-reader applications available through the App Store (e.g. Stanza, eReader, etc.)? If so, how do these compare to your own apps?
I have used the eReader software. I am a long-time eReader customer, having purchased dozens of their books and read them on my Treo. I have not used Stanza.
The biggest difference is that those products let the user download content from the Internet. Some let users create their own content and download it to the iPhone, which is nice. My reader is purely a book reader.
The eReader app supports a bookshelf list, showing all the ebooks. With my apps, each ebook appears as its own icon on the home screen.
My current reader program compares nicely to eReader. At the moment, I do not support landscape mode, which eReader does. Both offer text search and table of contents. I admit that the search function in my first batch of books was not very usable; newer books have a much better implementation, even better than eReader's. Both programs support different font sizes, images embedded within the text, layout options such as indenting and centering, and font styles.
One feature my reader has is instant repagination when the user changes font size. Using my reader, the user can increase or decrease font size using the "pinch" gesture, similar to zooming in and out of photos, and the results are immediate. I spent a lot of time to make this very, very fast. Changing the font size in eReader requires the program to repaginate in the background, a process that can take over 30 seconds for the entire book.
How many ebooks have you made available through the App Store?
Currently, about 140. More are in the pipeline; all newer, copyrighted works from other publishers and authors.
What has the response been like?
Response has been very good. My current download numbers for all books (not counting several free books) is almost 1,000 books a day. The numbers per book vary day by day, with some books having as many as 50 downloads a day. Most of the public domain titles have counts around five per day.
Most encouraging are that the newer works are selling just as well as the classic stuff. iPulp, a publisher of science-fiction and adventure short stories for young adults, has four works in the store right now with six more in review. These are priced at $0.99 and $1.99 and have sales of about 10 per day. The two Max Quick novels sell for $5.99 each. Currently they are selling about 13 copies per day and the numbers are increasing (they've been in the store for less than two weeks).
Are you selling ebooks or ebook applications through other platforms?
Right now, I am only working with the App Store. I am watching to see what other cell phone vendors and carriers do. As some of your blog postings have noted, the success of the App Store is making other carriers look at copying Apple.
I have spent time with Google's Android platform and have a version of the ebook software that runs on Android.
How much of your ebook content comes from Project Gutenberg?
My initial group of books, about 110, were all from Project Gutenberg. I constantly get requests from customers to add new books, so I have added more Project Gutenberg stuff. Now that I am working with publishers and authors to produce their works as ebooks, I will focus primarily on new works.
Can you list some of these publishers/authors? How did your relationships with these publishers and authors come together?
In the store now are a book on computer security by Neal Puff and a memoir by Teresa Wright. All relationships came about because of my presence in the App Store with the initial set of ebooks. I've been contacted by small publishers and individual authors to turn their works into ebooks for the iPhone. I work with them to get the content in an appropriate format, get the various graphic elements (cover art, icons, etc.), produce the ebook app, have them review the app, and put the app into the App Store.
Do publishers pay you a flat fee to prep App Store titles or is it a revenue share?
Revenue share.
Did you anticipate this type of publisher response?
I was a bit surprised at how quickly publishers contacted me. I thought I would have to market to them.
Are there other content sources or types you'd like to incorporate?
One publisher I am working with offers textbooks. That would be an interesting type of content. A textbook could take advantage of the ebook being a standalone app, offering more interactive content for quizzes that would appear within the book.
Some App Store reviewers complain that you're making money off of public domain content. How do you address these complaints?
The Project Gutenberg license clearly allows people to sell works based on the Gutenberg files. I am following the license, and I do send 20 percent of the revenue earned to the Project Gutenberg Foundation. Mobipocket, eReader and Amazon Kindle all sell public domain works for much more than $0.99.
Each book requires a lot of manual work. The Project Gutenberg text files are a good starting point, but I have to edit each one to add information about chapter starts, poems, songs, emphasized text, etc. Many files have extra data like page numbers that have to be cleaned up. I tried to automate this part, but there is so much variety in the files that only hand editing can get the correct results.
Since your ebooks are applications, and iPhone apps are stored on the device's docking screens, is there a concern about clutter? Do you have any organization tips for people who buy multiple ebook apps?
I would say that this is a general problem with the iPhone Home Screen user interface. iPhone blog sites describe users with 100 apps or more on their devices, and finding a specific app can become a problem.
iTunes does allow users to selectively install apps on individual devices. This is probably the best way to deal with lots of apps: for users to only install the apps they need, and keep the rest on their desktop machine. Personally, I tend to read about two books at a time, then I remove them from the device when finished.
What near-term features or products are you planning?
I am working on a new version of the reader software that adds many new features: bookmarks, notes, landscape mode, etc. Once completed, I will re-release all existing books with the new features. Customers will get the updates for free.
I also am working on several non-ebook iPhone apps.
