The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full price for each use of a book with a threshold trigger at considerably less than a complete read while, at the […]
Two pieces of news last week that foretell changes in the ebook marketplace
Two pieces of news this past week and how things play out with them might foretell some things about the direction of the ebook market. One news item is that reading on phones is really taking off. More than half of ebook consumers use their phones at least some of the time and the number that […]
Sony exits and the ebook business loses an original player
Sony has thrown in the towel on the ebook business and turned its customers over to Kobo. This has unleashed speculation that Nook will soon do the same. If B&N were really forced to choose between the investments they need to make in their stores and the investments required to compete in digital delivery, it […]
Three new ebook platforms nearing their debut
A year ago — even six months ago — it seemed like Amazon and its Kindle device had an insurmountable advantage in the ebook device and platform competition. Despite our admonition that Amazon’s dominance of ebooks was much more fragile than their dominance in online print bookselling, even we were impressed and sometimes daunted by […]
Big publishers have reason to be happy about how the book market is evolving
Big publishers have to be very happy about how things have been developing in the ebook world over the last six months or so. In that time, we have gone from a situation in which Kindle appeared to so totally dominate digital reading that Kindle-only publishing seemed an imminent threat to disintermediate publishers to one […]