New Price Fixing Suit Goes After Publishers and Amazon for Print Prices

Earlier this year, the law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro (Hagens) filed suit alleging the price fixing and collusion among Amazon.com and the five largest trade publishers which, the suit alleges, caused consumers to pay higher prices.

Now the same law firm is alleging a similar crime with respect to print book prices.  In the press release, the law firm states, 

“We believe we have uncovered a classic antitrust price-fixing scheme akin to exactly what Amazon and the Big Five book publishers have been accused of in the past,” said Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman and attorney representing the proposed class of booksellers. “The Big Five and Amazon have sought to squeeze every penny they can from online and retail booksellers through a complex and restrictive set of agreements, and we intend to put an end to this anticompetitive behavior.” 

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Mar. 25, 2021, and states that Amazon colluded with the Big Five U.S. book publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster – to restrain competition in the sale of print trade books, or non-academic texts such as fiction and non-fiction material.  

Back in 2011, this law firm also sued Apple accusing them of fixing e-book prices at artificially high levels and in that case Apple agreed to settle for $400 million. Hagens has a colorful history as these links (1, 2, 3) suggest but it also was recognized in 2020 by Law360 as Class Action Practice Team of the year. 

It remains to be seen how these cases will be adjudicated over the next few (likely) years.  As noted in an earlier post, Connecticut is also taking a look at Amazon and eBook pricing according to the NYTimes.

 

Class Action Suit: Amazon & Publishers Face Price Collusion

Attorney's Sperling & Slater acting on behalf of three eBook buying plaintiffs are suing Amazon and the "big 5" publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harpercollins) for eBook price collusion in the Southern District Court in Manhattan.  These plaintiffs are deemed representative of the following class:  

All persons who, on or after January 14, 2017, purchased in the United States one or more eBooks sold by the Big Five Publishers through any other retail e-commerce channel in the United States other than the Amazon.com platform.

The filing alleges that Amazon.com employs anticompetitive restraints to immunize its platform from the negative effects of the Big Five’s inflated eBook prices and that these 'inflated prices' are a result of the imposition by publishers of the agency pricing model.

There are several exhibits in this filing including the following:

As the following chart shows,15 the Big Five’s eBook prices decreased substantially from 2013-2014, as long as the consent decrees prevented the Big Five from interfering with retailer discounts, but they immediately increased their prices again in 2015 after renegotiating their agency agreements with Amazon and have continued to maintain supracompetitive prices

What the above chart seems to be suggesting is that eBook prices from the big five are now at a level comparable to the 2014-15 time period which is when they were lowest.

In their argument the attorneys focus on the use of 'most favored' pricing models which Amazon requires of its vendors. Basically no other vendor (including the publisher) can offer better prices to consumers. Due to this according to the suit, Amazon removes any opportunity for price competition and therefore perpetuates higher (anticompetitive) pricing of eBooks. As follows:

27. Amazon’s and the Big Five’s continued anticompetitive use of MFNs in the United States is astonishingly brazen, given the DOJ’s high-profile enforcement against Apple and the Big Five in 2012 and the EU’s own proceedings against the Big Five and Apple in 2011 and subsequently against Amazon in 2015 for its own use of anticompetitive MFNs in eBook sales. Despite multiple investigations and censure, Amazon and the Big Five have engaged and continue to engage in a conspiracy to fix the retail price of eBooks in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

28. Amazon’s agreement with its Co-conspirators is an unreasonable restraint of trade that prevents competitive pricing and causes Plaintiffs and other consumers to overpay when they purchase eBooks from the Big Five through an eBook retailer that competes with Amazon. That harm persists and will not abate unless Amazon and the Big Five are stopped; Plaintiffs seek a nation-wide injunction under the Clayton Act to enjoin Amazon and the Big Five from enforcing this price restraint.

29.Amazon’s conduct also violates Section 2. Amazon has obtained monopoly power in the U.S. retail trade eBook market, where it accounts for 90% of all eBook sales. Through its conspiracy with the Big Five Co-conspirators, Defendant Amazon has willfully acquired its monopoly power in the U.S. retail trade eBook through anticompetitive conduct, fixing the retail price of trade eBooks and causing supracompetitive prices for eBooks sold by or through Amazon’s eBook retailer rivals. Such conduct is an abuse of monopoly power in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

In stating thie case, the attorneys believe that Amazon and its co-conspirators (Big 5 publishers) did not act unilaterally or independently, or in their own economic interests, when entering into these agreements, which substantially, unreasonably, and unduly restrain trade in the relevant market, and harmed Plaintiffs and the Class thereby.

They seek damages in the case due to the higher costs of eBooks purchased.

Connecticut AG Investigating Amazon & Publishers for Unfair Practices

 According to a news report in the WSJ, Amazon is under investigation to determine whether their dealings with certain publishers are anti-competitive.

From the article:

The investigation is examining whether Amazon engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the e-book business through its agreements with certain publishers, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement.

Connecticut asked Amazon to provide documents related to its dealings with five of the largest U.S. book publishers, according to a subpoena issued in 2019. The Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that investigates technology platforms, obtained the subpoena through an open records request and shared it with The Wall Street Journal.

Is GoodReads A Good or Bad Thing For Books?

It's been a very long tome since Amazon bought up all the viable book recommendation sites - GoodReads included - but over in The New Statesman Sara Manavis suggests that Goodreads is not all good for books. Bad actually.

Apparently the one thing which unifies Goodreads users is that they all agree that the user experience sucks. I always believed Amazon buying these book recommendation and social networking sites was  cynical in the first place: Nothing should stop the Amazon juggernaut from dominating your book discovery and reading experience. Amazon were never really interested in the functionality or site 'experience' of these sites, they just wanted the enthusiasts and they were not going to let a potential competitor grow nor allow a real competitor buy up these companies.  In 2008, Amazon purchased Shelfari and in 2013 completed the Goodreads deal.  There was shock demonstrated at the time and commentators and users felt the sellers had sold out to the bad actor. Many felt betrayed.  But, according to the Manavis article there are still more than 90million users which is considerably more than the 16mm members back in 2008.

Since 2008, web design has changed considerably. No surprise there. However, to confirm the thesis that Amazon wasn't really interested in this product per se, the Goodreads website is virtually unchanged since 2008.  Manavis notes the frustration of users,

Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.”

