I am not enjoying today and have given up listening to NPR and reading blog/tweets until April 2nd. It’s just too much!!!! Ahhhh!!!! NPR got me this morning with the whole 2 minute piece on STEAM. And I haven’t been happy since.
And now over on the most excellent harperstudio blog, they have announced a new ebook pricing/marketing plan. Which seems really forward thinking as it engages the Twitter crowd, but then you can read the comments and every other person is “This has to be April Fools”. So what’s the point? If it’s legit, then they missed the boat cause their plans are being second guessed and if it’s a joke then it’s just wasted time. But, I guess it did spawn a blog post here…
So I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow, to see what’s really real in the real world.
Last year Amazon spent a lot of time throwing its weight around, trying to squash and curtail the activities of smaller publishers and booksellers on its site. But just last week, they have shown that they are capable of listening and working with consumers… when they see a threat to there own product line anyway.
The new Kindle has a text-to-speech feature which allows a reader to become listener as an automaton voice recites the text, which didn’t seem like a big deal to me. But agents and lawyers saw it differently, claiming it infringes on their ability to sell rights to the book for the audio-book format. At first, Amazon said ‘no’. But evidently they have had a chnage of heart and will give publishers the chance to opt-in/out to this feature. Which is really how things should be done, across the board these days. It’s 2009 and there is no reason why a content owner shouldn’t be given a choice of how their content will be made available.
I’m not much of a fan of the K2. It seems to be the device they should have put out there as the first one. And maybe they agree? The rumor mill is already cranking out “Kindle 3 by the end of the year” stories and some look to have merit. Which if they are truw, will put the Kindle in a place to remain competitive.
Orbit Books is offering one e-book for $1 for one month, through April. They even set up a special promotional site. One thing I found interesting is that they are not serving up the downloads themselves. They have tapped into the myriad of online distributors of digital book files.
I think this is great promo Orbit is running. And I’m sure more publishers will follow suit. I just wonder how long it will be pefore publishers bite the bullet and invest in their own site infrastructure so they can serve up all these file formats themselves… fewer clicks is a good thing, for the customer and for the distribution fees.
