There has been a great deal of media hoopla about how the iPad will supposedly change everything, and all sorts of publications have been hastening to prepare iPad and other tablet editions.
However, here is a video from the Association of Online Publishers in which a number of its members express doubts that the iPad and e-readers will have any significant impact in the short term of 2010.
It looks like the ghost of the Amazon/Macmillan feud is still lingering in the air.
The New York Times has a lengthy piece covering the ongoing confidential discussions between Amazon and publishers. Apparently Amazon is up to its old tricks again, threatening publishers that it may stop selling their books if they do not agree to a list of concessions.
Amazon is apparently conceding the agency pricing model for e-books that most of the major publishers want, but if the Times’s sources can be believed it is demanding those publishers agree to three-year contracts as well as stipulate that no other e-book sellers could have lower prices or better terms. Publishers are reluctant to commit to a contract of that length given how much the e-book industry can change in just a short time.
Meanwhile, Apple seems to be asking much the same thing, at least insofar as lowest prices go. And while Amazon is only agreeing to the agency pricing model for the major publishers and trying to keep the smaller publishers on its standard wholesale model, Apple is offering it to all publishers, large and small—which means that if a publisher takes Apple up on it, he will need to insist on agency pricing with Amazon, too, or else run afoul of the lowest-price clause.
And hovering over all these publishers’ heads like a sword of Damocles is Amazon’s ability to remove the “Buy” buttons from its site and deprive them of a substantial source of revenue. If Amazon were to pull this sort of thing again, the outcry would probably be considerable—but that didn’t stop Amazon from keeping Macmillan’s books unavailable by direct sale for a whole week.
There can be no doubt that we are living in interesting times.
Steve Riggio has stepped down from the CEO position of Barnes & Noble to become B&N’s Vice Chairman. The new CEO will be William Lynch. In addition to serving as President of the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com, Lynch has an impressive amount of e-commerce experience with HSN.com and Gifts.com (which he co-founded), as well as a lot of involvement with e-commerce and websites for Palm.
As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce and Palm veteran as CEO over its entire operation.
Here’s a blog post from Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher who made a title available on Amazon as a free e-book. He reported seeing the sales rate of the second and third books in its series increase at a rate of 20 to 1. He says that digital sales make up 1/5 of the total sales of this particular series so far, and are growing.
Henrion writes:
Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.
Funny how publishers just keep discovering this anew, isn’t it?
Further discussion by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, and Nate the Great on his blog The Digital Reader (formerly Nate’s Ebook News).
Here’s something interesting about the FCC National Broadband Plan, which I’ve mentioned here a couple of times in recent days: it has quite a few provisions that are only orthogonally related to broadband, and a number of them have to do with copyright.
For example, the Plan suggests adoption of a new voluntary permissive copyright license, administered by the government, to permit educational digital use—even including a mock-up of a new copyright symbol to be used with the program (see left).
While a number of educational uses are already permitted under fair use, fair use is a defense rather than an affirmative right which means educators still run the risk of being sued. This new license would work like Creative Commons, in that rights holders would have to choose to use it. (I wonder how many actually would?)
There are a number of other copyright-related matters discussed in the National Broadband Plan document as well. For example:
Other copyright suggestions include "a statutory framework to facilitate identification of copyright holders and securing of permissions in an efficient and cost-effective way" so that teachers can, for instance, "use Beatles lyrics to promote literacy, employing music as a cultural bridge" without paying the "$3,000 licensing fee charged by the rights holders."
It suggests amending the Copyright Act to make such uses feasible.
I rather doubt that these proposed copyright reforms will get very far, but it is at least good to see some people are thinking about them.
By Rich Adin
It appears that Barnes & Noble and some publishers plan to experiment with giving pbook buyers a discount coupon to purchase the ebook version of the purchased pbook. I’ve been wrestling with this idea for quite some time and I’m still undecided about how valuable such a system will be to me.
There are several considerations. Will I need to buy the hardcover or can I buy the paperback pbook? Buying the hardcover pbook isn’t much of a problem for me as I only buy hardcover pbooks. But where it does have some effect is on which books will come with the discount coupon and how recent will those books be: Will they be brand new releases still on the bestseller lists or will they be part of the long tail only? The answer also affects the price I would be willing to pay (or maybe it doesn’t; let’s see how the discussion unfolds) for both the p and e books.
You may recall how Data the android read books in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit—by riffling through the pages and absorbing the information in the time it took to go from the front to back cover.
