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Archive for the 'The Book' Category

the Kindle and the iPhone dance

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

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 [...]

The ISBN as SKU

Monday, June 16th, 2008

[mirrored at Peter Brantley's shimenawa blog]
I’ve spent the last few days in New York, and had the pleasure of meeting with various interesting folks. About which more anon, separately.
Many of the conversations revolved around digital books and the future of publishing — what form will books take? Would they be downloadable objects, or eventually migrate [...]

contra kindle

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

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 [...]

The Baby and the Bath Water

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just made an extraordinary announcement. The Press plans to make its entire backlist available for free online two years after formal, print publication. Here is what the AAUP newsletter has to say about this:
Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to [...]

Better pay attention to the Kindle

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

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 [...]

Cory Doctorow Meets the Giant Behemoth

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Cory Doctorow has some interesting things to say about the Amazon Kindle in The Guardian. Doctorow doesn’t like it much, as it doesn’t conform to his view of the Internet, which includes the ability to move files around without restriction.
What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle [...]