Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle

newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

I'm glad I'm not an old skool newspaper

The expense and waste of daily newspapers is probably one of the few things that make me froth with rage.

"Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead."

A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.

Amazon's Guide to the Galaxy.

Now this is original!

kindle usability useit.com kindlekindle

Summary: good for linear material, such as novels, not good for non-linear material such as journals, newspapers, encyclopaedias and recipe books

Summary: Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

Jakob Nielsen's review of the Kindle 2. "Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content."

Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone

kindle ebook e-book

数图研究

And dead tree editions deliverd via petrol to au sub-urbian households...

RT @guykawasaki: NYT could give every subscriber a Kindle and save money. http://adjix.com/y4t4 [from http://twitter.com/jamesvandyke/statuses/1377816533]

Tim O'Reilly on the future of books.

new web books be ...

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. ... (+ own "TwitterBook":) The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task.

O'Reilly Radar post from Tim on the #twitterbook

Tim O'Reilly and his O'Reilly media empire are reimagining the way they look at publishing books, and providing some insight into their thought process.

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.) But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning.

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

Great quote! "Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins." from @timoreilly (Kindle vs Open Book)http://is.gd/kwWx [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1245406729]

rt@timoreilly My post on Forbes: Why Amazon Kindle needs to support open standards. http://bit.ly/hjtfO [from http://twitter.com/frankhellwig/statuses/1253515333]

While users can load some of their own documents onto the Kindle, there is no easy way to "rip" a book.

He makes sense and is sane. I hope amazon listens.

tim o'reilly

AHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA

"Publishers and other content providers make a grave error when they ensure that legitimately purchasing their products involves more hassle and uncertainty than simply pirating them." - one of the comments. Very true.

"This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. [...] apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. " Allein die Tatsache, dass sich Leute so eine Ausgeburt an DRM-Geschwülsten zulegen, bei der deren Anbieter sogar noch retroaktiv Zugriff auf den vermeintlich eigenen Buchbestand hat... unglaublich.

it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Amazon removed purchased e-books from Kindles when a publisher had second thoughts about online distribution.

amazon smáznul z kindle čtečky lidem zakoupené kopie orwella, protože podle nakladatele byly neautorizované, sice jim poslal peéíz ena účet, ale udělal to bez ptaní, druhej den prostě knížku ve čtečce neměli

Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

Author: 10% (This in fact ranges between 8% and 15%, depending on the author's clout -- e.g. Stephen King does better than most. If the author has an agent, the agent's cut comes out of this. It is indeed tough for new authors.) Publisher: 30% (This ranges between 25% and 32%, again depending on the author's clout -- e.g. their percentage is less with Stephen King because the risk is lower too. Note: this is their net revenue, after deducting author royalties and printer fees.) Printer: 10% Distributor: 10% Retailer: 40%

by Nicholson Baker

ANNALS OF READING about the Kindle 2. The writer ordered the Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could he not? Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important. Writing and publishing, wrote Steven Johnson in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, would never be the same. In <i>Newsweek…

ANNALS OF READING about the Kindle 2. The writer ordered the Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could he not? Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important. Writing and publishing, wrote Steven Johnson in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, would never be the same. In <i>Newsweek…

Can the Kindle really improve on the book?

The Kindle vs. the book by Nicholson Baker

Via ...? Nicholson Baker gives the Kindle 2 a test drive, compares it to printed books and the iPhone, and gives us a history of how the Kindle came to be.

Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones.

Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?

kindle の本をPCで読める

Kindle still needs a lot of work for it to become more efficient for students (where they can get their maximum sales)

Ha! "7. Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears."

comments on kindle use in education april 7

As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the Federalist Papers.

I love my Amazon Kindle. I love reading with it, I love how light it is, and I love the battery life. I also love the fact that it automatically syncs with the Amazon Kindle application on my iPhone and iPod touch. That means any book will open to the last page read regardless of the device last used. it is an amazing bit of technology that makes reading books across multiple platforms beyond simple. It’s a perfect situation — right? Well, it’s an almost perfect situation. This afternoon I discovered a huge Achilles heel in the whole Amazon Kindle environment.

Imagine a world in which all copies of once-censored books like Candide, The Call of the Wild, and Ulysses had been permanently destroyed at the time of the censoring and could not be studied or enjoyed after subsequent decision-makers lifted the ban.

