Your Source for Publishing Intelligence
The recently announced merger of Penguin and Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann in Germany, sent shock waves throughout Western publishing circles. This new leviathan will publish a quarter of all books appearing in English, with annual sales of close to $4 billion, yet it is being treated by The New York Times and other media as a routine and perhaps even beneficial development.
Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic "anti-piracy" schemes. Combine this "malware" with digital distribution that sticks the end user with an unfavorable license rather than, say, an actual book, and you've got another ready-made disaster. The Consumerist has the details on yet another paying customer dealing with DRM stupidity. It starts off with this physical analogy.
Amazon has another (pretty much) informationless press release out about Kindle sales this morning.
The closest thing we get to real data: Worldwide Kindle sales over the holiday shopping weekend were more than double last year's sales.
Awesome! Right?
Well, we have no clue because Amazon has never revealed absolute Kindle sales numbers. For all we know, Amazon sold 10,000 Kindle tablets and e-readers over the weekend.
While no one is calling 2012 the year of the e-reader, there are a raft of deals out there right now as retailers and device makers expect big sales around digital reading this holiday season.
There's a lot of handwringing, such as this HuffPo piece, going on over the Bloomberg video where B&N CEO William J. Lynch cops to doing all of his reading on his Nook. The particular flavor of the angst is something like, that by going all digital, he's some sort of traitor to his own product, as if one can't be into books without being into print books.
The idea that this is somehow surprising strikes us as a little silly. Nobody is predicting a future where ebooks get less popular, after all.
—Brian Howard
Barnes & Noble is shutting down Fictionwise, a company running several eBook websites, including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com, and eBookwise.com. Although the move shouldn’t be all that surprising in a world of Amazon Kindles, iBookstores, and of course, B&N’s own Nook library, it’s worth a tip of our hat to these sites that laid the groundwork for the digital e-reading revolution.
As we mentioned yesterday, the marketplace of ideas around what the Random House/Penguin merger all means is heating up. The Financial Times' Robert Cookson looks at bigness vs. smallness and might vs. agility as competing strategies for success in an increasingly digital world. In smallness' corner is indie house Salt Publishing's Christopher Hamilton-Emery:
“I don’t think big necessarily means better." The rise of digital publishing, he argues, is likely to lead to an “explosion” of smaller, more focused publishers that can harness technology to establish relationships directly with consumers. —Brian Howard
The 7-inch HD tablet market is bursting at the seams, but for most users, the buying decision comes down to which ecosystem you prefer.
Barnes & Noble followed competitor Amazon into the e-reader market, but has quickly gotten up to speed on design and technology. Soon after Amazon unveiled its all HD lineup of tablets (the Kindle Fire HD 7-inch and Kindle Fire HD+ 8.9-inch), Barnes & Noble followed with its own line of redesigned HD tablets.
Publishing Perspectives has a guest post discussing BookShout, a startup that currently works in conjunction with three of the Big Six publishers, plus Wiley, to allow importation of your Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-book purchases into its own e-reader apps. It does this by you giving it your Amazon and Barnes & Noble log-in IDs and passwords.
I first saw this mentioned a couple of weeks ago on FutureBook, where Baldur Bjarnason pointed out what a “phenomenally bad idea” this is:
Barnes & Noble said on Wednesday it has detected tampering with PIN pad devices in 63 of its retail stores.
The company believes criminals installed “bugs” in the pad devices to extract credit card and PIN numbers.