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EBay Wants You to Buy It Now
Mac Slocum
August 20, 2008
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EBay is moving into Amazon's territory. Citing reduced consumer interest in online auctions, eBay is refocusing on fixed-price "Buy It Now" products. From the New York Times:
Among the changes being announced Wednesday [8/20/08] is a new pricing plan for sellers who offer fixed-price items in eBay's "Buy It Now" format. Starting in mid-September, sellers will pay only 35 cents to list an item for 30 days, a reduction of about 70 percent in upfront fees. EBay also announced that it would no longer allow most customers to pay by check or cash, a change aimed at curbing fraud. Users will need to pay with a credit card or through eBay's PayPal online payment service.
Direct competition between eBay and Amazon is nothing new. Amazon tried to capitalize on eBay's success by launching its own auction business in 1999, but by 2001 it had scaled back its auction efforts.
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Commentary: Apple Could Own the Ebook Category
Mac Slocum
August 20, 2008
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A recent discussion on the Reading 2.0 list examined Amazon's place within the ebook universe and the threat Apple poses if it enters the same space. In the following excerpt, John Conley looks at the fundamental differences between Amazon and Apple:
The debate as to how successful Apple is in selling music through iTunes and its impact on the music industry provides insight into Steve Jobs' strategy. People speculate that iTunes is contributing significant incremental profits to Apple even though Jobs says that it is not. Since the total results as far as costs and sales are really buried in the detail none of us may ever really know.
What is going on is that Apple is determined not to make the mistakes they made when they first came out with the Apple I in the '70s. They are using Mac, iPod and now iPhone to incubate a user base that is growing at a remarkable rate. They own the mind share of the next generation of power users, which is this generation. I have five children, age 27 to 13. When the oldest went to college he went with a PC, as did the next child. That was before iPod. My third child will be a senior in college this year and has been a Mac user since 14. The 13 and 15 year old are Mac users. The two oldest, one who is a PhD candidate, have converted to Mac. As this generation ages to the point of conspicuous consumption they will be all Apple in their information needs. They look at my briefcase with its multiple chargers for numerous devices and laugh. They know that Apple will provide them with the ultimate device. They have a level of loyalty to Apple that speaks of the incredible consumer power that now exists with the brand.
Whatever the current functionality of any Apple device the user belief that the next generation of iPhone will continue to innovate and provide the functionality that this next generation of users will require is why the Kindle will never have the success required to make it the mainstream device for end users.
The law of numbers will apply here in that if you have the largest installed base and strong brand loyalty you will provide the most desirable sales channel for those companies that are looking to sell product. Consumer product companies may not like dealing with Wal-Mart because they set all of the rules, but they do it anyway because they are the most powerful channel. Amazon desires to be the Wal-Mart of Web distribution, but they have no value added other than price. Apple provides the connectivity, software, platforms, and most important, loyal customers. If and when they decide that ebooks are a viable driver or requirement to meet the needs to their tens of millions of incubated users they will dwarf the efforts of any other ebook service provider in the market and the publishers will readily come to them with content. (They will also not make the mistake of asking the publishers to provide the content in some proprietary format.)
Apple's profit model is dependent on selling hardware and software. They bring more value added to the equation then a company like Amazon who, is only a distributor and a technology wannabe. Hardware is not Amazon's core competency and they do not have the infrastructure or money to fight a technology war. In the end they will be happy to be a partner in distribution of ebooks to an Apple device that meets the needs of e-readers and without a doubt be more functional than any device that Amazon would attempt to market.
Distribution is what Amazon has as its core competency. The Kindle, like all of its predecessors, will not rise in success beyond the early adopters because Amazon does not own the brand loyalty within the consumer electronic market segment that is required to make the next big step in creating meaningful demand.
(Excerpt reprinted with John Conley's permission.)
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[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
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20 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
- Wheatmark Book Publishing
- iPub
- University of Arizona Press
- USPublishing Jobs
- Arnica Publishing & Creative Services
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
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Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:
The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:
1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.
2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun!
Before I got out of that terminal, it was already clear that the submissions were too good to keep to myself. My fiancee Tania suggested turning the stories into a book. So, after a few days of collecting, I selected about 25 stories and 20 images and spent an evening doing a nice layout for a Blurb book.
The book can be previewed here.
(Via the Reading 2.0 list and Boing Boing)
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Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
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A flurry of new Kindle guesstimates and analyst predictions has reignited the Kindle number debate (something I'm not fond of). One of the oft-cited arguments is: "How can the Kindle be so popular if I've never seen one in public?"
There are big holes in this line of inquiry, but since it gets raised so often I figured a few device-spotting questions were worth posing to the TOC community:
- Have you seen a Kindle in public? If so, where did you see it?
- Have you seen a Sony Reader or other standalone e-reading device?
- Have you seen more than one e-reader?