Kindle owners awoke to discover that Amazon had reached into their devices & remotely removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 & Animal Farm. Amazon explained that the books had been mistakenly published, & it gave customers a full refund. It turns out that Orwell wasn't the first author to get flushed down the Kindle's memory hole. In June, fans of Ayn Rand suffered the same fate—Amazon removed Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, & The Virtue of Selfishness, with an explanation that it had "recently discovered a problem" with the titles. & some customers have complained of the same experience with Harry Potter books. Amazon says the Kindle versions of all these books were illegal. Someone uploaded bootlegged copies using the Kindle Store's self-publishing system, & Amazon was only trying to look after publishers' intellectual property. The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism, however. Amazon was forced to promise that it will no longer delete its customers' books.

Kindle Issues - Censoring, Monitoring, etc.

How do you design your content for a Kindle?

Obras do George Orwelll grátis pra download.

Penenberg, Adam (Fast Company, Julio 2009)

Amazon aims to disintermediate publishers by working directly w/ authors

Blog post on ideas for "socializing" the Kindle. Some good ideas here...

Using ebooks.

Bookstores, particularly independent bookstores, help resist this trend by championing authors the employees believe in. "In a bookstore, there’s a serendipitous element involved in browsing," Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, says. "Independent bookstores are like a community center. We walk in and know the people who work there and like to hear their reading recommendations." ... "If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant," ... Assked to describe her foremost concern, Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, "In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day."

Ken Auletta.... good article on publishers, ebooks, Amazon and Apple. Good statistics.

Publish or Perish

Let's talk about text. Let's talk about the digital book.

On redesigning e-readers or how we read digital text. Of note: "Show me the overlap of 10,000 readers' highlighted passages in a digital book. This is our ‘Cliff Notes.’ We don’t need Derek Sivers' brilliant summaries[14] anymore (sorry Derek!) — we’re collectively summarizing for each other as we read and mark our digital copies. Show me a heat map of passages — ‘hottest’ to ‘coldest’. Which chapters in this Obama biography should I absolutely not miss?(Fig 7) Let Stefan Sagmeister publicly share the passages he’s highlighted in the new Murakami Haruki novel. This is something I want to see. And I bet you do, too. When I’m considering buying a book, show me how far the average reader gets. Do most readers get through the whole novel or give up halfway? How many notes do they take? How many passages do they highlight?"

We've co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years," he says, explaining how ease of Kindle buying changes behavior. "Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device....It's a myth that multi-purpose devices are always better.... I like my phone... I like my swiss army knife too, but I'm also happy to have a set of steak knives." "I get grumpy now when I have to read a physical book....The physical book has had a great 500 year run, but it's time to change." "If you're an incumbent in any industry, and rapid change is underway, you're uncomfortable, even if long term it's going to be good." "We've made many errors. People over-focus on errors of commission. Companies over-emphasize how expensive failure's going to be. Failure's not that expensive....The big cost that most companies incur are much harder to notice, and those are errors of Omission."

"At the end of the day, you don't end your strategy because other people don't understand it. Not if you have conviction." This and other quotes from Jeff Bezos, collected by Tim O'Reilly at Wired's 2009 Disruptive by Design conference.

Business wisdom from Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos is very quotable. Listeing to Steve Levy interview him at the Wired Disruptive by Design event in New York, I was furiously taking notes. Here are the quotes I managed to capture.

"There are a few prerequisites to inventing.... You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can't do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation.... You typically don't get misunderstood for sustaining innovation."

notes on innovation and entrpreneurs

"There are a few prerequisites to inventing.... You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can't do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation.... You typically don't get misunderstood for sustaining innovation." "At the end of the day, you don't end your strategy because other people don't understand it. Not if you have conviction." [via: http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/briefly_noted/how_to_invent/]

Bezos: "One of the differences between founder/entrepreneurs and financial managers is that founder/entrepreneurs are stubborn about the vision of the business, and keep working the details. The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. The trick for me is to be stubborn about the big things."

Nielson compares Kindle to iPad reading speeds

Possible ECOO

Summary: A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print.

A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print.

Nielsen säger att det går snabbare att läsa bok än e-bok. Testat på 24 personer- http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html

Studie: Vergleich von Lesekomfort bei Kindle, iPad, PC