Minavis suggests that the negative feedback has reached some type of breaking point, and I believe there is room in the market for other online booksellers of scale.

When I became CEO of Ingenta, the company was planning a commercial B2C book retail store. We had conversations with publishers, built some wire frames and developed a product concept. We planned to use existing technology (subsequently proven unstable). I had to squelch this initiative to concentrate on saving the company and delivering to current customers. It was actually a very crazy idea given our circumstances stoked by the high (and bizarre) interest of our board. Ingenta had a closet full of ill-conceived poorly executed projects and this would have been a spectacular example.

Looking around for other book recommendation sites, I still use LibraryThing but even they have some corporate overlords. LibraryThing is majority owned by the founder Tim Spalding but he counts both Amazon and Proquest as partial owners. LibraryThing hasn't changed much over the years either but I don't have anything like the frustration some of the Goodreaders seem to have.  Maybe they should come over.

MediaWeek (Vol 12, No 9): Amazon Juggernaut & Dilemma, Open Source Publishing, Digital Textbooks, Elsevier

The Amazon Publishing Juggernaut: What does the e-commerce giant want with the notoriously fickle world of publishing? To own your every reading decision. (Atlantic)

"Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing is far from the tech giant’s best-known enterprise, but it is a quietly consequential piece of the company’s larger strategy to become a one-stop shop for all your consumer decisions. As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. (One literary agent summed it up succinctly to The Wall Street Journal in January: “They aren’t gaming the system. They own the system.”)

The Amazon dilemma: how a tech powerhouse that fulfills our every consumer need still lets us down. Despite increasing criticism, Amazon refuses to acknowledge many of the unintended consequences its rise to dominance has spawned. (ReCode)

"Let’s start with Amazon’s power. Its roots can be traced back to a potent cocktail of vision, fortuitous timing, relentlessness, and a knack for exploiting loopholes — from state tax laws to a dearth of regulation that could have prevented it from acting simultaneously as retailer, retail platform, and consumer brand kingmaker."

Fake Journal publishers: OMICS, Publisher of Fake Journals, Makes Cosmetic Changes to Evade Detection. Following a public outcry over their proliferation, paralleled by a media exposé together with regulatory pressures in some countries, fake journals have appeared to be cleaning up their act. (TheWire)

Mind the Gap: The landscape of open-source publishing tools (report)

The number of open source (OS) online publishing platforms, i.e. production and hosting systems for scholarly books and journals, launched or in development, has proliferated in the last decade. Many of these publishing infrastructure initiatives are well-developed, stable, and supported by a small but vigorous distributed community of developers, but promising new ventures have also recently launched.

The notable increase in the number of OS platforms suggest that an infrastructure ‘ecology’ is emerging around these systems. Distinguishing between systems that may evolve along competitive lines and those that will resolve into a service ‘stack’ of related, complementary service technologies will help potential adopters understand how these platforms can or should interoperate.

Hummm, The radical transformation of the textbook (Wired)

“Digital text, digital work, is often engaged with at a lower level of attention. By moving everything online, it’s going to become even more decontextualized. Overall, I think there’s going to be less deeper learning going on,” Trakhman says. “I believe there’s a time and a place for digital, but educators need to be mindful of the time and place for using these resources. Rolling out these digital suites is not really the best for student learning.”

Battling Elsevier:  University of California’s showdown with the biggest academic publisher aims to change scholarly publishing for good (The Conversation)

The UC-Elsevier showdown made headlines because it’s symptomatic of the way the internet has failed to deliver on the promise to make knowledge easily accessible and shareable by anyone, anywhere in the world. It’s the latest in a succession of cracks in what is widely considered to be a failing system for sharing academic research. As the head of the research library at UC Davis, I see this development as a harbinger of a tectonic shift in how universities and their faculty share research, build reputations and preserve knowledge in the digital age.

Inclusive (textbook) access at the University of Arkansas (News) and at Austin Peay (News)


Read more articles on my Flipboard magazine:

*******

Are you considering an investment in new technology?  Check out my report on software and services providers.  (PubTech Report)

PND: Digital Transformation: A Seminar for Management

PND: Blockchain for Publishers

PND: Technology News

PND: The Price is Right for Cengage  

PND: The Opportunity in 200MM Students

PND: Mediaweek Reports 

Michael Cairns is a business strategy consultant and executive.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com or (908) 938 4889 for project work or executive roles.

Amazon Launches Prime Book Box for Children

As we know, Amazon's ability to mix, match and smash business models has no limit, but one thing is clear: Amazon is king of the subscription model.  Recent numbers revealed by Jeff Bezo's about the number of Prime subscribers were, on the one hand, astounding but also entirely believable given the power with which Amazon has asserted itself in the retail channel.

The company continues to enhance their Prime subscription model and recently announced a Children's Book Box product.  Currently in test, the product sells for $22.99 per box and guarantees a 35% discount on the list price of the books included in each box.  Customers can decide how many boxes they want, on what schedule and which age tier they are most interested in.  There are currently four age group tiers from age 'I can't stand up yet' to 12.

Currently, the offering appears to be hard cover (no eBooks) titles and from the announcement the selections will be a combination of classics and new 'selected' titles.  Amazon has kindly made a cute video:



This book box features some of the functionality of existing amazon subscription services which includes confirmation of the shipments in advance, the ability to delay or pass on a scheduled shipment and the ability to substitute selections before they are shipped.   Amazon may be interested in gathering even more information about their audience via this product.  Children, generally speaking, don't make purchases therefore the data on their purchasing behavior gets mixed with many other purchases.  A subscription product like this could provide potentially new data to Amazon.

Aside from independent retailers which face yet another threat from Amazon, there's another market segment which may suffer if this product proves successful and that is the library market.  Both public and school libraries offer curation benefits and subscribe to services such as the Junior Library Guild to supply them will curated titles.   Is it possible that the suppliers and/or libraries themselves could be disintermediated by this type of Amazon service?  Of course, libraries provide other benefits in addition to the curation of children's books so the question isn't so simple, but those curation services cost money (and the books are sold full price).  If Amazon can provide a better service at a good price then they may take market share in the library market as well.

