Amazon Relents, Blio Invents

As a follow up to the previous post, Amazon announced Sunday night that it would agree to Macmillan's terms allowing Macmillan to set prices for its e-books. Amazon did so grudgingly, stating that this would only hurt customers. The new pricing would mirror prices that Macmillan is setting with Apple for the iPad.

In other news, another e-book format called Blio is set to be released in February. Blio is a free format that works on PCs and is being developed for the Mac and iPod (and presumably for the iPad as well). Blio differs from other e-book formats in that it keeps the original formatting, fonts and pictures as the original books in full color.

Blio can display books with a 3 dimensional perspective so page turns simulate flipping through an actual book. Setting the cursor on the last word read allows readers to easily return to the place they stopped reading. E-books could also be preloaded with read-aloud content and associated sounds.

Blio's audio and picture capabilities would be especially useful for education and for children's books. These capabilities could be a real boon for science fiction and fantasy cover art, illustrations and audio, leading to a rich multimedia experience. This could allow literature to compete more favorably with film and television content.

Blio's website is at http://blioreader.com/

A very incisive and derisive take on Amazon's response to Macmillan from science fiction author John Scalzi entitled "All The Very Many Ways Amazon Failed the Weekend" can be viewed at Whatever.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/all-the-many-ways-amazon-so-very-failed-the-weekend/

Amazon Pulls Macmillan

The fallout from Apple's entry into the e-book marketplace has already begun. As reported in the New York Times, Macmillan publishing, one of the largest publishers in the U.S. whose brands included the science fiction publisher Tor Books, has been pulled from Amazon over an e-book publishing dispute. Macmillan is one of the publishers that signed with Apple to publish their e-books on Apple's new iPad.

Macmillan has been pushing to raise the price of its e-books from Amazon's set price of $9.99. Amazon deeply discounts their e-books to encourage sales of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. Apple is expected to allow publishers to set higher prices for e-book sales which could cut into Amazon's strategy.

Expect an ongoing struggle between other publishers and e-reader distributors over the future of nascent e-book industry. It will be interesting to see what the effects of the more e-book distributors with different e-readers and e-book formats will have on traditional publishing.

The Future is Here, Now What?

Let me preface this by saying that I am an Apple geek. That being said the Apple iPad brings personal computing and media interaction to a new level. A large touch sensitive screen for viewing and manipulating print, video and other media applications. How far are we away from "Minority Report" when we'll be able to control computing with hand gestures alone?

To be fair, Microsoft might be the one to get us there. Their Project Natal is designed to control video games through hand gestures alone, rather than the Wii's wireless controller. I can't help but think that it will be used for other applications as well. Maybe we'll be dreaming of electric sheep before too long, too.

By the time I publish, my works will probably appear in e-book form either on Amazon's Kindle or the iPad, or both. It's a brave new world and the publishing industry is just going to have to find a way to make it work so that authors get the royalties they deserve and the publishing companies can still make a decent profit. I just don't like the idea of paying for the New York Times in e-format.