Marketers are spending money on iDevice apps at the expense of improving their mobile Web sites that everyone with a smart phone can access. According to Ahonen and Moore, iDevice app development actually costs 10 times more and reach is 50 times worse. Sex appeal will only trump pragmatic reach for so long.

via The Great App Bubble | Fast Company.

By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year.

via Print or Pixels? Publishers Strive to Advance Both – NYTimes.com.

I know what you’re thinking. No, I really do. I can practically hear it through the screen. You’re thinking, 531 copies? Well that’s all well and good, but 348 of them were e-books, so she can’t say she really sold 531 books.

via The Big Reveal Part II: How Many Copies of MOUSETRAPPED Have I Sold? « Catherine, Caffeinated.

What is a book worth? Well, there’s list price created by the publisher. That seems to be the value referenced by publishers. Then there’s the price consumers actually pay. That gets more complicated, of course. You have to break it down to various levels including the price for the first sale and the price for the second sale. Library patrons pay a different price; we call that “property tax”.

Oh, and then there are the books acquired for free.

This is what I think about when I hear publishers talking about this, that, or the other devaluing the price of content. And by devaluing content, they really mean consumers paying far less than publishers would like. This is absolutely a valid concern.

via A Question of Value | Booksquare.

But some of us write and read on computer screens. For that, it still makes sense to have text lines that are not too long for comprehension and to have screens that can show us quite a few lines of text at once. That is, our ideal screen would be something more like the shape of an 8×11 sheet of paper, taller than it is wide.

via Christopher Moore’s History News: HIstory of Technology.

That’s why broadcast television is going to die of a certainty, and why print publishing never will. Because physical books have always met the on-demand test. It’s their greatest strength, by far, and always has been.

via Why Print Publishing Will Never Die | Ditchwalk.

The sector has never seen a company like Google for using its wealth to pursue opportunity outside of its core markets . From YouTube to Android , from DoubleClick to Aardvark , from Google Earth to Google Energy , the company sometimes seems to be restlessly evading its destiny while remaining 98% tied to advertising for its revenues .

For its destiny is surely now reasonably clear . There will be a decline in search as an apps orientated world moves more fundamentally towards solutions . Already Google is feeling some of this , as well as the continuing movement of advertising markets away from the traditional way of contextualization. There will be continuing pressure within solutions created for professional and business services for search to be customized to need , and good enough for active purposes ( which may be better or more targeted or more rigorously selective or more representative of niche user groups than public search environments ) .

via David Worlock | Paradigm Lost

Weeks after Amazon.com said that it is now selling more electronic books than hardcovers, a leading book publisher said one of its prominent new titles is generating greater e-book unit sales than hardcover unit sales during its first week on sale.

Laura Lippman’s thriller, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” went on sale Aug. 17, and in its first five days sold 4,739 e-books and 4,000 physical hardcovers, said News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers.

via New Thriller Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers – Digits – WSJ.

For all of the reasons above, there are really only two types of person for whom it makes a jot of sense to tear up their book deal and abandon the professionalism, billion-dollar print market, and immeasurable cachet of traditional publishing. The first is highly skilled self-promoter likes Godin who have successfully identified their entire (niche) audience and who know they will only ever sell a certain number of copies of their books to that same audience. Marketers like Godin tend to make the bulk of their money with speaking gigs anyway – books are just a throwaway promotional tool, full of ideas that even they admit will be out of date by this time next week.  Might as well take the money and keep running.

The second type of person is more tragic: authors who, for whatever reason, fear they’re about to be dumped by their publisher (or at best paid a tiny advance for their next book) and who want to save face by using innovation as an excuse.

via NSFW: A Modest Proposal For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers — Give Me A Break.

In this model, authors stop carving out rights.  They hand almost everything over to the publishers and give them maximum flexibility to experiment with format, pricing, sampling, enhancements, and territory – BUT, for a very limited time.  At the end of those 3-5 years, everyone reassesses.

If the publisher has done an outstanding job and turned the book into a bestseller,  they might now have to cough up more royalties.  If the publisher has failed to sell the book or exploit some of the rights they were ceded, the author may continue with the house on a more limited basis or may withdraw the book altogether and take it elsewhere.  The author gets far more flexibility and control over the book’s fate than was ever possible with a life-of-copyright contract, but has to accept a full partnership role: the publisher will no longer pay a significant advance or assume the lion’s share of the financial risk.

via Copyright, Ebooks and the Unpredictable Future | Digital Book World.