That said, one final point.  There is a substitution factor here.  It may be more likely that the target market for this Book Box product would never step foot in a library.  It may be the case that subscribers to the Book Box buy more (or the same) because the subscription service is so easy and convenient.   Libraries and other retailers may only suffer at the margins.   Regardless, Amazon again shows its' power and scale in being able to spin up a well crafted service like this with relative ease.

Related: WAPO on the best book box subscriptions 

Michael Cairns is a business strategy consultant and executive.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com for project work or executive roles.  See here for examples of recent work.

Bezos' Principles for Success

Recently, Jeff Bezos released his annual letter to shareholders and it it he defined why it will always be "day 1" at Amazon.  In order to ensure that determination, he also outlined a few management principles which he believes are critical for the continued success of the company. 

These are:

• Operate a high-velocity decision making environment
• Recognize it is preferable to decide when only partial (70%) truth is known
• Appreciate that a boss or team member can disagree but must commit when decisions are taken 
• Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately

Read the whole letter here.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 43): McGraw Hill, Springer, Hilary Mantel, Amazon, Metadata +More

The tires are being kicked at McGraw Hill Education by a predictable group of private equity players (Cengage is backed by Apax) but the asking price looks steep (Reuters):

McGraw-Hill Companies Inc's (MHP.N) education unit is expected to draw final bids from private equity firms Bain Capital and Apollo Global Management (APO.N) as well as rival Cengage Learning Inc, in a deal that could fetch around $3 billion, several people familiar with the matter said.

Cengage, the No. 2 U.S. college textbook publisher, and the two private equity firms are working on final offers for McGraw-Hill Education, the world's second-largest education company by sales, with the bids due later in October, the people said.

McGraw-Hill, which is running the auction as an alternative to its planned spin-off of the business, wants to get more than $3 billion and could still decide against a sale if the bids fail to meet its price expectations, the people said this week.

Note - If you read my post this week about Pearson the Apollo Group owns for profit University of Phoenix making me some kind of fortune teller.

Journals publisher Springer is up for a recapitalization based on reports from Reuters:

The company has performed well and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) have risen to around 330 million euros, bankers said, from 310 million in 2011, which was quoted on EQT's website.
Although there is no urgency for the company to do anything as its debt does not mature until between 2015 and 2017, conditions in Europe's leveraged loan market are such that it could be good time to do an opportunistic deal.
There have been a number of such deals recently as banks and private equity firms seek to make money and take advantage of stronger market conditions, after a lack of deal activity over the summer, including dividend recapitalisations by the RAC and Formula One.

Hilary Mantel interviewed in The New Statesman:

Mantel wondered if she was being too demanding. But then she thought that to adjust her style in any way would be not only a loss, but patronising (“You simply cannot run remedial classes for people on the page”). Some will be lost along the way, but she doesn’t mind. “It makes me think that some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”

She can sound arrogant, Mantel, assured of her abilities and candid about them in a way that seems peculiarly un-English. But even the arrogance is purposeful. It is one of her pieces of advice to young authors: cultivate confidence, have no shame in being bullish about your ideas and your abilities. She was patronised for years by male critics who deemed her work domestic and provincial (one, writing about A Place of Greater Safety – the French 800-pager – dwelt on a brief mention of wallpaper). So she makes no apologies for her self-belief.
...

After all the research, the reading, the note-taking, the indexing, the filing and refiling, it is a question of tuning in. Alison, she says, is how she would have turned out if she hadn’t had an education – not necessarily a medium, but not far off, someone whose brain hadn’t been trained, and so whose only (but consi­derable) powers were those of instinct, of sensing, of awareness. Mantel describes herself as “skinless”. She feels everything: presences, ghosts, memories. Cromwell is researched, constructed and written, but he is also channelled. Occupying his mind is pleasurable. He is cool, all-seeing, almost super-heroic in his powers to anticipate and manipulate. (Craig thinks Mantel made the mistake of falling in love with her leading man and that her version of Cromwell is psychologically implausible for a man we know tortured people.) Mantel relishes his low heart rate, the nerveless approach to life, a mental state unbogged by rumination. She says that when she began writing Wolf Hall, first entering this mind, she felt physically robust in a way she hadn’t for years.

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was on a promo tour in the UK this week and was interviewed in The Telegraph:

He says the business quickly realised that if they wanted to make ebooks work, they needed to make hardware. Eight years later, the Kindle is into its fifth generation. The latest, film and music playing, multimedia tablet takes on Apple’s iPad and is, on pre-orders alone, the site's number one best seller.

Bezos, though, doesn’t want to take on Apple at their own game. “Proud as I am of the hardware we don’t want to build gadgets, we want to build services,” he says. “I think of it as a service and one of the key elements of the service is the quality of the hardware. But we’re not trying to make money on the hardware – the hardware is basically sold at breakeven and then we have a continuing relationship with the customer. We hope to make money on the services they buy afterwards.”

And make money they do, but Amazon is still not Apple’s size. Would Bezos like it to be? “Even though this device is only £159, in some ways it's better than a £329 iPad – way better wifi, the iPad only has mono sound and the Kindle bookstore is by far the best electronic bookstore in the world.”

Colin Robinson writing in the Guardian suggests ten ways publishing can help itself. Extra points if you can find anything either new in this list (Guardian):

This year, on the face of things, it's been business as usual at the Frankfurt book fair, with some 7,500 exhibitors setting up shop in the gleaming white Messe. But scratch beneath the surface and a tangible unease about the future of the industry is evident: book sales are stagnating, profit margins are being squeezed by higher discounts and falling prices, and the distribution of book buyers is ever more polarised between record-shattering bestsellers and an ocean of titles with tiny readerships. The mid-list, where the unknown writer or new idea can spring to prominence, is progressively being hollowed out. This is bad news not just for publishing but for the culture at large.

Three magazine publisher's experience with Apple's Newsstand (Journalism UK)

When Goldsmith delivered presentations on Newsstand at publishing conferences a year ago, he said he would be asked a common question.  "The first question from the audience would be 'aren't you cannibalising your own sales?' And that question would come from our editors as well."  "But 80 per cent of sales are overseas, 90 per cent of customers are new to the brand." And 40 per cent of all of sales are for subscriptions. "That's brilliant, because it is offsetting that sad decline in print.
It is a similar story for Conde Nast. "We are reaching a new audience, we are able to target them in new ways, we are able to market to them in new ways, it's a pretty exciting new development for us," Read said. "It means that the overall circulations of our magazines in these particular instances are growing very healthily so that we are seeing very big increases in circulation with titles such as Wired and GQ." Overseas sales vary from title to title, Read added, "A magazine like Vanity Fair will see quite a big proportion of its iPad sales coming from overseas, something like 60 to 70 per cent will be international, but that applies to print as well.

