It’s not a huge stretch to posit Amazon as the reverse-Valve of the ebook world, constantly pushing the envelope in unexpected ways, aggressively experimenting with pricing, developing a core of popular franchises, while staying focused on delivering and optimizing the best consumer experience.
Since publishers are so concerned with the “perpetuity of lending and simultaneity of availability” of their ebooks, I have to wonder if libraries shouldn’t just help them out and hit the STOP button themselves? Stop buying ebooks across the board, at any price, under any terms.
Not quite one year to the day it was announced, Seth Godin is shutting The Domino Project down, offering the awkward explanation that “it was a project, not a lifelong commitment to being a publisher of books,” instead of, perhaps, admitting that publishing is harder than it looks if you want to swim at the deep end of the trade pool in the middle of a dramatic transition, as he obliquely acknowledges in many of his noteworthy takeaways.
In publishing, every day it seems there’s a new upstart or three that’s going to disintermediate (or even better, KILL!) traditional publishers, but with the exceptions of Open Road Integrated Media and, possibly, Ruckus Media Group — notably, both are run by major publishing veterans and have partnerships with a variety of “traditional” publishers — you’d be hard-pressed to name too many others that have had any truly notable impact to match the hype surrounding them.
Basically, Amazon one-upped Barnes & Noble’s Read In-Store feature that allows Nook customers to “read NOOK Books FREE for up to one hour per day” in any of their 700+ stores, and put the exact same feature in every Kindle customer’s living room via 11,000+ public libraries, without the physical and timing limitations.
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