Giants

I don't profess to be much of a football fan, but that was some game. In a strange way the last drive had the air of inevitability....Now for the ticker tape parade and it won't be in the parking lot at Giants stadium either.

Google Search By Year

I came across this a few weeks ago and I thought it was very interesting. Google has place where you can see some of their experimentation with new search interfaces. In the Google search box enter the following: joseph conrad view:timeline and you will see a dateline version of the life of Joseph Conrad. It works for all kinds of things: Try replacing JC with Viet Nam War. If you play with this a little you will see that you can narrow down searches within years. As far as I can tell it doesn't do months.



Some of you will recall an interface that OCLC has worked on for authors that is similar. WorldCat Identities looks like this: Conrad



Fellow traveler, Peter Brantley reminded me of the Google interface by referring me to an article in Arstechnica.com. In this post they look at six of the experimental interfaces.


PS. Within three clicks on the Google I was reading a review/appreciation of The Red Badge of Courage written by Conrad himself. Again, yet another reason to want to be be a high school student today.

Microsoft to Buy Yahoo for $44Billion

The dam has finally busted. Will Microsoft be able to pull off the deal to buy Yahoo and then, more importantly will they be able to make a success of the integration. This could be one of the most exciting news stories of the year. Will this be welcomed by Yahoo? Is this the big deal that Terry Semel was said to be working on only yesterday? Could Yahoo look for some other combination - with Ebay - and act defensively to stop the acquisition? The current offer is very expensive - 60% over the closing share price yesterday.

AP
Timesonline.
NYTimes

Amazon Versus Apple: Is This A Cage Fight?

Amazon is buying Audible.com for $300mm: This changes everything. Audible is already a destination site for Audio books (and content) what more appropriate gateway exists to boost the growing (e-)book content that Amazon is selling via their Kindle? As I speculated a few weeks ago, the Kindle will be a delivery platform for content (not just e-books), and it doesn't take too much imagination to see how Audible's content fits very nicely with the Kindle strategy. Audible has also taught their users about the benefits of subscribing to content and have proven that this model can be successful. So, not only does the Audible acquisition have the potential to bring new customers to the Kindle platform (on the basis of a subscription model for content), Amazon.com will also gain the expertise of staff at Audible who has built up this program. Extending a subscription model to content presages the resurrection of the Book Club model. Didn't we all know it would come back? (Well maybe not, but Bertelsmann were spied coming out of Madame Radzwilli's House of Fortunes just the other day).

Strategically, this acquisition makes fundamental sense at the product level alone. Coupled with an increasing need for Audio versions of text (what with our aging population) with the already loyal Audible customer base there is little to argue about. And I do believe, it will escalate a change in business model for trade (consumer) publishing content.

How publishers react to the news will be interesting to watch. Most will not see the significance and many will be happy at the increased exposure that audio books will get as part of the Amazon.com empire. Where there is concern, it will orient itself around the realization that even greater market power will be exerted (either overtly or not) by Amazon. Given my comments above, this acquisition could represent an end-run of the order of I-Tunes. Look how music publishers are now tied to the $0.99 cents per song model. It just snuck up on them. Will the same happen to book content?

Which brings me to my last comment: It is all out war with Apple. (In fact, I would not be surprised to see a competing offer for Audible. I know Apple are not in the content owning business but they might do it to be mischievous or to protect a budding position in the book market). There has been some speculation about whether Apple would develop an e-reader device as part of the I-Phone. Despite his comments to the contary, I believe Jobs was planning some development here and I speculate that Amazon thought so as well. Amazon will do everything they can to keep Apple out of the content distribution/platform business. Apple for their part don't want Amazon's movie and music distribution (or the Kindle) to challenge iTunes. How this rivalry plays out will be very interesting to watch. They both come at the issue from completely different starting points.

NYTimes

Traditional Marketing is 40% Less Important

The editors at Publishing Trends have annouced the results of their recent online marketing survey which indicates that 40% of book publicists believe traditional marketing makes less of an impact than two years ago. The Publishing Trends survey reveals that nearly all book publicists (70.9%) claim to devote up to half their resources to online marketing, but that the New York Times and Publishers Weekly still make the most impact when it comes to publicizing new titles.

Publishing Trends emailed the survey early in January to publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media, both online and off. Though most publicists polled say they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing, 90% of the publicists working at publishing houses say they should be doing more.

While their publicity counterparts did not reach a consensus, media respondents consider online marketing a “must” for Technology, Travel, Business, Sci-fi, and Health titles. When asked to describe in their own words what the online book marketing world will look like in five years respondents predicted “smarter, more targeted practices,” “all authors MUST blog and have scheduled chats,” and “huge increase in digital content.”