Metadata on Stage at Frankfurt reported by Publisher's Weekly:

Indeed this is the thrust of their exchange—the ever-increasing numbers of books and the faulty metadata being circulated about them—over the next half hour. The transition from print to digital has made metadata—which can mean anything from an ISBN to customer ranking on Amazon—not just simply useful, both Dawson and O’Leary emphasized, it is now critical to the ability to find and sell a book. The rise of digital publishing, and the lowering of barriers to entry for just about anyone—from professional publisher to newest self-publisher—has resulted in an explosion of metadata of all kinds. And apparently a sizeable chunk of it is either inaccurate or missing outright, compounding the problem of book discoverability. 

“When it was only the print bookstore, BISAC was a luxury,” O’Leary said, “but with all the digital products, we need accurate and granular metadata. It’s what we need to make book discovery possible.” The explosion in the amount of digital book content, “puts pressure on the metadata,” said Dawson, who pointed out that once inaccurate metadata is published online, “it’s there forever. If you’ve ever tried to correct a mistake in the metadata you know it’s a game of Whack-A-Mole.”
In fact in the olden days of print, O’Leary said, “It used to be that once you shipped the book, that was the end, the metadata was done. But with digital it never stops, there are constant updates and changes.” And as more consumers around the world go online they encounter information on all kinds of books, many of which they will want—but will be unable to buy. “Today, every book you publish is visible everywhere, even if you can’t buy it [because of territorial rights],” O’Leary said, “This encourages piracy, because if people do try to buy it, they find out they can’t.”

From Twitter this week:

From the fashion and style section of the NYTimes (??) The Education of Tony Marx head of NYPL.  (NYTimes)

Amazon The Monopoly

Re-post from March 28,2008

Trouble at Mill. Manufacturing of old had it that the mill owner owned the means of production and the mill workers toiled within an inch of their lives, lived in company barracks, spent scrip at the company store and if they had anything left they banked at the company bank. Amazon is a latter day mill owner. The company is attempting to tie their client/POD publishers to them to the exclusion of other relationships the client publishers may have through Amazon's web of administrative, financial, distribution and content tools. As a practical matter, it is becoming harder (and may be financially impossible for many small POD publishers) to maintain separate relationships with Amazon and all the rest of the publishing community.

The blog world is enraged at the moment over Amazon's new policy on POD. The company is effectively telling POD customers that if you want to sell your POD products via the Amazon store you need to be on our platform using our tools. If that means all your titles need to be converted then that's your problem. This is not a situation where these POD publishers can say 'I'll just go some place else'. Amazon has sucked them in because of all the wonderful tools they offer the publishers and of course the sales penetration. In announcing the Booksurge/ CreateSpace merge in August 2007, Amazon's senior v-p, North American retail, Jeff Wilke said, "The new CreateSpace Books on Demand service removes substantial economic barriers and makes it really easy for authors who want to self-publish their books and distribute them on Amazon.com." As it turns out this is true, but there are some significant caveats.

The Wall Street Journal was kind (and misleading) in its assessment of this Amazon initiative:

"Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon's Web site. The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing.

Amazon hasn't been merely a book retailer for some time. While many in the industry - PND included - can't help but have admiration for this company they have amassed a level of market influence across the publishing value chain that should concern everyone. Today, the issue is focused on a small (ardent and vocal) minority of POD publishers who's entire livelihood in many cases is dependent on the Amazon retail expanse. The WSJ should know better. Without being too dramatic, the release of Windows 3.1 heralded a period of intense exclusion at Microsoft: If you didn't play ball with them you essentially had no marketplace. Perhaps at first blush the publishing industry doesn't appear to have any correlation to the software world but with the migration to 'platform' based publishing (a publishing version of iTunes for example) we are seeing the germination of a world where there are only one or two legitimate channels to the consumer. If their actions in the POD world over these past two months are anything to go by then Amazon definitely has monopolistic tendencies.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 23): Amazon, Achilles, Ulysses +More

In a heavily retweeted article, The Nation takes a look at The Amazon Effect.  In the process, the author seems to rely a lot on what Jason Epstein had to say.  (Not that there's anything wrong with that).

Jeff Bezos got what he wanted: Amazon got big fast and is getting bigger, dwarfing all rivals. To fully appreciate the fear that is sucking the oxygen out of publishers’ suites, it is important to understand what a steamroller Amazon has become. Last year it had $48 billion in revenue, more than all six of the major American publishing conglomerates combined, with a cash reserve of $5 billion. The company is valued at nearly $100 billion and employs more than 65,000 workers (all nonunion); Bezos, according to Forbes, is the thirtieth wealthiest man in America. Amazon may be identified in the public mind with books, but the reality is that book sales account for a diminishing share of its overall business; the company is no longer principally a bookseller. Amazon is now an online Walmart, and while 50 percent of its revenues are derived from music, TV shows, movies and, yes, books, another 50 percent comes from a diverse array of products and services. In the late 1990s Bezos bought IMDb.com, the authoritative movie website. In 2009 he went gunning for bigger game, spending nearly $900 million to acquire Zappos.com, a shoe retailer. He also owns Diapers.com, a baby products website. Now he seeks to colonize high-end fashion as well. “Bezos may well be the premier technologist in America,” said Wired, “a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.”

Tales of brave Achilles: From the Observer a discussion of the continued popularity of Achilles (Observer)

Why are the classics making a comeback? According to Hughes, the classical historian and broadcaster, it is to do with emotional connection.

"You think of big epic tales and you think they're just to do with war and conflict, but Homer actually writes beautiful lines," she says. "There's one line about Athena brushing an arrow away 'like a mother brushing a fly off the face of a sleeping child'. I read that and I remembered doing that with my own child.

"So suddenly there's an immediate emotional connection, 27 centuries later, to me as a 21st-century mother. There are big philosophical connections, but also the base connection of what it is to be human.

