publishing Archive

  • Penguin is betting on the iPad for the future of books

    Penguin is betting on the iPad for the future of books

    Posted on March 3, 2010 | No Comments
    I’ve been thinking a lot about the world that my kids will soon live in. Books will be like vinyl records – clever and beloved artifacts of an analog age, hoarded more for reasons of nostalgia and scarcity than value. I honestly think that the book I’m working on now will be the last physical [...]

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  • eBooks on the iPad may not be so outlandishly expensive

    eBooks on the iPad may not be so outlandishly expensive

    Posted on February 18, 2010 | No Comments
    The NYT has a report on ebook pricing for the iPad, saying that Apple may charge $9.99 for popular titles, just like everyone else in the free world. While most prices will be higher - it's an iPad! Why go slumming? - popular books can hit the $9.99 if need be. Apple takes 30 percent of the sale while the publishers take 70 percent.

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  • Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction

    Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction

    Posted on December 29, 2009 | No Comments
    As if we didn't have enough pretenders in the ebook space, here's Ray Kurzweil with a new format of his own and a bagful of ambition to go with it. Set for a proper unveiling at CES in a week's time, the Blio format and accompanying application are together intended to deliver true-to-life color reproductions of the way real books appear. Interestingly, the software has been developed in partnership with Nokia, in an effort to turn Espoo's phones into "the smallest text-to-speech reading devices available thus far," though apps are also being developed for the iPhone, PC and Mac. The biggest advantage of this format might actually be behind the scenes, where the costs to publishers are drastically reduced by them having to only submit a PDF scan of their books, whose formatting remains unchanged in Blio. We'll be all over this at CES, but for now you'll find more pictures and early impressions over at Gizmodo.

    Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Analyst noise: Apple tablet in March for $1k, publishers on-board, Verizon iPhone coming too

    Analyst noise: Apple tablet in March for $1k, publishers on-board, Verizon iPhone coming too

    Posted on December 9, 2009 | No Comments
    If you've been following mainstream news today, then it's likely you've seen the story doing the rounds on new Apple tablet rumors, spurred by a note sent to clients from Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner. Never heard of him? That's not surprising, since he has no real connection to Apple, and his job mainly consists of telling people how to move their money around -- a Master of the Universe gear-cranker, you might say. Anyhow, Yair is sure that Apple will be releasing its 10.1-inch, multitouch tablet around March or April, with a ramp-up on production sometime in February. He also notes that the device will sell for $1,000 (so far we've heard rumored price points from $699 all the way up to $2,000), but ultimately Reiner seems most concerned with how it will impact Amazon, the Kindle, and book and media publishers.

    According to the note, Apple has been in talks with publishers concerning a "very attractive proposal" in which the company will split revenue with publishing houses 70 / 30, as they do with iTunes and App Store sales (just as we speculated in our post on the Time Inc. digimag). What's most disconcerting about the report is that it seems more interested in disrupting or dismissing what Amazon is doing (particularly noteworthy as the company is in the midst of its biggest season for Kindle sales ever). When financial analysts start squawking in this manner, we like to approach with caution. As of right now, we have zero solid evidence that Apple is even producing a tablet, let alone ready to drop one for a G come March. We have heard plenty of other rumors that corroborate much of this, but if the above is the plan, you can expect a big reveal from Cupertino around the time of Macworld or CES, so you won't have to wait long to know the truth. For now, keep your BS detectors set to "stun."

    P.S.: See what we mean? Now a Piper Jaffray analyst is 70 percent certain (70 percent!) that Apple will introduce an iPhone for Verizon in 2010. Hold onto your hats folks, we've only just begun.

    Analyst noise: Apple tablet in March for $1k, publishers on-board, Verizon iPhone coming too originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • “This means something:” Why the magazine industry is suddenly crowing about tablets

    “This means something:” Why the magazine industry is suddenly crowing about tablets

    Posted on December 6, 2009 | No Comments
    Whenever companies do something inexplicable, the nerd in me always comes back to that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfus keeps building models of a mountain, culminating in a huge, muddy mess in his kitchen. Throughout it all he keeps saying “This means something.” Well, the latest molehill into a [...]

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