The fight between Macmillan and Amazon over the price of ebooks illustrates some of the problems that publishers, and indirectly authors have with Amazon’s current business model — authors Tobias Buckell and Charles Stross weigh in.
The NY Times’ Paper Cuts blog recently pointed out the new trend of selling individual short stories. Reportedly, The Atlantic has made an exclusive deal with Amazon to distribute new fiction through the Kindle system. While smaller operations, like One Story and Madras Press, are charging for similar content in online issues and chapbooks respectively.
The release of the Barnes and Noble Nook should have been exciting, but it wasn’t. It appears to be the best designed reader to date; it has wifi and 3G, it lets you share books and access PDFs, and it runs a cutting edge, open source operating system. It’s so well designed that it highlighted the real flaws with itself and its main competitor, Amazon’s Kindle. The problem with these readers is that they are both products of companies’ whose main business is selling books that have partnered with telecommunication companies for 3g service.Unfortunately, Booksellers and 3g providers do not want to build the device that lets the user get the most out of its technology, they want to build a gadget that sells the most content on the lowest possible amount of bandwidth.
Does the engadget of ereaders have to come from outside of the bookselling industry? Probably. Think of how Apple revolutionized the the music industry — it allowed people to easily put all the content that they already had access to into their more accessible format. They did this because they had one goal in mind: to sell as many units as it could.
It’s not what the Nook is lacking, but its extra baggage that’s holding it back. The 3G means that Barnes and Noble cannot open up the device to the droves of developers that are creating apps for Android because of the bandwidth issues and cost considerations that were surely addressed when signing up with AT&T. When it comes down to it Barnes and Noble wants you to use that bandwidth to purchase their product, not to check your email, edit word documents, or access the freely available blogs and newspapers on the wider web. One day the Nook may be able to do all this and more — Barnes and Noble could open up it to Android developers and start an app store in their up coming sales war with Amazon. At least the Nook has what it takes under the hood to become a powerful mobile device and not just an online bookstore, that alone puts it ahead of the closed minded Kindle.
Forrester released a report predicting large scale growth in the eReader market. The report expects the growth to bring new challengers to Amazon’s market dominance. According to the report, “Competitors will attack Amazon’s market position by launching new features, expanding content beyond books, dominating markets outside the US, reducing costs, and improving relationships with publishers.” Read a synopsis of the report here.
The Kindle is a technological marvel that has the potential to greatly enhance our relationship with written content — its amazing battery life and lack of eye strain could make digital reading a much deeper and intellectually satisfying experience. For these reasons, an e-reader will soon appear that will be as widely implemented as PCs and iPods.
However, most of the Kindle’s potential remains untapped. The productivity and communication potential for a mobile platform with a reliable wireless connection, long battery life, and no reading fatigue are almost endless. Unfortunately the device is too closed to reach its full potential, closed to both developers and content providers. Amazon could learn something from Apple, who succeeded greatly by allowing customers’ existing music collections to freely live side by side with purchases from iTunes. Apple has also had a huge amount of success openning up to developers with its app store, where third party content (both free and payed) is available to users. Such a business model has proved so successful that it is now being copied by almost every company that offers a competing mobile platform — every company besides Amazon.
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2009
If fundamentalism is as Terry Eagleton claims a “failure of the imagination,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution is his attempt to show how religion’s liberal opponents and their ultra-rationalist arguments have suffered the same intellectual failures as those that they [...]
Today the Avenues of A, B and C are full of sushi restaurants, cafes and bars that serve martinis for double digit prices. It is a far cry from the place that Miguel Algarin grew up in and remained in. The neighborhood still has its charm that separates it completely from the rest of the [...]
In The Accordionist’s Son, Bernardo Atxaga brings the horrors of recent history to light without diminishing the mysteriously foreign and beautiful world that he has created. And it is another world that Atxaga has created, so particular in the details of both the land and its inhabitants that it feels organic like few fictional worlds [...]
Nick Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, brings magical realism to the post apocalyptic genre. A well written vision for futurists and luddites alike.
In the The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel Salman Rushdie continues to explore his interest in how the supernatural can be brought to life through the power of storytelling. However, he does so without the grandiosely experimental postmodernism of his earlier works.
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