"I do think that, post-millennium and post-9/11, people have become much less abashed about asking the big questions about why we're here. If anything can answer those, it's the wisdom of the ancients because the Greeks and Romans weren't just swanning around in the Mediterranean sunshine, they were living in tough times. You could be dead by the age of 45. You were in a time of total war."

BBC Radio 4 is planning a whole day on Joyce's Ulysses for Bloomsday June 16th (Observer):

Which makes it all the more welcome that the BBC is intending to go several better than its (admittedly useful) cheats' guide and mount an extensive celebration of the novel on this year's Bloomsday. This coming 16 June, Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest, kicking off at 9am and running until midnight: a new, five-and-a-half hour dramatisation of Ulysses, narrated by Stephen Rea and starring Henry Goodman, Niamh Cusack and Andrew Scott, will be punctuated by broadcasts by Mark Lawson in Dublin and discussions about the book's place in 20th-century literature.

To reassure those who might quail at some of the book's more full-blooded material, the Beeb has emphasised that its raciest parts will be concentrated after 8pm (although there has not been a cull of the explicit: as the dramatisation's producer, Jeremy Mortimer, points out: "You can't have a Molly Bloom that doesn't enjoy sex").

Potentially interesting big data application in Higher Ed gets some funding (TC):

With capital in tow, Civitas is looking to provide colleges and universities not only with smart learning tools but also the ability to create their own learning apps based on its “Learning Community’s” application programming interfaces. By doing so, Civitas is providing an alternative path for scaling tools and solutions across institutions, through supporting publisher-created apps as well as those built by startups that otherwise could never invest in the integrations with campus systems or the sales cycles necessary to establish relationships with higher ed institutions.
In turn, the startup’s participating institutions can identify trends across swaths of student learning data, including a realtime view of which students are at risk of dropping out (and why), the ability to identify specific courses and degree paths that are contributing to attrition, and, in turn, what specific resources and interventions are most successful and for what type of students.

Frank Donoghue at The Chronicle thinks about the consequences of closing University Presses (Chronicle):

University presses have been an essential component of research institutions since the founding of Johns Hopkins, venues where scholarly knowledge could be dispersed to an admittedly small but interested intellectually interested community. It is, I admit, hard to imagine major universities without presses. But one has to at least consider: Have those various intellectual communities become too splintered, specialized and small? Have the monographs that university presses produce become so costly that individual scholars can’t purchase them? And, thus, have university presses outlived their time? If they have, there are even more dire professional consequences, which I will take up next time.

From the Twitter:

Ten Reasons to Avoid Doing Business With Amazon - The Nation

Tintin cover fetches record price BBC

Spanish Booksellers to Sue Amazon Over Book Prices EbookNews

Textbooks don't have to be free, but $20/month is too much. Students will rebel. Blog (HT @neilschlager)

Libraries Grapple With The Downside Of E-Books NPR

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 5); Fixing Copyright, UK Education & History, Girlsand Science + More

Long article in The Nation this week about reforming copyright and makes deep reference to Bill Patry's How to Fix Copyright. The author of the article Caleb Cain is not convinced of the arguments Patry, who is lead council for Google and widely seen as an expert on copyright issues, makes and he makes his opinion know very early on:

The non sequitur I’m objecting to here is a small one. Unfortunately it’s representative; Patry’s reasoning is slipshod throughout the book, and more than once he tells the reader what to think instead of taking the trouble to convince him. Nor are these the only signs that the book may have been hurriedly—or just poorly—written. Patry often repeats himself. Though he seems to wish to address a broad audience, he uses legal terms of art such as “de minimis” and “worldwide exhaustion” without explaining them, and the later chapters sprint faster and faster through vagaries of international copyright law that are more and more complex. His priorities seem unsorted; he devotes a whole chapter to discrediting a 1995 article that consists only of notes in outline form and that by his own admission seems to have been little read. Nonetheless, if only because of Patry’s connection to Google, the ideas in his book will be taken seriously.
* * *
Patry believes that copyright laws have failed, and for evidence of the failure he begins by pointing to conflicts. Creators of copyrighted work have tussled with the distributors to whom they sell it. Record labels, for example, have been found guilty of withholding payments to musicians, and Patry recounts that in his capacity as a writer, he was recently forced against his will to sign away valuable rights in negotiations with a powerful online publisher. Creators have also been quarreling with their audiences, especially about pricing and access. Patry cites a recent dispute over Amazon’s Kindle: Amazon enabled the device to read books aloud in a mechanized voice, and the Authors Guild protested that the function would cut into sales of audio books. Amazon backed down—a matter for regret, in Patry’s opinion.

This article is mostly a review of the book rather than an argument with Patry's point(s) of view. Read the whole thing in The Nation.

UK Education Secretary Michael Gove argues that schools should teach children about kings, queens and wars. He's offering a quack remedy to a misdiagnosed complaint (New Statesman):

How about teaching narrative rather than analysis, then? It is wrong, David Starkey has asserted, that history in the schools has modelled itself on university research. What we need, he declares, is to give children "a sense of change and development over time . . . The skills-based teaching of history is a catastrophe." But what sells in the bookshops or what succeeds on TV is not necessarily what should be taught in schools. Teaching is a profession with its own skills and techniques, different from those needed to present a television programme (as Starkey's performance on the reality TV show Jamie's Dream School dramatically indicated). Physics, biology and every other subject in schools is taught along lines that reflect research in the universities. One wouldn't expect physics teachers to ignore Stephen Hawking's ideas about black holes, or biology teachers to keep quiet about the discovery of DNA. So what makes history so different? Chemistry devotes a large amount of time to transmitting skills to students; why shouldn't history?

The narrative that the critics want shoved down pupils' throats in schools - as they sit in rows silently learning lists of kings and queens - is essentially what's been called the "Whig theory of history"; that is, telling a story of British history over a long period of time, stressing the development of parliamentary democracy in a narrative that culminates in a present viewed in self-congratulatory terms.

