Continuations

The New York Times had a piece yesterday on ebook pricing, which I have written about before. Interestingly, the piece simply states and doesn’t question that an ebook retailer such as Apple should be entitled to a 30% fee. What will Apple provide? There would seem to be four separate functions: discovery, payment, delivery and DRM. Let’s start with payment. The fraud rate for ebooks is likely to be very low and the cost to process a payment at scale should be no more than 25 cents (and hopef...

I was away last week and so am late to the party when it comes to commenting on the fight between Amazon and book publishers. Here are a couple of observations. First, I was surprised it took so long for this fight to start. It is a great example of what I call “fighting over the digital pie." What was most fascinating about it is that none of the publishers even made a mention of how much authors would receive. At present, this is all about trying to support the existing cost structure of pu...

I am late to the Kindle show. Having grown up in Europe and going back there for vacation a fair bit (and reading books mostly on vacation and otherwise via DailyLit), I did not want to buy a US-only device. So I jumped on the international Kindle, pre-ordering as soon as it was announced (something I may regret when the Nook or the Apple Tablet arrive). I have now had my Kindle for a few days and have been reading the newspaper on it via the 14-day free trials of the NY Times and the Wall St...