Microsoft Corp.
October 25, 2012
In almost every case, the conventional wisdom is that Apple follows but does not lead. The iPad happened long after the first Windows tablets flopped and the iPad Mini is a reaction to the Kindle HD and the Nexus 7.
While I will not go so far as to say that you can take any meaningful lessons from this tactic – copy, embrace, extend? Try new stuff and fail? – I think it’s an interesting way of doing business and it would behoove Google and Microsoft to rethink launches in the Apple mold.
October 22, 2012
What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library.
The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases.
October 17, 2012
Amazon.com announced an initiative on Wednesday to get its Kindle e-readers and tablet computers into schools, entering a market that has been particularly successful for rival Apple and its iPad device.
Amazon said it has been testing Kindles in recent years with hundreds of kindergarten through 12th grade schools in the United States, selling the devices at bulk discounts and helping them purchase and distribute e-books to students.
October 16, 2012
Look at the publishing news these days and you'll read as much about devices as you do about books. There are new families of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks on the block; Google's Nexus 7 is outselling the Kindle Fire; Microsoft is betting big on its Surface tablet; oh, and maybe you've heard about an iPad mini coming 'round the bend? And let's not even get into the wild world of smartphones. Point is, while the printed book was once a platform unto itself, now the ways people read "books," and the devices they read on, are expanding.
October 16, 2012
The Microsoft Surface Tablet picture has abruptly come into focus. Tuesday morning this Redmond giant filled in the blanks on the new tablet’s pricing, availability and specs.
Starting today at 9 a.m. PT, consumers can preorder Microsoft’s upstart 10.6-inch tablet at Surface.com, with prices starting at $499 for the 32GB model and $699 for the 64GB model. Both tablets are Wi-Fi only.
October 11, 2012
While Amazon launched its own lending library on top of its Amazon Prime service, there’s still an opportunity for other competitors to create a Spotify or Netflix for books. That’s the hope of New York City-based Oyster, a new startup which announced today it has raised $3 million led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
The company is preparing a mobile app that will allow users to get unlimited access to a library of books for one monthly price.
October 11, 2012
This post was inspired by a few of the recent complaints posted to TeleRead about e-publishing standards, and by some of the other more Luddite anti-e-book comments that have appeared here and elsewhere online. I think it’s worth reminding both e-book-pros and the anti-e-book contingent that in fact all books have been e-books from the word go, for many years now.
There seems to be a myth among some anti-e-book diehards that somewhere in the publishing world there is still a loving process of manual typesetting and handcrafted design going on, to produce real solid physical books.
October 4, 2012
New York, NY and Redmond, WA (October 4, 2012) – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced the completion of their previously announced strategic partnership in NOOK Media LLC, a recently formed Barnes & Noble subsidiary and a leader in the emerging digital reading and digital education markets. Microsoft and Barnes & Noble’s strategic partnership in NOOK Media LLC will enable the companies to advance world-class digital reading experiences to the hundreds of millions of customers they jointly serve.
September 17, 2012
Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, recently spoke with the Seattle Times about the status of the company, all of the upcoming releases, and what the company plans to do over the next 10 years. While Ballmer only touched the surface of the Surface, his response was revealing in its vagueness.
Ballmer told the Seattle Times that Microsoft had not yet announced a price for its upcoming line of Surface tablets, but he did offer a range that he believes is “the sweet spot.”
August 28, 2012
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.
Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years’ weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.
