TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Tools of Change for Publishing’ Category

By David Rothman

“Online and mobile services offering listeners unlimited ‘free’ access to millions of songs are set to proliferate in the coming months, according to music industry executives.” - New York Times.

The TeleRead take: E-subscription services like Safari and Baen’s already exist. But how about the mainstream publishers? When will they get the message in the case of major bestsellers? Granted, many of the new subscription services are bundled with phones and so on. But what about stand-alone services, as well as options for e-book-gizmo buyers? I like the option approach out of respect for customers who just want the hardware.

Meanwhile here’s an interesting tidbit in the Times piece:

The government of the Isle of Man announced plans for a system under which consumers with broadband subscriptions would be required to pay a nominal monthly license fee. They could then legally download music from any source, even peer-to-peer services that are outlawed currently.

“At the end of the day, we are not going to stop piracy, so let’s embrace it,” said Ron Berry, the inward investment manager for the Isle of Man government.

Housekeeping—about the TeleRead blog’s move: While I’m not sure, I suspect it’s okay now to make posts and comments. Just keep backups. For those tuning in late, the TeleRead blog has moved from the blog directory to the main Web address of teleread.org. RSS and email subscriptions may not function at the moment—we’ll keep you posted. Speaking of e-mail, you can reach me at davidrothman NOSPAM pobox.com rather than the usal dr NOSPAM teleread.org for now. Also, we’re still working on images and on redirects from the old blog directory. Our goal is to have all the old TeleRead links lead you to the new location.

By Paul Biba

That’s the news from the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog. It’s just another indication of how the iPhone has become an industry-changing device. I have phones by HTC, Nokia, MWg, Palm and  Blackberry, but I simply don’t use them any more.

Whenever I switch over to one of them for a change of pace, I switch back the next day.

Clunky GUIs compared to the iPhone’s

Their GUI are just so clunky compared to the iPhone that they are painful to operate. On the book reading front, however, I still have the short battery life problem that will keep me locked to my Kindle as my main book reader. Also, the larger screen is just more pleasant.

As to the substance of the post below, the iPhone has a limit of 148 apps. I already have 62 on my phone, so it is unlikely that I will ever take up app space by adding a book, when I can add books by other means.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It’s hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we’ve been quite pleased with just how well:

If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales.

The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan

A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available.

There are certainly some who don’t care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It’s also clear there’s substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we’ll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital — and especially mobile — space in the coming months.