- When did you first see an iPod in public? How about a cell phone?
- When did iPods and cell phones transition from public novelties to commonplace items?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
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Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age
Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway.
"There are many advertisers out there that would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group.
Ad auctions are already commonplace in Web-based advertising, most notably through Google's AdWords program.
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Links: The Simple Solution for Context
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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A recent report from the Associated Press finds that news consumers are engaged in a futile search for depth and context. Ethan Zuckerman offers a different perspective in his excellent analysis of the findings:
The [report] authors argue that news fatigue is a function not just of negativity, but of too many headlines. Some of the people in the study (basically, everyone who has internet access at work) report restlessly reloading news websites waiting for something new to appear. This is a pretty unsatisfying experience with most news stories, which don't change all that fast, but it's an easy form of news to get and one that cable news networks now appear obsessed with. It was less clear to me than from the researchers that this constitutes a consumer desire for depth - it simply looked like boredom with the same old headlines to me. [Emphasis added]
My take is that these seemingly insurmountable and divergent needs -- avoiding boredom and finding context -- can both be served by one simple tool: hyperlinks. A series of well-placed, hand-picked links expands the boundaries of a particular story without affecting the core narrative. No other medium offers such an elegant and powerful mechanism. No other medium gives readers a choice to go deeper.
Unfortunately, that choice is only available if editors aggregate and embed links. Simply making content available through Web sites, mobile devices, newsletters, RSS feeds and Twitter isn't enough. As the AP report suggests, consumers want something deeper (or less boring), and editors are uniquely positioned to provide that service by exercising the unique curatorial skills they've developed in the news trade. Ignoring links -- or relegating them to rarely-read closing paragraphs -- is an egregious disservice to the audience because it withholds the very things consumers crave.
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Books Fail to Crack Top 100 in iTunes App Store
Mac Slocum
August 15, 2008
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Over at Radar, Ben Lorica analyzes sales and category data for the iTunes App Store and makes an interesting discovery about the store's book section:
The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings ...
As Ben notes, most of the applications in the App Store's book category are individual ebooks -- most drawn from Project Gutenberg -- wrapped up as stand-alone software packages. The user reviews attached to these ebook apps fall into two camps: critics who cry foul over public domain titles repurposed with a price tag, and advocates who see value in the applications' low cost (most are $0.99) and easy access.
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News Roundup: B&N; Won't Buy Borders, Kindle Roadblocks and Sightings, Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
Mac Slocum
August 15, 2008
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Report: No Borders Bid for Barnes & Noble
It looks like Barnes & Noble won't acquire Borders after all. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says B&N; is changing course from earlier this year and will not submit a bid for Borders.
Kindle Projections, Roadblocks and Sightings
Theresa Poletti from MarketWatch comments on the relative absence of Kindle sightings, particularly in Silicon Valley:
The biggest problem is the fact that the Kindle is only available online, via the Amazon.com Website. For many consumer electronics products, potential buyers need to touch and feel the device, to pick it up and play with it, before making any kind of purchasing commitment ... (Continue reading)
Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
"Why do people pirate my games?"
Game developer Cliff Harris recently posed this question on his blog and the onslaught of responses caught him (and his blog host) by surprise. Harris offers some interesting conclusions, but most notable is this passage on digital rights management (DRM):
People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.
Harris says his company will no longer use DRM on its games.
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Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
Mac Slocum
August 14, 2008
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"Why do people pirate my games?"
Game developer Cliff Harris recently posed this question on his blog and the onslaught of responses caught him (and his blog host) by surprise. Harris offers some interesting conclusions, but most notable is this passage on digital rights management (DRM):
People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.
Harris says his company will no longer use DRM on its games.
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TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 14, 2008
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Could the iPhone be a Kindle Killer? (Bill Trippe, Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog)
Here's a project I would love to do if I had the time--a face-off between Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, an eBook Technologies ETI-1, and a few other devices. Take a few book types--novel, textbook, graphical book, business document to begin with--and create a feature matrix and evaluation criteria.
Random Ebook Thoughts From A Jetlagged Mind (Kassia Krozser, Booksquare)
Here's a truth: ebooks sell far better than numbers from traditional publishers indicate. This is because there's a huge market for erotica out there. Women buy erotic ebooks instead of purchasing physical books because, well, if you're female and over thirty, you've been taught that good girls don't go there. Actually, good girls do. They just do it under the radar.
Why blog publishing 'failed' in the UK (Ashley Norris, TechCrunch UK)
... many brands and their agency planers have chosen to play it safe and will work with established media brands or mega portals like MSN, even when the ads themselves will be seen by a less focussed and often an inappropriate audience
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Report: No Borders Bid for Barnes & Noble
Mac Slocum
August 14, 2008
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It looks like Barnes & Noble won't acquire Borders after all. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says B&N; is changing course from earlier this year and will not submit a bid for Borders.
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