This theory was exploded by professional historians more than half a century ago, under the influence of the classic tract The Whig Interpretation of History by the conservative historian Herbert Butterfield. Yet it still has strong support in the media. The Daily Telegraph and the right-wing think tank Civitas even campaigned to get H E Marshall's patriotic textbook Our Island Story put on the National Curriculum. Dating from the Edwardian era, this book, with its stories of how the British brought freedom and justice to the Maoris of New Zealand and many other lucky peoples across the world, has rightly been described as "imperialist propaganda masquerading as history". In what other academic subject would people seriously advocate a return to a state of knowledge as it was a hundred years ago?

Steering Girls to Science and Technology (MediaShift):

One thing research consistently shows is the impact that one-on-one relationships and role models can have in influencing kids. And that's one of the defined goals of the Techbridge program. To that end, Ebony and her peers get to work once a week with Esosa Ozigbo, who comes from a similar background as many of the girls in the program -- single-parent home, struggling financially, parents who never graduated from high school. But Ozigbo, a Stanford graduate with a science degree, is living proof that there's a way out -- and it might just be in a field like science or math. "I definitely know that growing up, it would have been great to have someone like that come in and talk to me," Ozigbo said.

Ozigbo leads Techbridge field trips, taking girls to companies like Google and Yahoo for site visits so they see for themselves the possibility of a life that's different than what they've lived so far. "I took some girls to San Francisco -- they had never been on the other side of the bay," she said. "It's just about seeing what's out there and seeing if it's in your grasp and saying, 'This is what I have to do, this is what I can do.' I think that makes the world of a difference."

From the Twitter this week:

Serving police officer among four men arrested in London and Essex as part of Operation Elveden http://bbc.in/wjqphP

Casio has unveiled smartphone prototypes able to exchange data using light. Some have labelled this system Li-Fi http://econ.st/ww1QF8

Amazon's Hit Man - With Bow Tie http://buswk.co/A6sfea

Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research http://dlvr.it/17Fk3m

Amazon As Producer - Repost

Originally posted May 14, 2009

Amazon sells a lot of books but like any retailer they want to sell more. Reliance on publishers to produce the right books, or support the books in the right way, is so old school, and Amazon has determined that in some cases they can do a better job than a traditional publisher. From their press release:

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon websites to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors that show potential for greater sales. Amazon then partners with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. This summer "Legacy" will be revised by the author and re-issued as an AmazonEncore edition in print on Amazon websites around the world, in physical bookstores, as a digital download from the Kindle Store in less than 60 seconds, and via spoken-word audio download on Audible.com.

It was really only a matter of time before Amazon entered the acquisitions segment of the publishing value chain and they follow Barnes & Noble and Borders in this respect, but the danger (or opportunity) in the Amazon case is more acute given their market power. Amazon is likely to go about this program in a far more aggressive manner than the other retailers, and the strategy looks like another element of their 'platform' play. Soon it may be the case where traditional book content - once 'generic' in terms of its' availability in all retail outlets - becomes somehow proprietary on the Kindle, in audio and perhaps in print. Amazon has such retail selling power that any publisher selected into the Encore program would have few qualms agreeing to an 'exclusive' sales arrangement. 'Exclusive' since few non-Amazon retailers would be likely to carry the title.

The self-publishing market has long seemed to me to be one of the best things that has happened to the acquisitions editor. The market represents a test bed of potential new authors and book projects. While the number of winners is always going to be small, the work of sifting through this material, which historically would have been done by reading the stacks of manuscript submissions, now takes place in the minor leagues of publishing. Here, there is a ready market of readers and reviewers who en mass can do the job of many AE's; but, Amazon is spoiling all the fun. With their superior data analysis capability, Amazon will be able to select these sleeper hits far in advance of any publisher and this Encore program will conspire to erode a publishers ability to source new books.

On the other hand, publishers will continue to publish authors who have not gone the self-publishing route and will not initially be available to Amazon. Many of these titles don't sell well even though they are good titles. Amazon are telling publishers that they are prepared to step in and help out if they determine that with a little more coaxing the title could indeed find an audience. The question will be on what terms this arrangement will be based.

Amazon as producer is a subtle but important change in the operations of the largest retailer. I often mull what would happen to some of the largest publishers if they lost their top two or three authors to Google or Amazon. It may be that the Amazon Encore program sets the stage for a much larger program by Amazon to establish their own publishing and media production operation - their content supply - that feeds their retail presence. There may be further ramifications from this seemingly innocuous press release.

Book Movement

This means little but it is intellectually interesting to me: On Sunday night 60Mins had segment on the Armenian mass murder that took place during WW1. During that segment, they noted Armenian Golgotha written by Grigoris Balakian which was written about the atrocity and published in March 2009. On Sunday night the hard cover, paper and Kindle books were ranked 108,172, 42,618 and 21,975 in their respective bookstores. By Tuesday morning, the numbers where significantly changed: 9,201, 2,036 and 7,623. As far out on the sales curve as 102,172 is probably means that any news or pr is likely to move the title significantly up the curve however, the title doesn't seem to have moved as far up in popularity in the Kindle store as it has in the hardcover and paper formats. There's probably some math equation there that explains all.

Same Day Delivery on Sales Tax

Amazon.com is rolling out same day delivery in select cities for orders placed between 1oam and 1pm (NYTimes) As B&N steps up its online and e-Reader activities, Amazon is not standing in place and looks to be offering this service to counter one of the primary benefits that the bricks and mortar bookseller retains. But Amazon has also been battling states over the collection of sales tax and has pulled operations out of states that have sought to require them to collect sales tax. One of those battleground states has been New York and the NY attorney general has been looking into this matter with respect to Amazon in particular. In reaction Amazon began closing their affiliate relationships in the state to mitigate any argument that they had nexus in the state requiring them to collect state tax. As an internet retailer, Amazon has never agreed that they should collect sales taxes if they don't have substantial operations in a particular state but as of August they appear to have been collecting sales tax in New York.

This announcement could have more implications than just same day delivery.

LATimes

In Support of the Google Book Settlement

It isn't unusual to hear from financial analysts here at PND HQ who offer all manner of crazy predictions over (in particular) eBook take-up and how the Amazon Kindle is going to take over the universe, so it was particularly welcoming this morning to read Jeffrey Lindsay's (Analyst, Global Internet at Bernstein) defense of the Google Book Agreement.

