Posts Tagged ‘Digital Books’

Apple iPad as Fancy Book Reader

Monday, February 1st, 2010

iPad may not be a laptop, but as an e-book reader that does a bunch of other things, it’s a pretty impressive use of internet speed.

Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business (edited for brevity)  

1) The multi-functional capability–a reader that can do games, movies, browsing, documents, and more—all in one. And zillions of iPhone apps. 

2) The screen. Full color, multi-touch screen, gestures, and more.

3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub, creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. 

4) The iBooks store. Apple has captured the magic of shopping. Once again, whereas Amazon does great with the functional needs of buying a book, Apple goes beyond to create an experience.

5) The experience. You can swipe through pages on an iPad.  On the Kindle, you have to dutifully click a button.

6) The economics. Amazon requires publishers to cut prices and offer deep discounts.

7) The apps. In a digital age, a book is (finally!) becoming more than just words on a page. With the iPad, out of the gate publishers can create whole experiences. 

8) The marketplace. Apple’s iBook and App Store marketplaces will instantly be a must-attend venue for publishers.

9) The price. For $10 more than a Kindle DX, consumers get an incredible ebook reader, and so much more.

10) The Apple factor (a.k.a. “sexy”). Let’s face it, Apple is a brand people want to be affiliated with. It has a cool factor. As Jason Kottke says, “the iPad makes the Kindle look like it’s from the 1980’s”.

Ouch.

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Google Books Deal a Do Over

Friday, September 25th, 2009

We may have announced the time to rejoice over Google Book’s settlement a wee bit too soon.  As Miguel Helft wrote for the NY Times on Thursday, “As currently written, the controversial settlement between Google and groups representing publishers and authors is officially dead.”  But before you start ringing the bells of mourning, it seems a federal judge gave the parties time to negotiate a new deal!  Yay!  And one that would address some of the many objections filed by various groups.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American University Presses sued Google in 2005. They felt that Google’s plan to scan books from major libraries and make them available online constituted copyright infringement. After two years of negotiations, the parties announced the settlement in October 2008.

Judge Denny Chin (of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, if you must know) granted a motion to delay an October 7th hearing on the settlement. The motion was filed earlier this week by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, the plaintiffs in the case, and was unopposed by Google, the defendant.

In his order, Judge Chin indicated that he took seriously the long list of objections that various parties have raised about the agreement.

“The current settlement agreement raises significant issues, as demonstrated not only by the number of objections, but also by the fact that the objectors include countries, states, nonprofit organizations, and prominent authors and law professors,” Judge Chin wrote. “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised.”

Instead of the scheduled fairness hearing, Judge Chin asked the parties to convene in court on October 7th for a status conference to “determine how to proceed with the case as expeditiously as possible, as this case has now been pending for more than four years,” he wrote.

So, readers of digital books, keep your fingers crossed for this to be resolved with internet speed!

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Downloaders of Internet Books Rejoice

Monday, August 31st, 2009

You may recall that in March of this year, Sony struck a deal with Google to make half a million public domain books from its digitization project available as free downloads on the Sony Reader in its e-book store. 

Wired.com told us that it was “a hefty blow to Amazon not only because it gives Sony a much larger e-book library than the Kindle store — more than 600,000 to Amazon’s roughly 245,000 — but also because Google’s books are in the open ePub format Amazon doesn’t support. On top of all that, Sony has also dropped the price of its PRS-700 to $350, slightly below the price of the Kindle.”

We know you love to read books that you can obtain with internet speed, which is why we told you about the Kindle from Amazon.  But of course, there are now even more options to read books via the internet, which we’ll tell you about in another post.  

Back in March, Google’s book digitization project had just been through a $125 million settlement in its lawsuit with the authors and publishers.  Now, this past week, Sony, stated that they thought the settlement between Google and the authors and publishers “may have a profoundly positive impact on the market for e-book readers and related devices.”

Sony expressed its support for a settlement that lets Google and the rights holders share revenues from commercial use of the company’s vast online database of digitized books.

Under the settlement, Google would be able to sell access to millions of books online, as well as offer for-pay subscriptions that would allow libraries, universities and other institutions unfettered access to the Google Books collection. Google would pay rights holders 67% of the revenues generated from the database.

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