Month: April 2013

Go Read This | Burning the Page – an instant review | FutureBook

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 1 Comment

On my kindle waiting to be read after The Signal & The Noise:

I could review this book for another thousand words, and still have more to say. In that, this book is incredibly valuable. We’ve not had much exposure to the minds of those driving the eBook revolution, and to have something to engage and in places disagree with strongly is rather novel. There are some very nice idealistic long-term statements in here, and though this is no exhaustive business history we get an idea of some of the thoughts behind the technology. I cannot in all honesty say I’ve been blown away by what I’ve read, but it has given me a more direct perspective on another experience of eBook History. Merkoski’s peek behind the curtain is valuable, it will be interesting to see if the conversation goes somewhere new from here.

via Burning the Page – an instant review | FutureBook.

Amazon & Goodreads

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 4 Comments

There’s been a lot said about Amazon’s latest move, the decision to buy Goodreads.

While I agree that Amazon has made a very sensible move in acquiring the company, it seems to be a far more strategic and defensive acquisition than anything else. The real value of the deal is in what it prevents rather than in what it enables.

All the talk about the data gained seems a little misplaced to me. Amazon, after all, has considerably more and better data on readers and via Kindle is getting even more as time goes on. Where Goodreads has only the expressed opinions and posted libraries of its users, Amazon has real sales and purchases and, increasingly, real reading data on readers not to mention reader class, book and book class level. No-one else comes close to that.

What the purchase does do though is prevent a valuable commodity from becoming a weakness in the future in the hands of a rival. In fact, almost all of Amazon’s acquisitions in the book space have been quite successful at keeping reader preferences and expressed opinion data at the global or non-publisher specific level from the hands of others. In many ways its minority interest in LibraryThing prevents a publisher from getting involved there too (I like LibraryThing and have a lifetime account).

So Amazon has gained a little but prevented a lot by removing yet another data-set from the hands of its rivals, whether it takes advantage of this data-set or not, it at least ensures that its rivals are considerably less data empowered than it itself is.