Jobs Kicks the Kindle

In the bits blog on the NYTimes Steve Jobs gets it right for the Kindle but for all the wrong reasons:

Mr. Jobs can be like that when he assesses the competition.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Unfortunately, that's hard to take seriously and I would have expected better. I would always have given Apple and Jobs more credit in understanding market dynamics and trends. On the surface his comment is partly accurate, but there is no cause and effect here.

Does this mean we aren't about to see books on the iPhone in quantity? Of course, it could be misinformation.

From another perspective, it has been the media industry and the publishing community specifically that has kept this company (Apple) relevant for the past 15years (at least) via their loyal devotion to the Mac platform. To all those dedicated authors, marketing and design professionals in the publishing industry locked into the Apple mystique this comment should come as a kick in the processor.

Future of Bibliographic Control

Biblio data providers will be beating a path to the Library of Congress site in the next few days in their collective effort to foresee the future of bibliographic data. The Report is now available for review and certainly the commercial providers, who did not participate in the development of the report, will be anxious to know what the library community sees in their crystal ball.

Here is a sample from their executive summary:

The Working Group envisions a future for bibliographic control that will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. The realization of this future will occur in cooperation with the private sector and with the active collaboration of library users. Data will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control will be dynamic, not static.

The Report is based on the key premise that the community is at a critical juncture in the evolution of bibliographic control and information access/provision. It is time to take stock of past practices, to look at today’s trends, and to project a future path consistent with the goals of bibliographic control: to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access of and to library materials and other information products. Libraries must work in the most efficient and cooperative manner to minimize where possible the costs of bibliographic control, but both the Library of Congress and library administrators generally must recognize that they need to identify and allocate (or, as appropriate, reallocate) sufficient funding if they are serious about attaining the goals of improved and expanded bibliographic
control.

The report also states that they want the report to generate a wider discussion - a "call to action" that will lead to more specific plans and recommendations.

Cruising for a Lawsuit

Readers in Australia, UK and New Zealand will not be able to read the new Tom Cruise bio written by Andrew Morton. Fearing a threatened $100mm lawsuit, the Pan Macmillan business units in those countries are backing off. According to the book, Cruise is not gay, is second in command of the church of Scientology and (more bizarrely) his current wife was impregnated with the sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Through a combination of web reports and Youtube, readers in the UK, Australia and New Zealand will be able to get the essential elements of the book without actually having to buy it. In that respect, they might have an advantage. Having said that, there is so much 'leakage' in the antipodean market that booksellers will continue to import the title direct from the US. The Dymock chain said earlier this week that they would not stock the title but many other retailers are likely to order it.

SMH

Edge Boston (Where they name the author 'Thomas' Morton).

Pearson Near Sale of FT Deutchland

Pearson invested in a German language version of the FT in 2000. The company reports that the edition has had some success but remains steadfastly unprofitable and for the past year they have been trying to off load it. Late last year, the company appeared to have a sale (Spiegel) but that deal fell through. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is reporting that the German partner in this deal with Pearson will buy them out. According to reports Gruner + Jahr will pay next to nothing for the deal. Reuters.

Bloomsbury Guidance

Bucking the trend in yesterdays stock melt-down, shares of Bloomsbury Publishing rose on the back of a report from the company that operating results would be better than anticipated. The company is the publisher of Harry Potter but has invested broadly over the past 12 months in advancement of the series' denouement. The company reports that several specific titles, investments in the US and Germany and a number of key rights sales have contributed to the expected full year performance.

Full year results will be released on April 1st.

Bloomberg
Guardian

LiveMocha Update

I wrote recently on a social networking approach to language learning which I thought we quite innovative. LiveMocha, the site I looked at had launched at an innovators conference in September last year and the company just announced they have received over $5mm in equity funding to expand the business. Noted in the announcement is that the lead investor is Maverson which is the vc firm of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.

Seattle Post

Prior Post

(I am personally interested in this due to my work at Berlitz many years ago).

Amazon: The law est un idiot

Per expectation, Amazon's operations in France have elected to pay the silly amount of $1500/day as a fine for continuing to provide free shipping to French customers. You know, this is how revolutions get started...

As the Trib notes, this fine will be reviewed after 30 days and if the government(court) really wants to penalize them the fine will be raised substantially and so will end this symbolic effort. However, perhaps the court will recognize the ground swell of support (after all who wants to pay for something they could get for free - even the French agree that) and take the view that this is a archaic rule. Perhaps they will be enlightened and lower the fine.

From the Trib:

The 1981 Lang law was passed at a time when booksellers were losing sales to supermarkets and other new competitors. It was meant to assure that the French public had equal access to a wide variety of books, both high-brow and low-brow, not just heavily marked-down publications. The law has twice come before the European Court of Justice and both times it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anti competitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard, Manara said. In the Amazon case, a union of French bookstores won its lawsuit against the company last month over the free-shipping offer, which applies only to deliveries within France on book orders of more than €20.

Stay tuned to this riveting story.