I mean, this is embarrassing

"Yeah, Microsoft - that defunct company"

But as Amazon's market power increases, it needs to be mindful of whether its moves, even those that may be good for the company in the short term, are ultimately destructive of the ecosystem on which they depend. I believe that they are heading in that direction, and if they succeed with some of their initiatives, they will wake up one day to discover that they've sown the seeds of their own destruction, just as Microsoft did in the 1990s.

At O'Reilly, we have a motto: "Create more value than you capture." It's a wise motto for companies far bigger than we are to adopt. If you do that, you ensure a healthy ecosystem. If you capture more value than you create, watch out, because stagnation is on the way.

Amazon has, so far, created huge value for the publishing ecosystem. Now, as they become more powerful, they need to be especially watchful that they don't irreparably damage an industry on which they too depend.

Cool blog

Textbook publishers sue GSU

As of Feb. 19, the university's library electronic course system listed more than 6,700 works that were available for more than 600 courses, the lawsuit said. By allowing such widespread access, students can obtain many of the required reading materials for their courses without ever setting foot in a bookstore or spending any money for them, the suit added.

New York attorney R. Bruce Rich, who represents the publishers, said other universities, when notified, have worked out license agreements with publishers over the use of copyrighted materials.

BookMooch

Apart from still-negligible sales, what should be more of a wake-up call to the book industry is how the site is tapping into the so-called long tail of book retail with a social, free service. The long tail, as the theory goes, accounts for as much as 60 percent of the goods sold in an industry, or all those unpopular works that find a home with only a few. It's said that the lion's share of Amazon's book sales come from works that have a low sales ranking.

What's more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books--distributed among its members--that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company's 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said. BookMooch's decentralized warehouse of books serves the long tail the same way that centralized warehouses like those of Ingram's serves the top of the tail.

JISC Report: Metadata for Digital Libraries

The problem for librarians is that when you are creating things like e-books, you have to think about a different set of ‘quality’ criteria because these digital objects will not be used in the same way that physical books are. They will need to designed so that they can be searched, for example, or delivered as separate pages. For the average library user, accessing information that spans multiple digital sources is increasingly a messy process and for those who are used to search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections. What is concerning about this is, unless we are careful, people will increasingly see the search results thrown up by Google, Yahoo etc. as the be-all and end-all of a particular area of interest or subject.

Cooled Kindle

The Kindle has many sophisticated features. One is the interactive NowNow program. How does it work?

Amazon.com describes it this way: "(The service) answers a question you may have about literally any topic. When you ask a question, our workers will surf the Web to find the answer. They will then send your Kindle up to three answers to each question."

To test it, I sent this question: What is the meaning of life?

Amazon.com's "workers" were fast in their responses. One lengthy response focused on the philosophy expressed in the five-book "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series by the late Douglas Adams.

A second offered an answer that noted, "Some philosophers have asked questions like, 'What does the question "What is the meaning of life?" mean?' and also questioned whether it is a meaningful question."

A third was the most straightforward and our favorite: " 'The Meaning of Life' was a 1983 Monty Python movie.' "

Author Author

Harry Potter Copyright Case

The Big Picture Specials!!!

• Book Industry Acronym Glossary
  A compilation of initialisms and acronyms that proliferate throughout our business. Sitting in conference sessions, gathering at industry events, we're frequently confused by all this alphabet soup - this glossary (BIAG?) is an attempt to put definitions at our fingertips. We've also included two useful flowcharts: Tracking the ISBN and Book Industry Metadata Supply Chain.
  
  
  
• The Big Picture Year One
  A compilation of the hottest industry news and interviews from the first year of LJNDawson's industry newsletter, The Big Picture.
  
• You can buy them here - subscribers to The Big Picture get a discount!
  
  

Amazon, the digital river

HarperCollins Roundup: Is It Good for the Writers or Bad for the Writers?

The Authors' Guild responds; AAP hasn't yet

Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the "long tail" of publishing -- the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it's uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount -- or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books -- to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors -- since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher's gross revenues -- and publishers.

The Big Picture Specials!!!

Harper Unit Not Paying Author Advances, Allowing Returns

Instead, the unit, which hasn't yet been named, will share its profits with writers and focus much of its sales efforts on the Internet. In recent years, Amazon.com Inc., the nation's largest online book retailer by sales, has gained market share from bricks-and-mortar stores. News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

MySpace Taking On iTunes

James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, said MySpace could help modernize the music industry.

"MySpace has the audience and environment to enable the music industry to get to the next digital level," McQuivey said. "What iTunes offers is a good buying experience but that's not all people do with music. They they talk about it, they share it, they try things out. Remember, this is the kind of activity that (record label) Universal Music Group was suing MySpace for previously."

McQuivey continued: "I think the labels said to themselves,'Oh, if we enable fans to have a fully immersive experience, they might spend more on music. MySpace can offer a place where all aspects of the music experience can be expressed. Imeem was getting close to this but MySpace, if they don't mess it up, should take the music industry to Music 2.0"

Yeah, I know that Muze post is messed up

Get Your Lightning Source Title While You Wait

If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.

Muze launches new database

Seriously, there IS more to say

Amazon/BookSurge - no, we're not done yet

In which it is April 1st, and we are confused