From Lindsay:

Google has just done something rather wonderful. It is on the verge of an astonishing achievement that will benefit the U.S. for generations, bridging a major part of the digital divide and giving the country a global lead in a key area – scholarship. Its reward: a lawsuit, public criticism from the hastily reconstituted and Orwellian-named “Open Book Alliance” (Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon) and scrutiny by the Justice Department. Imagine what might have happened had they had tried to destroy a competitor’s business model by bundling its product into an operating system or attempted to corner the e-book market by making a proprietary closed system to force users to buy online books only form them.

I like the irony. Lindsay alerts us to the effort by Microsoft (in particular) and their aborted effort to implement their own digitization program - one which in my view never really got off the ground. With a little bit of a dig, he seems to suggest that Microsoft didn't really have the consumers' or publishers' interest in mind when they unceremoniously canceled the Live Search Books program after their late and halfhearted approach last year. So under those circumstances is Microsoft a viable challenger to this agreement when they chose to abandon their effort?

Only Google stayed the course and so now only Google has the world’s largest digital book archive. So what is it going to do that is so terrible now that it has this archive? According to Google it is simply going to let people search it for free and if they want to buy the books direct them to a range of other sellers – hardly cornering much of the value of book digitization.

Lindsay does address three important objections - competition, BRR representation and privacy - and introduces these as follows:

Ignoring the competitively-motivated hyperbole there are some grounds for concern with the Google Book Rights Registry agreement. No legal agreement is perfect and given the way events have picked up speed since Google reached agreement with the Authors Guild, some concerns these do merit some serious consideration. The usual Google refrain "trust us, we do no evil" line may be well intended but the company has already had a couple of near misses on privacy; the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit for example (where Viacom subpoenaed and received full records of all videos seen on YouTube). Moreover Google already caved on censorship in China – clearly as a corporate entity it is susceptible to arm-twisting to a greater degree than the small but well documented number of brave librarians and book sellers in the U.S. who have turned down user reading list requests from the Police and FBI.

Moreover even assuming Google's current management team is well intentioned and trustworthy who can give guarantees about the actions of future generations of management? Considered objections from academics and public watchdog institutions such as the Center for Democracy and Technology fall into three broad categories: (1) lack of competition; (2) limited representativeness of the BRR and its potential for self interested behavior; and (3) Privacy

With respect to pricing he notes critics of the GBS use the pricing models of academic journal publishers as proof that Google will act with similar disregard for universal access and fairness; however, he does note that Google's behavior to date has been more 'altruistic' than the behavior exhibited by those same publishers. Despite this, he concludes that perhaps some type of regulatory oversight might be called for once the agreement is approved.

On the Book Rights Registry he comments,

The BRR in principle has no incentive to drive down the costs of knowledge and given its privileged position could actually act in self-interested ways – analogies to the Olympics venue selection committees have been made. In addition parallels have been drawn with the BRR's unique gatekeeper position relative to the fragmented base of book users prompting comparisons with the cable industry and health insurers.

Again the solution seems to be some sort of oversight of regulation to counter-balance market failure.The EFF position on privacy which I noted a few weeks ago is also referenced as an important issue in not only the debate over the settlement but the wider implications for how Google charts everything we see and do. Books of course hold a particular sacrosanct position in terms of privacy and librarianship and if nothing else many would want Google to act in a similar way to the stand taken by many librarians in the face of subpoena and the FBI.

Lindsey closes with a desire to see the settlement approved by the court noting that the access to knowledge afforded by the agreement exceeds any negative aspects of the deal especially if supervision is also prescribed. His final comments concludes,

With good regulation this repository of human knowledge and ideas could be kept accessible to millions at low or zero cost while ensuring the rights to knowledge and privacy set out in the Bill of Rights could be preserved for generations. What is the alternative? Forcing Google to destroy this database may delight a small number of extremely rich individuals in the Pacific Northwest, but would be one of the greatest acts of Luddite vandalism of modern time. We hope the regulators will be enlightened and bold in the upcoming hearings on October 7th.

Teleread: Amazon and Synergy = Kindle

On the TeleRead.org blog about a month ago Felix Torres was asked to expand, as a guest contributor, on a comment he had made on a related post. His guest post turned into one of the best explorations of the Amazon market strategy I have seen. Two years ago, I thought the implications of the Kindle were far greater than publishers anticipated but Felix pulls together all the strands to make clear both the 'danger' for publishers and the inevitability of the strategy (Link):

Here are some examples:

Once you factor in Amazon’s hidden face it is hardly surprising that they are leveraging their cloud platform capabilities into boosting Kindle with features like Whispersync and hosting notes and bookmarks; they already host Kindle bookshelf backups and email accounts and file conversion services for their users, after all. And when you consider that none of their existing ebook-business competitors has any experience in that arena (except Microsoft, who may not even be in the game anymore) this just might turn out to be the deciding factor.

....

For the near term, say three-to-five years, Amazon really has no significant challengers to the Kindle cloud they are developing. Expect new features to roll out regularly, many of them shocking, some might even seem head-scratchingly odd, but all will fit into a basic paradigm that says: “reading is more than just about books”.

....

Want to see where Kindle is going? Look to Xbox 360. Look to Zune. Look to XBOX Live. And then look again, at what doesn’t show on the surface.

XBOX 360 is, like Kindle, a “walled garden” content delivery system. DRM rules XBOX live. Unlike Sony, Microsoft doesn’t own any movie studios, yet they beat them to market by over a year with online movie rentals and TV show sales.

....

Kindle is just for reading ebooks, after all, right?

Sure, just like an Xbox is “only” for games. Except people buy Xboxes these days so they can play with/against their friends; they buy Xboxes because the people they know buy Xboxes. And there is added value in having the same console, playing the same game, and talking, interacting. Suddenly, gaming is about more than the games. Its about the (forgive the marketing-speak) “experience”.

And that is where Kindle is going. Fast.

....

There is a lot more. With respect to this last quote the Amazon strategy of owning Social Booksites like Shelfari and LibraryThing (partly) suggests they have the elements in place to build their 'experience.' As potential influencers and curators perhaps it is the Kindle upon which these investments will be leveraged.

Desperate Publishers of Manhattan

Poor Book Depository having been cast as the next Amazon.com killer by publishers desperate for some broadening of the retailer market they face inevitable marginality. On the back of 'they've seen some success' and 'they offer free shipping anywhere in the world' it is suggested they are a legitimate player in the US market dominated by Amazon.

