The WSJ reported lasted night that HarperCollins is negotiating terms with Apple for making ebooks available on the company’s forthcoming new device, along with unnamed other publishers. Which is correct, but is just a sliver of the story that is emerging, albeit changing all the time. Apple, whose representatives are in New York for meetings this week, is acknowledged by participants as currently negotiating with nearly all (and most likely all) of the six largest trade publishers, though those negotiations were supposed to be confidential. Multiple participants caution that negotiations are complex, far from complete, and may be hard to […]
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BISG Surveys eBook Consumers
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has released headline results from their first survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading, conducted among approximately 550 people from Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer panel who said they had purchased an ebook within the past year. Computers were still the top ereading “devices,” cited by 47 percent of respondents, followed by the Kindle at 32 percent and other ereaders at 10 percent. “Roughly one-fifth of survey respondents said they’ve stopped purchasing print books within the past 12 months in favor of acquiring the e-book editions.” One question asked how, for a favorite author, consumers would […]
Espresso Book Machine Aims to Gain Heft with Xerox Agreement
Makers of the slow-to-grow Espresso Book Machine On Demand Books announced a sales and marketing partnership with Xerox that could add some muscle to the company’s efforts. Together they will sell a high-speed Xerox copier/printer that they say can print approximately 40,000 300-page books a year, paired with On Demand’s finishing machine and software. That is a significantly higher capacity than is provided by the other printers that have traditionally been paired with On Demand’s finisher–though the new package is more expensive, too, adding approximately $20,000 to the roughly $100,000 cost of the current full package from On Demand. Presumably, […]
More Action in Online Textbook Rentals
Following yesterday’s announcement from Barnes & Noble College, Cengage Learning announced that their site CengageBrain.com is renting over 1,200 of the company’s textbooks at “up to 70 percent off the suggested retail price.” And they say they will add another 1,500 titles to the program by July 2010. Just as importantly, Cengage’s site already sells electronic textbooks and echapters, too. Inside Higher Ed suggests that a transition to a Netflix “play instantly” model is not far off in the textbook market: “Just as Netflix has begun making more and more of its inventory available for users to stream instantly on […]
CES Hilarity: How Quickly the Coverage Turns
After days of excited reports about the very latest demos of mostly non-existent but planned ebook readers, the press has now had enough and decided they are too many devices and the market is over. Gizmodo is among those writing: “The introduction of e-ink-based readers by many big tech companies and a handful of feisty little ones threatens to sow confusion in the market place, encourage piracy, and screw over any company who gets in and then can’t really hack it against Kindle and Nook. And all of it will be a pointless exercise when long-lasting slates are a reality.” […]
Borders Springs a Deal with Alex Reader
Borders ebookstore–powered by Kobo–has reached an agreement “in principle” to partner with Spring Design’s nook-alike Alex ereader. While it makes perfect sense–after all, Alex can’t use BN.com as their store partner like so many other readers while they are suing them–it’s an opportunistic victory for Borders as they play ereading catch-up on a limited budget. Reuters adds, “the Alex e-reader will give the borders.com e-book site top billing, featuring it on its initial screen, a Borders spokeswoman told Reuters, though shoppers will be able to buy and read books from other sources on their Alex e-reader.“ Though they did not […]