What are the obstacles keeping publicists from doing more online marketing? Not having enough time to explore it (67.1%), cost (52.9%), lack of technology know-how (31.4%), and luddite bosses (5.7%) rank the highest.

For further information or a copy of the article, go to publishingtrends.com.

Amazon.com Reports Full Year Up 39%

Amazon.com announced strong fourth quarter and full year results yesterday. Full year net sales increased 39% to $14.84 billion (35% excluding the $0.40 billion favorable impact from changes in foreign exchange) versus net sales of $10.71 billion in 2006. Full year operating income increased 69% to $655 million (61% excluding the $29 million favorable forex impact) versus operating income of $389 million in 2006. Net income increased 150% to $476 million in 2007, or $1.12 per diluted share, compared with net income of $190 million, or $0.45 per diluted share, in 2006. Press release

Other highlights from the press release included the following:

• The Company introduced Amazon Kindle, a revolutionary wireless portable reader that provides instant wireless downloads of more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display. The Amazon Kindle team is scrambling to increase manufacturing, as demand remains higher than supply. Kindles are being delivered to customers on a first come, first served basis.
• Amazon MP3 added DRM-free music downloads from Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, making it the only retailer to offer DRM-free MP3 music downloads from all four major music labels as well as over 50,000 independent labels. The MP3 store now includes over 3.4 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Pepsi will debut the Pepsi Stuff Amazon MP3 promotion, a massive collect-and-get program, during the upcoming Super Bowl.
• Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter.
• Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com's global websites combined.
• AWS launched a limited beta of its SimpleDB Service, which allows queries to run on structured data in real time. This service works in conjunction with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.
• AWS launched European storage for Amazon S3, allowing software developers and businesses to store their data physically in Europe. Amazon S3 is a storage service in the cloud offering software developers and businesses low-cost access to the same scalable and reliable storage infrastructure Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites.
• North America segment sales, representing the Company's U.S. and Canadian sites, were $3.08 billion, up 40% from fourth quarter 2006.
• International segment sales, representing the Company's U.K., German, Japanese, French and Chinese sites, were $2.59 billion, up 46% from fourth quarter 2006. Excluding the favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, International sales grew 35%.
• Worldwide Media sales grew 33% to $3.33 billion in fourth quarter 2007, compared with $2.50 billion in fourth quarter 2006.
• Worldwide Electronics & Other General Merchandise sales grew 58% to $2.21 billion in fourth quarter 2007, compared with $1.40 billion in fourth quarter 2006, and increased to 39% of worldwide net sales compared with 35%.
• A record number of customers took advantage of Amazon Prime, the Company's unlimited free-shipping program. Amazon Prime is now available in the U.K., Germany, Japan and the U.S.
• Amazon.com shipped over half-a-million units in fourth quarter 2007 on behalf of sellers who utilized the Fulfillment by Amazon service.

Notable comments from the conference call transcript (SeekingAlpha):

On their outlook:

For calendar 2008, we expect net sales of between $18.75 bllion and $19.75 billion, a growth of between 26% and 33%. This guidance anticipates greater than 200 basis points of positive impact from foreign exchange. GAAP operating income to be between $785 million and $985 million, or between 20% growth and 50% growth. This includes approximately $240 million for stock-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets. We anticipate 2008 consolidated segment operating income, which excludes stock-based compensation and other operating expense to be between $1.025 billion and $1.225 billion, or between 21% growth and 44% growth.

Some interesting comments on the Kindle from Bezos:

Well, the Kindle has a few experimental features that are -- some of which are visible on the Kindle. It has something call a Now-Now, where you can type in any question and using the Mechanical Turk in the background, which is one of our web services, that question gets answered and the answer to the question gets displayed on the Kindle. There is an experimental web browser on the Kindle, which is actually, for a mobile device, a pretty good web browser, and of course is has the Whisper Net EVDO connectivity, which gives you broadband wireless access to that web browser.
So there are a number of experimental features and we’ve put those on there and made them accessible to customers so that these early Kindle users can tell us what they think of those features, whether we should continue to invest in them, continue to work on them and make them part of the product.

And answering a question on Kindle demand:

Yeah, Kindle is, in terms of demand, is outpacing our expectations, which is certainly something that we are very grateful for. It’s also on the manufacturing side causing us to scramble. We’re working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week, so that we can get back -- our goal is to get into a situation as quickly as we can where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately. That’s the standard we want to hold ourselves to and we are working very hard to get there. We are super-excited by the very strong demand.

Borders Australia

For those waiting for resolution of the review by the Australian Competition Commission, you will have to wait another week. No explanation given, although from the documentation on their web site it does look like they need more time to review additional material they have requested from A&R/Whitcoulls who are the likely purchasers. Feb 6th is now the expected date.