Saturday, February 27, 2010

News

When It Comes to Content, Amazon’s Kindle Won’t Be Undersold
On Jan. 27, Steven P. Jobs was still standing on a stage in San Francisco, presenting Apple’s new iPad, when the phones started ringing. Senior managers from Amazon.com were calling newspaper, magazine and book publishers trying to glean any information possible about the deals Apple was offering them to supply content for its new reading device. [...]
Since December, Amazon has been pushing publishers to sign a new round of legal agreements that would guarantee that the Kindle price for their content is always the same or lower than the price on other electronic reading devices, such as the iPad or the Sony Reader.
Source: New York Times


AP takes aim at consumers with new digital unit
The Associated Press is setting up a division to help the news cooperative, newspapers and broadcasters sell digital products directly to readers on the next wave of Internet-connected devices such as Apple's iPad. [...]
AP Gateway will focus on expanding such products as the AP Mobile news service for cell phones and the kinds of online platforms that the AP developed for the Winter Olympics and Copenhagen climate talks. Some services might be supported by advertising revenue, while others might require readers to pay subscriptions, Curley said.
Source: Associated Press


The fuss about ePub
But Pacheco conceded that he isn't crazy about how ePub files look on most e-readers. It's more like reading a blog through an RSS reader as opposed to reading the content on the originating Web site, he said.
That said, "I have a feeling that Apple will push the International Digital Publishing Forum to extend the capabilities of ePub over time and make it more visual and interactive," he said. "Apple and publishers together have an opportunity here to lead the evolution of a standard for rich, offline handheld content."
Source: News & Tech


Scribd Spreads the Words From PCs to Mobile Devices
Document-sharing site Scribd.com launched a new feature Wednesday allowing users to easily transfer many of the site's 10 million books, magazines and documents to mobile devices, including Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle, the Nook e-reader and the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone.
It's part of the San Francisco-based tech company's effort to plant its hooks in the growing e-publishing business by making it especially easy for people who don't yet have e-readers -- which is to say most of us -- to behave as though we do.
Source: E Commerce Times


My Kid’s an Honor Student at iPad University: Apple on the Rebound in Edu
With Apple (AAPL) inking multiyear Mac contracts with a number of school districts, it’s growth in edu is on the rebound. And now, with the iPad and its promise of hand-held education just a few weeks from market, Apple could be poised to see significant growth in higher ed.
Source: Digital Daily


Mobile E-learning Publishing: iPad, iPhone, or Kindle – Which do iChoose?
While there are some who feel e-reading on mobile devices is not ready for mass adoption, Kindle’s popularity has laid that discussion to rest. Timothy Egan, a writer for the NY Times blog, iCountry, sees the acceleration of e-book reader adoption as a step towards preserving “book culture” and believes that a key part of ensuring this movement is equitable is to hold the gatekeepers accountable.
Source: Electronic Papyrus


My Notes from an Interview on Ebooks
Publishers are looking for better margins and retail prices from ebooks in general. While the agency model has been held up as a tool to enable better prices and margins, it's not clear that enabling publishers to set their own prices via the agency model is going to support prices and margins in the long run that much better than the retail/wholesale model.
Source: ContentBlogger





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