February 2010
12 posts
So who's going to buy an iPad?
Research group YouGov has released some interesting stats [PDF] relating to
iPad awareness and interest:
When shown a picture of the product and asked if they had heard about it 70% of British respondents said they had, compared to 64% in USA, 63% in Germany,
60% in Denmark and 53% in the Middle East.
Middle East respondents were most likely to buy the iPad, with 58% of respondents...
What could the Macmillazon affair mean for...
Now that Amazon has started putting buy links back on Macmillan books,
there’s no shortage of opinions on what it might mean for the future
of publishing, retail, distribution, and so on.
But here’s a question
that I don’t think is being asked: how will the the relationship
between publishers and authors change, and more importantly, how can authors exploit the situation?
...
Some vague stats on e-reader usage
NPD has released some interesting, though infuriatingly vague, tidbits
on usage patterns for e-reader owners. Buried inside this press
release (which seems to hang off the sloppily-worded “95 percent
of e-readers owners are happy with their devices”) is something
enormously interesting:
[It] seems that e-Reader owners aren’t married to their e-Readers to do their reading. About...
What Amazon and Macmillan Aren't Fighting About
I don’t want to dwell on this, but after seeing the responses of bloggers, Twitterers and commentators to the Amazon and Macmillan spat, I think it’s worth pointing out what the argument is about — and more importantly, what it’s not about.
First, here are two concise points lifted from my Twitter stream that, incredibly, seem to sum up about 40 billion words of reader...
Google Book Search Settlement Still Rubbish
Quick update on the Google Book Search (GBS) Settlement. At the end of last year, Google proposed a revised Settlement which was supposed to satisfy the demands made by the US Department of Justice.
Here’s what Judge Chin had to say:
“[The] amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism...
Google's cultural asphyxiation
My views on the Google Book Settlement are straightforward: solve
the antitrust problem. Google will gain automatic access to your work
via the Book Rights Registry on an involuntary basis, and that’s
utterly insane. Squabbles over copyrights, fair use, privacy, author
compensation, etc, are only meaningful in a marketplace — if the GBS
goes ahead as is, then we won’t have that,...
January 2010
3 posts
What the iPad looks like...
… without Flash.
The actual stupid thing Amazon did
John Scalzi on the Amazon thing:
Note to Amazon: Real people do not give a shit about your fight with Macmillan. Real people want to buy things. When your store takes them to a product page on which they cannot buy the thing on the page, they will not say to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder if Amazon is having a behind-the-scenes struggle with the publisher of this title, of which this is the...
Amazon pulls its head in
Well, that didn’t last long. Amazon has “capitulated” on its decision to wipe Macmillan from its stores.
According to a post on the Kindle forum:
Dear Customers:
Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for...