Engadget featured “exclusive” pictures of Microsoft’s Courier, a tablet/ereader–now called a “digital journal–that the company is working on.Link Amazon is said to have e-mailed its Colorado-based affiliates to notify them that their relationship with the etailer has been severed as of March 8 as the result of new state legistation “to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers.” The company writes: “The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to ‘voluntarily’ collect Colorado sales tax — a […]
eNews
Apple Adjusts, Clarifies iPad Release Dates
Apple announced this morning that they will start taking pre-orders in the US for the iPad on March 12, and the unit will arrive a few days later than originally planned, on April 3. (That’s for wi-fi models; 3G units will come in late April.) The company says that “all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.”Release In other device news, the WSJ reports on plans by Sony to introduce “a portable device that shares characteristics of netbooks, electronic-book readers and handheld-game machines” later this year […]
Penguin's Makinson Demonstrates iPad Adaptations
Yesterday Penguin Group ceo John Makinson presented more of the company’s vision of how to present books on the iPad platform at conference. There vision is that they “will be embedding streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do.” Which means they are forsaking epub, which “is designed for narrative text but not this cool stuff that we’re talking about now” and “for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications.” Makinson freely admitted that “we don’t understand at the moment what the consumer is prepared to pay for. We don’t […]
More eNews: iBooks Will Go International Once they Hire; Bloomsbury Expands Online Library, and More
* So far Apple has said the iBookstore and iBooks app will launch in the US only. But a company job listing has been spotted online seeking a manager “responsible for launching and growing the iBook business in Asia Pacific [later detailed as Australia, New Zealand and other countries] and Canada and building an extensive offering for customers.”Listing * In the UK, Bloomsbury has expanded their online library project and renamed it the Public Library Online, reflecting the new inclusion of books from other publishers. Joining them are Faber, Quercus, Canongate and Allison & Busby, “with more coming soon.” Built […]
eBook Pricing: The Feedback Loop
Macmillan ceo John Sargent’s blog post from yesterday has drawn over 50 comments, spanning the typical online range from reasonable to ranting. Importantly, Sargent has posted back twice, indicating: “Thanks for the comments. I’ll get back to you as time allows. I’ll also try to gather groups of questions that indicate I have not been clear enough and answer them in my next post.” A number of posters don’t fully understand that the new pricing has not begun yet, even though the original piece indicates things will change “starting at the end of March,” and ask about the publisher’s historically […]
Understanding the Digital Divide for Smaller Publishers
The rise of digital publishing and the coming of the agency sales model raise all kinds of urgent issues for publishers of all sizes. What applies to the biggest publishers may not be the same for smaller companies. Earlier this month Perseus surveyed its approximately 300 distribution clients (over 100 of whom use their digital distribution service Constellation) to learn more about their digital views. The approximately 70 responses provide an interesting glimpse of the “digital divide” between large and small publishers. One big, unanswered strategic question for the company is how to deal with the agency sales model. Will […]