Barnes & Noble’s e-reader entry was supposed to have one big advantage over the Kindle–you could buy one at the retailer’s stores. But it has been a long time coming, and in the meantime, you may have heard about another compelling e-reader heading to market.
Here’s another publisher publicly throwing its weight behind Apple–and against Amazon–in the e-book pricing war. Hachette Book Group says it will pursue the “agency model” for pricing e-books: It sets retail prices and the retailer gets a 30 percent cut. In more practical terms, this means Hachette’s titles will be getting more expensive, and the rest of the industry will be following suit.
Amazon caves after two days, agreeing to Macmillan’s demands to sell its e-books at a higher price–otherwise known as the Apple iPad pricing plan. In doing so, the world’s biggest e-commerce player has made a tacit admission that e-book prices will rise across the board.
Apple has yet to sell its first e-book, but it is already engaged in a bruising battle with Amazon for control of the market. The most recent salvo: Amazon has stopped selling all books from MacMillan, apparently in response to the publisher’s plans to sell its books at a higher price point through Apple.
Interesting footnote in AT&T’s earnings this morning: The carrier everyone loves to hate has quietly become the carrier of choice for e-book readers from Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble. They generated a million new subscriptions last quarter, and now the iPad will bring more.
As predicted, Steve Jobs showed off a new multimedia device today. One thing he didn’t show off, though: Much in the way of new media.
Amazon is doubling the royalty rate it pays small e-book authors and publishers–if they promise to keep the prices of their digital texts below the price of physical books. The goals here are obvious: Push prices down and try to keep business away from a growing list of rivals.
Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason: The magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet. Tease that out a bit and you can tell the story of most media companies. They’re excited to start taking advantage of the tablet–as soon as they find out what it is, exactly.
Here’s another e-reader clamoring for attention in a Consumer Electronics Show full of e-readers: The Skiff Reader, produced by a company funded by publisher Hearst Corp. and supported by Sprint. But in many ways, the Skiff Reader’s specs are beside the point, because the real point of its parent company isn’t to produce e-reader devices at all–it wants to create a publishing and distribution platform. Does this sound familiar? And does it sound like something another publisher might want to buy?
After promising to deliver its take on Amazon’s Kindle for a couple of years, Plastic Logic is finally delivering: Here comes the Que, which the company promises is “more than an eReader.” It had better be: The first two versions of the gadget will cost $649 and $799.
The Apple tablet is threatening to approach Yeti status, but here’s an indication it will turn out to be very real, indeed: The company has told some of its key developers to prepare versions of their iPhone apps that will work on a device with a larger screen, in time for an event next month. Sound like a tablet to you?
Since we’ve spent the past few months dreaming about what a magazine might look like on a tablet from the future, why not do a little dreaming about the tablet itself?
Sound good? Then take a gander at the XO-3, a superlight, supercheap tablet that the people from One Laptop Per Child think they’d like to have available in 2012.
Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store. Seminude pop star aside, this doesn’t seem as sexy as the Tablet of Tomorrow talk. But the fact that people are indeed buying magazines in digital form seems pretty relevant to me.
How do you catch up to Amazon in the e-book race it is running away with? Maybe exclusive content will help.
That’s what Sony says it is trying to do with News Corp. and some of its publications. The partnership the two companies announced today won’t be nearly enough to make Sony’s Reader line competitive. But it does point in the direction both companies would like to head.
No one has actually spotted one of the much anticipated tablet devices in the wild. But that doesn’t stop publishers from dreaming about what they can do with them once they appear. Here’s the latest, and perhaps most attractive, one–from Sweden’s Bonnier Group. It seems to be purely conceptual at this point, but it’s fun to look at.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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