Now researchers in Tokyo have come up with a system that can scan paper books into electronic form just as fast. The video (embedded below the jump) shows University of Tokyo assistant professor Yoshihiro Watanabe literally holding a book under the camera and riffling through the pages.
The monitor captures the images and, as shown above, overlays them with a laser grid that is used to calculate the curvature of the pages so it can be compensated for in the image-capturing process. The scanner works at a rate of 500 frames per second, and can capture a complete 200 page book in a minute. Its developers say they hope to be able to make it even faster.
They also hope to be able to make it smaller, so it can be integrated into portable devices such as a cellphone. Imagine being able to OCR any book, anywhere, for later reading on your iPhone.
By Paul Biba
Amazon is now asking for a 3 year “most favored nations” clause from publishers who use the agency model. In other words it doesn’t want any competitor to get lower prices or better terms than Amazon. This is reported in the NY Times which cites industry executives. To make matters worse, Apple, on the other hand, is requiring all publishers, not just ones who use the agency model, not to allow ebooks to be sold by any other retail outlet at lower than the iBookstore price.
This means that Apple is actually tougher than Amazon. Apple wants publishers to sell to all retailers at the Apple price or above, but Amazon is only asking that for price parity on those publishers adopting the agency model, and is evidently trying to limit the agency model to only a few of the big publishers. Thus Apple is controlling all publishers who enter its store, but Amazon is leaving 50%-60% of its content to its standard distribution terms which will still force Apple to compete with Amazon’t pricing.
All this, of course, is a perfectly normal type of thing in retail, but I bet the publishers are tearing their hair out. When the big guys went to the agency model I suspect they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Once you control the price, rather than let the retailer do it, you have all this type of stuff to contend with.
Read an E-Book Week 2010 may be over but the amount of downloaded reading material should last readers for quite a while. Several participants of the event commented that traffic on their websites was up dramatically from last year. The Read an E-Book website had well over 60,000 page hits just prior to, and during the week. Mobile phone traffic – both Android and iPhone – was also up from last year.
Libraries from around the world were visitors this year. Wright State University Libraries did an article on Read an E-Book Week and produced lapel button templates. Several libraries in Canada and the U.S. contacted me for the templates so they could produce buttons for their own staff.
Visitors came from 137 countries speaking 74 languages. Countries included: U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, India, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, Peru, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Cuba and American Samoa. [Read rest of post]
By Paul Biba
According to CrunchGear, the Alex Reader is taking a different path than some of its competitors. Their goal is is to work with publishing houses and periodicals to create a branded webstore and an unique GIU for each device. That way a newspaper or publisher could offer “their own” device at a subsidized price. In addition they are looking at getting universities to develop university-branded Alexes.
With all the “me too” readers out there now it’s refreshing to see someone thinking in larger terms. It does mean, though, that I’ll hold off buying one until I see if a branded, subsidized version will come out. I wonder if Kobo is thinking about this?
By Paul Biba
Daily Finance is talking about enhanced ebooks and the problems they bring. To the reader everything seems simple. Just put out the book. However, there’s lots of other stuff involved:
And literary agents on both sides of the Atlantic are gnashing their teeth over the prospect of enhanced e-book editions being a separate right from standard e-books. If standard and enhanced e-books are classified separately, the battle will begin again over whether authors can hang onto those rights — and whether publishers even have the rights to the enhanced editions at all.
British publishing trade magazine The Bookseller outlined the quandary this week. Some publishers, like the independent Canongate, negotiate deals individually. Others, like Hachette’s U.K. arm, prefer to keep all digital rights. But agents are shaking their heads over the idea of equivalency between a text-only e-book and a more sophisticated edition enriched with audio and video.
By Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation
Originally posted at Kindle Nation Daily 3.17.2010
I’ve been a David Baldacci fan for over a decade, and I’ve easily read over half of the books he’s published since his stunning 1996 debut with Absolute Power. From everything I’ve heard he’s a decent guy — among other things, in addition to spinning a great yarn, he’s a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and he funds his own literacy foundation, the Wish You Well Foundation. I’d love to keep reading his books on my Kindle, and I probably will do so. Since I and many other Kindle Nation readers are conscious both of content and price, it is worth noting that his most recent bestseller, True Blue, is priced at $9.99 in the Kindle Store. There are, also, over a dozen Baldacci backlist titles in the $6 to $8 price range as well as a couple of children’s books and other titles that fall outside that range.
