http://pubfrontier.com A raucous public discussion of the publishing revolution. Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:04:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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. ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/07/20/e-ink-the-kindle-and-the-iphone/ 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 ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/07/07/ebooks-and-the-iphone/ It was 51 years ago today, on July 6, 1957 (not 1955, as Time magazine subsequently reported), that on the fairgrounds in Liverpool, Paul McCartney met John Lennon for the first time. From that time through 1970, when the band formally broke up, musical and social history were made. Another ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/07/06/the-beatles-yesterday-and-today/ [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 ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/06/16/the-isbn-as-sku/ 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 ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/06/08/the-trouble-with-free/ On one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/05/25/provostial-publishing/ 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 ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/03/04/contra-kindle/ SCOAP3 - Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics at UC Berkeley, February 29, 2008. Converting an entire discipline -- high energy physics -- to open access. Live Blogging. Rick Luce, Emory Univ.: Open access has been seen as a solution to the pricing crisis. But ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/02/29/scoap3-high-energy-physics-goes-open-access/ The Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/02/29/open-access-re-journals-vs-books/ There's a wonderful piece at Mobile Opportunity that analyzes the slow demise of the hand-tuned mobile application for dedicated stacks.  The punch is in the last paragraph, and there are analogues here between mobile carriers and all other last-gen sectors that market and provide information - publishers, libraries, newspapers. In the ... http://pubfrontier.com/2008/02/25/writing-the-web-into-the-phone/