November 16th, 2011
Over at PressThink Jay Rosen observed that professional journalism has been optimized for low participation. He explains that “until a few years ago, the ‘job’ of the user was simply to receive the news and maybe send a letter to the editor.” This was a logical outcome of the available technology. “Journalists built their practices…
November 9th, 2011
I’ve seen two principal schools of thought surrounding covers for e-books. Theory One: Book covers don’t really matter much any more. Theory Two: Covers for e-books still matter a lot. They matter in a different way, and we’re not quite sure what makes it different, but they certainly do matter.
October 25th, 2011
If you run a $50 billion company and announce that your sales are up 44% going into the holiday season shouldn’t Wall Street give you a standing ovation? Not if you’re Amazon and your profit margins are, once again, taking a short-term hit for the long-term gain. What part of this 2009 message from Jeff…
October 21st, 2011
Compare these two statements about two different new-and-improved e-book specifications: “KF8 has over 150 new formatting capabilities including support for HTML5 and CSS3.” “HTML5 is the base language of EPUB3… The new baseline for style sheets is CSS2.1 with some CSS3 features added.” They sure sound similar. The first, published yesterday, describes Amazon’s just announced Kindle Format 8…
October 19th, 2011
Ever since the New York Times discovered that Amazon.com has 122 new books in the works the blogosphere is filled with shrill cries that Amazon as a publisher threatens publishing. Wrong. That’s not the trouble with Amazon – Amazon as a book publisher is neither here nor there.