No new facts today, just some perspective. Google has launched and Copia has launched. Kindles and Nooks are on sale in consumer electronics stores far and wide. iPads continue to roll out by the millions and recent evidence suggests that consumers are very happy reading ebooks on them. I’ve made the point on the blog […]
Some pre-Thanksgiving stuffing
A few things worthy of a pre-Thanksgiving comment have passed in front of my eyeballs in the past few days. 1. Sainsbury’s, one of the big supermarket chains in Britain, has announced that it will open a digital download store before Christmas. They’re starting with movies and music, but plan to expand to ebooks before […]
Insights about the current state of the ebook market
I had a chance this week to chat with a very smart person who works for a company that does a lot of business with book publishers. Some things articulated themselves in that conversation — one of my favorite collaborators, Mark Bide, has often observed that we “learn a lot by talking” — that seemed […]
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 […]
White labeled specialty stores, not ebook superstores, are the future
One of the recurring characteristics of “change” is that the first iteration of something new looks a lot like what it is replacing. So it has been with ebooks and ebook retailing. The ebooks themselves have, for the most part, been the same as the print books except rendered on a screen instead of on […]