Further to our own reports on how publishers hope/expect to the deploy the agency model of selling terms broadly across their ebook accounts to retake some measure of control over the pricing of new releases, Apple’s Steve Jobs essentially confirmed the plan to the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg in a brief video interview. Mossberg wondered why someone “should buy a [b]book for $14.99 when you can buy one from Amazon for $9.99 on the Kindle or Barnes & Noble?” A confident Jobs replies, “That won’t be the case…. The prices will be the same.” How in the world will prices be […]
eNews
They're Back: Amazon, Hachette and Others File New Google Books Objections
With today’s filing deadline, the court has registered a wave of new opt-outs and objections to the revised Google Books settlement agreement, though so far it’s a fraction of the over 400 objections to the original agreement. Though Judge Denny Chin made it clear that he wanted to hear objections to the revised provisions only, some parties couldn’t help themselves and have repeated earlier points lightly clothed in new language. Amazon’s objection follows a middle line, reiterating many basics points from their first filing but also addressing some of the new issue. They believe the agreement continues to constitute illegal […]
The Five-Minute iBooks Presentation
“We’re going to open up the floodgates for the rest of the publishers starting this afternoon.”
Random House On their Ongoing "Conversations" with Apple
Random House welcomes Apple’s iPad and iBooks app and we look forward to our continuing conversations with them about how we might best work together.
Apple Partners with All Big Six But Random House; iPad Starts at $499
At today’s iPad announcement Apple introduced a new ebook app, using epub, called iBooks. The logos of all of the big six were displayed on stage as participating partners, leaving aside Random House. (We could not reach Random House yet for comment.) Sample price baskets shown top out at 14.99 though they did not speak to price or business details at the event. The new iBooks bookstores was called similar to iTunes, and integrates with the iBooks reading app. Steve Jobs gave props to Amazon: “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this… we’re going to stand on their […]
More Consumer eReading Insights from New BISG Study
Kelly Gallagher started today’s Digital Book World presentations with the first highlights of data from the BISG’s new survey of consumer attitudes towards ereading. Aiming to evaluate “how traditional print-book buyers are interacting with ebooks”–and to be repeated two more times this year to track changes in readers’ habits–they surveyed about 550 people from their panel of survey panel of 36,000 book readers (after “qualifying” a mere 2.4 percent of that group overall as able to speak about ereading habits at all). As with other data presentations, our caution–data-heavy slides went flying by so are hard to present fully here. […]