Now that both the Kindle and the iPhone are out, it’s interesting to look at the very similar business strategy behind the two products.
I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up [...]

I’ve been pondering the ebook situation with respect to the upcoming (Friday) launch of the iPhone App Store. One of the problems hardware devices like the Sony Reader and the Kindle have to contend with is competition with other reading platforms like the paperback book, or the library book. It’s hard to spend $300 on [...]

Paul Krugman has an interesting column on the future of publishing, in which he notes (citing Esther Dyson) that in a digital world where copying is easy and perhaps unstoppable, electronic books will be given away for free in order to promote the sales of other goods and services.
I am a great admirer of Krugman, [...]

Technology Review asked for my thoughts on Kindle. Here they are, slightly emended.
No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional supply [...]

I got my Kindle at the beginning of Christmas week. The holidays gave me a chance to show it to a number of friends and relatives who don’t read ebooks, don’t know about ebooks, and have never tried reading on a screen. Several of them had heard about the Kindle and were primed to see [...]

Recently, Netflix released some anonymized usage data in order to seed a technical challenge (on recommending algorithms).
Bruce Schneier, a well known security expert, reports that a team of University of Texas researchers successfully de-anonymized a subset of the data through correlation with public IMDb (internet movie database) entries.
Bruce extends this by analogy to point how [...]

Joe Wikert of Publishing 2020 talks about the potential for having subscription-based ebook vending models, with page-view based economics.
“Could you imagine a model where you pay $X/month for access to an unlimited number of books? It’s never going to happen in the print world but I think this could be the killer app for [...]