Damn smart move from Collca, but then that Mike Hyman is a smart man! Best of luck to him and Collca:
Diversifying its electronic publishing business from just Apple iOS apps, Collca has just launched its first e-book series called In the Footsteps of…. with three initial titles. This series of bitesize e-books covers favourite authors and people from history or fiction.
via Taking aim at e-books with a brand-new series « News from the Mill.
I posted this as a comment over at An American Editor who has an interesting piece on Amazon. I thought it was worth putting it here too.
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I think we should judge Amazon by BOTH its words AND its actions. The result is different than just listening to the spin.
So Amazon says only the reader and writer are needed YET:
1) It has invested huge resources in building, developing, rolling out and marketing a publishing platform and a reading device (KDP and Kindle)
2) It invested resources in selling ebooks (both by selling them below cost when publishers wouldn’t play ball and by promoting them in premium page space)
3) It has hired serious editors and publishing types to acquire and edit books (and there are ample stories online about those hires)
4) It has acquired serious (and well paid) writers of various genres
Amazon’s words say one thing but it spends its money like it BELIEVES that there is room for more than one kind of model. Amazon SPENDS ITS MONEY like it believes in various forms of mediation between author and reader. It SAYS it doesn’t believe in anything other than Author Reader to scare the crap out of everyone else and draw attention from the fact that it is building a platform to provide really good publishing services to authors and really good reading services to readers.
Eoin
Not a huge surprise but still, interesting …
The Office of Fair Trading has cleared Amazon to take over The Book Depository, ruling the merger would not lead to a lessening of competition within the UK book industry.The OFT decided there was limited pre-merger competition between the two companies and found that competition within Amazon Marketplace would continue to be strong after the takeover. It said The Book Depository only accounted for between 2-4% of the online market for physical books, and that TBD had most of its growth in overseas markets rather than the UK.
via OFT gives go-ahead for Amazon/TBD merger | The Bookseller.
The Kindle Fire is a beautiful device (and by that I mean it looks pretty nice from a distance). What’s more, it’s at the right price and has a library of content to beat the best on offer. Yet I find it worrying, exceptionally worrying.
Worrying because it marks a shift away from a singular focus on digital books and towards other media forms. Digital books (and their publishers, traditional and self) have benefitted from Amazon’s desire to move their consumers towards digital consumption and purchasing. Benefitted enormously.
Amazon’s strategy though, as the launch of Fire makes clear, is about ALL media forms not just books. As the company builds digital sales of those media (a MUCH bigger market than books), digital books will become less important overall. At some point it may just be the case that they will cease development of a dedicated ereader, just as Apple is close to ceasing the development of a dedicated music player (or at least has relegated the music only devices to the bottom rung of its offering).
More importantly, Amazon is popularising mobile, digital media consumption and at relatively cheap prices. This long-term strategy is all the time building the competition plain text ebooks face.
There is only so much audience attention to go around and as mobile gaming, tv and film watching and web browsing become possible for everyone, it is just possible that digital books will lose out*. Of course maybe the audience that moves digital will be big enough for this to not be an issue, but even so book publishers and authors will need to compete with movies, games and music much more directly and immediately than they have in the past.
The possibility then that the Kindle Fire presents is one where the dedicated device that has done so much to build the digital book market is, however distantly, headed for a quiet retirement and the publishers who think they have it all so sorted now are going to faced a changed game yet again.
But maybe these are just wasted fears! I certainly hope so.
Eoin
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* I’m a pessimist on this score and think that possible is a definite.