David Rothman at Teleread.org addresses this silliness further (Teleread):

Some wishful publishers are rejoicing that a British company called The Book Depository will go after the U.S. market and in other ways compete online against Amazon.

Alas, I’m not so optimistic. Would you believe, the little TeleBlog in recent months has drawn more traffic at times than The Book Depository has, according to Alexa. Even allowing for Alexa’s inaccuracies, it’s clear that the Book Depository is not that big a power on the Net. Perhaps eventually the store will be. But it has a long way to go as an Amazon rival—look at the chart below. In the comparison, you can’t even see the Book Depository’s line. What’s more, if the Book Depository has a Kindle equivalent, that’s news to me. Just how is the company to be a major power in a fast-growing sector like e-books?

And another bizarre aspect to this flaccid conversation is there's no mention of B&N.com.

Art of Kindle Forecasting: What's a $100mm between friends?

As noted in paidcontent Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal is predicting that revenues from Kindle sales will approximate $300mm this year and generate $70mm in profit. Even more he projects $1.6bill in revenues and $400mm in profit by 2012:

Aggarwal argues that sales of the Kindle grow almost 80 percent a year from ‘09 to ‘12, and that subscriptions will also jump as a result. (Amazon gets 70 percent of subscription revenue). Some 30 percent of Kindle owners subscribed to a service on the e-reader last year, a number that Aggarwal will grow to 75 percent in 2012 as more products are offered and the device becomes more mainstream.

Who's he arguing with? Maybe this guy from Piper Jaffray who suggests 2009 revenues of $405mm going up to over $1bill by 2010. What a nice growth curve that is. eMarketer goes on to note that analyst Mark Mahaney from Citibank believes 10% of all books sold in the 1Q 2009 were Kindle books. Impressive, but nontheless unknowable unless you are looking at real Amazon sales numbers and who is doing that?

Being eMarketer they go on to quote some stats on consumer purchasing. But surely some of these stats seem to undercut the basic tenants of the stratospheric growth:

Importantly, people are increasingly willing to try e-book readers.

Piper Jaffray found that 5% of consumers surveyed were interested in buying a digital book reader, and 9% were interested in buying one after a price drop. Nineteen percent of respondents had never seen a digital book reader but wanted to check one out.

I am not sure I could take anything meaningful from that set of results. The first question is a killer. We all know eBooks and eContent and devices are important but this 'analysis' is banker talk and look where that got us.

And another thing, there aren't that many $100mm publishing companies out there: Here we are just talking about the delta between these two forecasts.

Murdoch on the Kindle and Paid Content

From their earnings conference call yesterday (SeekingAlpha):

If it is possible to charge for content on the web, it is obvious from the Journal’s experience. We are now in the midst of a [proper] debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers the current model is malfunctioning. We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues and returns for our shareholders. I can assure you we will not be feeding our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle. We will control the prices for our content and we will control the relationship with our customers. Any device maker or website which doesn’t meet these basic criteria on content will not be doing business long-term with News Corporation.
Too many content creators have been passive in the face of obvious violations of intellectual property rights. We rightly hold China and other countries accountable on this important issue. But the violation of these rights is rampant on the web in our own country. Our content is extremely valuable and the violators have recognized that value.
Within the company itself, the very bright people we have at our Slingshot Laboratories are devising clever ways to monetize the content of some of our long established print properties. We will be matching their contemporary expertise and the creation of communities within our traditional -- with our traditional expertise in the creation of content. The [current days of the Internet] will soon be over.

PS: Barely a mention of Harpercollins. A tough 3rdQ means HC will need a very strong 4thQ to finish the year in positive territory. (PublishersWeekly)

Big Kindle Goes to School (Shrug)

The launch of Big Kindle looks like another round in the continuing Apple vs Amazon cage fight. Amazon looks to be on the defensive as they rush out a larger version of the Kindle for the education market in advance of Apple's proposed Tablet PC. Jobs may think that people don't read but he does know that children are educated, and education is an arena Apple has traditionally done well in. The developing convergence of education and book e-commerce is what Amazon may see as a threat: A captured market of educational materials that, should Apple enter with a tablet PC type device, Amazon could be locked out of.

For Amazon however, Big Kindle will still be giggled over by those in Cupertino. Will the Apple tablet be any better? It is certain to have a far better form factor. Whether it will be expressly suited to delivering educational content in a dynamic and forward thinking manner remains to be seen. That is certainly not within the capabilities of Big Kindle.

Several universities participated in the launch of Big Kindle and the hype around the launch hid a troubling question; namely, why these schools were in-bed with the retailer at all? On a list serve I questioned,

Don't the participating universities appear to be endorsing a hardware platform (not to mention a specific retail channel). You could argue (possibly strongly) that allowing the bookstore to be managed by B&N or Follett or even the adoption of college textbooks themselves to be little different; however, doesn’t the changed paradigm suggest an opportunity to operate on a more open field of play or is this more of the same leading to more student frustration, higher prices and deadened innovation in education?

In other words, why would the universities want to continue the (essentially) old way of doing business when most observers believe we are on the cusp of a renaissance in educational learning. The Kindle doesn't do multimedia, it doesn't do color and most importantly it doesn't do networking because the Kindle is a closed system. This is a short sighted collaboration between schools and Amazon that doesn't really suggest any major change.

As I thought about the Big Kindle development it struck me that there could still be a more interesting development. Content media companies suddenly developing a hardware delivery platform are growing like weeds from NewsCorp to Hearst, and there could be an opportunity for collaboration between the news/magazine world and education. What if CourseSmart or Safari joined one of these efforts? That would be a far more interesting and potentially game changing development than selling text book content on a Big Kindle. By definition, the hardware to support a digital magazine will be capable of all the aspects necessary in delivering a changed educational experience.

Will that happen? As it turns out some of the partners involved in CourseSmart are also participating in the Big Kindle roll out; but, what is CourseSmart if it isn't a new way to deliver educational materials to learners? That doesn't seem to be what students will be getting with Big Kindle. There may be all kinds of reasons why CourseSmart (or even an publisher themselves) won't be launching a device: The predominant reason may be the amount of print revenue tied to Amazon, and therefore from my perspective Big Kindle and education is more about marketing hype than anything fundamental. We await more developments with keen interest.