Group items tagged

Thew controversy was mainly about Amazon, and it was as interesting reading the comments as well as the article. Amazon is creating "fulfillment centers" in states for shipping items to consumers, and may even be looking at creating their own delivery service. The business model Amazon uses is very lean with low paid workers, and the American Booksellers Associations claims that for every $10 million that shifts from physical brick-and-mortar stores to Amazon 33 jobs are lost.

Amazon is acquiring Goodreads. They already own Shelfari and a portion of LibraryThing.

An article that revisits an older issue (Amazon wiping or removing a book from a Kindle), just this time it was an entire eBook collection and was deleted because of a problem with the user's account. It reinforces what copyright holders have always had but weren't able to enforce until the digital era, that users have only rights to access or use a work, not to actually own it, and those rights can be limited. Further, Amazon is a private company that can dictate policies; all the user knows is her account is "related" to a blocked account without knowing why or how.

I'm not too sure if this should be taken as a good or a bad sign for the Kindle. On the one hand it increases the promotion and awareness of it, on the other Amazon seems to be trying too hard to promote the Kindle, and I wonder when the point of market saturation will be reached.

At least two of the big-six publishers are refusing to sign new annual contracts with Amazon. While that could result in their "buy" buttons being turned off, it is more likely that the feud will result in less promotion of big-six publishers' titles on the site.

No real surprise here. With Amazon trying to make deals directly with authors to avoid having to pay big money to these publishers it's no wonder. It's only a matter of time before these big publishers either go out of business or wise up and scale back.

In France eBooks are only 1.8% of the general market, and total sales of books have actually increased by 6.5% from 2003 to 2011. Some interesting conclusions are drawn from this, namely that prices for French language books are fixed by government decree and set by publishers--not by price discounters such as Amazon, and last year the publishers lobbied to do the same for eBooks. The French government is also friendly to booksellers, offering grants and help with rent. The result is French language bookstores are doing well, while some such English language bookstore such as the 30 year old Village Voice are closing because of the competition from resellers like Amazon and eBooks. The article surmises that the French are really only delaying the inevitable, but I find it curious that nothing is really stopping them from turning entirely to eBooks now, the main factor is cost rather than convenience or access.

This is not the first time Barnes & Noble has done this sort of "banning" as the author calls it. Last spring they pulled DC Comics because DC was making a deal to only work with Amazon. The comics eventually came back, but it made a pretty big statement. I don't think we've heard the end of this.

An article about the outrage when Elsevier bought a social media research platform called Mendeley, and the parallels to when Amazon bought GoodReads. Points are made, that open social media is best, but at a certain point the data produced is valuable enough that corporate interests will step in.

The article is interesting for what it gets wrong and for what it brings up. The phrase "Boise Public Library's new Enterprise Discover System, which was funded by a consortium of more than 15 Idaho libraries" makes it sound like this was a home grown discovery system, but it's actually Sirsi-Dynix's Enterprise system. It's interesting because it's one of the first general news articles I've seen showing awareness of a discovery service, which means they are gradually filtering their way into the public realm of what libraries are supposed to be about.

Coming after Target stopped selling them in May this is likely more from Wal-Mart wishing to promote their online products than from any drop in demand for the Kindle.

A fairly complete review on the new Kindle Fire HD, notable that most of the improvement was done with faster and better hardware and not in the interface. Notable is the upcoming 8.9 inch Kindle is the device with cellular connectivity, the Fire HD still uses wireless ethernet. Also notable is the primary competitor is not Apple's iPad but Google's Nexus 7 which in shape and general performance is similar but uses Google's Play store.

This is similar to a problem I'd heard about regarding non-copyrighted books, namely repackaging what could be had for free and charging for it when there's little to no added value. Now books with titles similar to popular offerings but otherwise having nothing in common are coming up in the hopes that buyers not paying attention will click on them. Examples are "I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "Twilight New Moon." This is also a very old trick, as I've heard for years of knock-off electronics being sold under brand names like Panasoanic and JCV.

LendInk was a site that facilitated legitimate ebook lending by putting people with books to lend in touch with people looking to borrow. This was all done at Amazon and Barnes & Noble's websites LendInk merely put the people in touch. The site was shut down because of their host receiving hundreds of Cease and Desist letters from ebook publishers who didn't even take the time to see what the site actually did or who didn't understand that their books were even lendable. 

This is the rest of the story of the Wired.com writer who got hacked. It's really alarming how easily this was done and also the *why*. The hackers just liked his 3 character twitter user name (there obviously aren't a lot of short twitter user names) and were out to hijack it. Dude lost the photos of his kids first year and loads of other irreplaceable stuff when they remote wiped his phone and laptop to prevent him from taking his twitter account back.

I would say this is still more of a niche interest than an "antidote," but it does say something that people would still prefer to use the Espresso Book Machine and publish a physical copy of a book and it still sells rather than create it as an eBook on Amazon or Google Books. Probably the most useful aspect is for small independent booksellers to maintain a large accessible inventory but only keep and produce a small physical supply as needed, which could also apply to libraries--however not mention in the the articles is these units also have a hefty price tag of over $100,000.

An interesting article about some of the strategies Jeff Bezos used in building Amazon. I this example he only wanted to order the specific book he needed, but most vendors had a minimum order of 10. He found that by ordering 1 book and then 9 copies of an obscure book on lichens he knew the vendors didn't carry that the order would be fulfilled for the 1 book. I'm a little surprised, however, that vendors didn't clue in or change their rules that books had to be ordered that were in stock.

An author recounts a success story and what had to be done to self publish a casebook. Unlike fiction or repackaged public domain material this was a large book, 870 pages and nearly 40 megabytes in size. The author also did not used Amazon but Scribd and Gumroad as publishers.

An interesting topic but not one that necessarily reflects what people are thinking. First is the purpose of highlighting--often for research as in a paper or in self help books, and second is how many people make highlights in the first place. Still, it is an interesting insight into what readers find notable.

And why would they do it?  Probably because as it stands, it doesn't work as intended. As people realize that what they're doing isn't buying content so much as leasing it, it's interesting to see how their attitudes have changed towards DRM. 

"Girl wonder beats boy wizard."