A Couple of Interesting Articles no comments
I’ve come across a couple of interesting articles today that are worth sharing.
Could a Kindle tablet running Windows 7 Mobile be in the works? Last week Microsoft and Amazon announced that the two companies had entered a cross-licensing deal allowing access to each other’s patent portfolios. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but payment of an undisclosed amount by Amazon to Microsoft was part of the deal.
There has been much speculation on the implications of this agreement. Patents related to the Kindle, which uses Linux, were included in the agreement. Was Amazon just trying to cover its bases vis-a-vis Microsoft’s contentions that many Linux implementations violate its patents? Or is Amazon laying the groundwork for a Kindle tablet to go head to head with the iPad? Does Microsoft plan to release an ereader, and is the Courier tablet for real?
On a ZDNet blog post Jason Perlow speculates that Amazon might have plans to ditch Linux and switch to a Windows 7 powered Kindle, possibly even with a Pixel Qi display:
Imagine a Windows 7 Phone Series device scaled up to a 10.1 inch screen, with Wireless-N networking, Microsoft’s Zune/Amazon MP3 music service, Kindle’s e-book store and the Microsoft’s developer base behind it. A synthesis of the world’s largest Internet retailer, ebook reseller and the world’s largest software company.
Such a device could also go well with Amazon’s video on demand service.
More Publishers vs Ebooks
Writing in the NY Times, Motoko Rich estimates the comparative costs of publishing a pbook vs an ebook and explains the ebook pricing controversy pretty much from the publisher’s point of view.
Citing concerns that ebooks will further pressure already beleaguered brick and mortar bookstores, Rich quotes Mike Shatzkin who is CEO of a consultant company to the publishing industry, “If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books. The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”
My thoughts would be that even if we didn’t have ebooks the bookstores would sadly still be in trouble. For one thing dedicated bookstores face similar problems as other smaller specialized shops have in recent history. How can they compete with the likes of Walmart, Costco or online stores such as Amazon? By the time that ebooks become a significant enough percentage of the total number of books sold to become a serious threat to bookstores it will most likely be far too late for many of these stores anyway.
In addition people read less than before because we are so busy and there are so many other forms of entertainment competing for our scarce leisure time. While it is of little benefit to pbook stores, ereaders have the capability to help reverse the decline in reading by making it much more convenient.
Rich also mentions the common publishing industry argument that “the industry is based on the understanding that as much as 70 percent of the books published will make little or no money at all for the publisher once costs are paid.”
In other words bestsellers subsidize the rest of the books that are published. Well, if all books were published digitally this would not be an issue. No physical bookstore can afford the shelf space to stock all of those 70 percent of books that are not bestsellers. How can titles that are slow sellers even be bought if most bookstores cannot stock them? Online pbook stores can stock much more than brick and mortar stores, but there is still a limit.
Shelf space is not an issue for ebooks. The long tail made up of the 70 percent of titles that do not sell well would cost almost nothing to stock in digital format and because they could be made readily available as ebooks they would even sell more copies than they do now. Publishers could even turn their out of print books into a revenue stream by rereleasing them as ebooks.
Rich closes by quoting Anne Rice “The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.”
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