121–130 of 176 posts
[OT] I've been reading quite a few posts from qz.com and medium.com these days - what is going on?
They write content that people (yourself included, apparently) find interesting.
My two big takeaways from this are: 1. Amazon sells every Kindle ebook at a loss of $3 -- they pay $13 wholesale and sell it for $9.99. I thought this was a typo, but then Jobs repeated the figure (though he said $12.50). It was my impression that Amazon also sells the Kindle itself at near-cost, so does that mean that Amazon's entire ebook business has been running at a loss the whole time? 2. Jobs certainly did win…
I personally still prefer the PDF for e-books, as it maintains original design, layout, and typography, as well as page numbers. I'd like to see Apple and Amazon both start selling these formats DRM free, with watermarking.
Amazon's Kindle has e-ink, and a great selection for fiction, but not too many text books. And honestly I would not want to read a programming book, or other text book, on the kindle for the reasons stated above.
Being able to say "We already sold 4 of your competitors" and "we have 120M users that have paid for 2B products" is something any asshole worth their salt would use as leverage this way.
I'd love to see his negotiations in a more precarious position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So was Steve just making shit up? i.e., he won the negotiation because he was so full of shit that they didn't see any way to talk sense into him?
I guess you're right if by "winning" you mean signing a deal and then having a criminal investigation into his behavior. I'd wager that no one won (customers lost, the publishers didn't make any more money and now Apple is stuck in a legal battle that all the counter parties have paid their way out of).
The Feds are unlikely, IMHO, to win the case. Here's something that Greg Sandoval and I wrote at the time the lawsuit was announced, and I think it holds up well today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57412861-38/
Honestly - this doesn't show much of Job's negotiating (which I'm sure he was great at) because he was in such a position of power. Being able to say "We already sold 4 of your competitors" and "we have 120M users that have paid for 2B products" is something any asshole worth their salt would use as leverage this way. I'd love to see his negotiations in a more precarious position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has always made 30%. They were the ones to start that model. Publishers are actually about relationships, not dead trees. They can get your book to the customer, which is where the value is. From the consumer point, you only care about the producer, but the producer cares about the publisher a lot more than the customer.
Yeah, but again, that's back when you'd be talking with all these different retail stores to get your book to the customer. Plus printing, shipping, all that. How about 1) Write book. 2) Spend a day or two getting it on Amazon, Apple, B&N online. 3) Keep 100%. Might be harder for authors who need marketing but I have no idea why established authors aren't self-publishing en masse.
The issue there is that if no one knows about you or your book, 100% of nothing is still nothing. Publishers also often provide advances, which can be make a big difference.
Note that I am not defending some of their questionable business practices, but to pretend they provide zero value is silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AAPL makes $3~4. Publishers are who "make" the writers in the first place (unfortunately) by shouldering the distribution, marketing, etc. Without them (or without the author being e-famous(tm) already), an author can't hope to sustain himself through writing. Maybe things would change if we were more willing to "pay" for discovering content creators through our own time investment, but this is doubtful.
eBook distribution is now handled by Amazon, BN and Apple. No reason to pay the old publishers for that.
I understand that I can't force the companies who produce a book, movie, or album to make it legally playable on my TV, computer, tablet, or streaming service of choice. No store has all the content, and in some cases DRM schemes make the content unplayable. There's no guarantee that I can read a particular book on my iPad legally, or put a Britney Spears song on the device in my pocket, or play my movies off a network share on my LG TV. Too bad; the company that paid for the content owns it. However, extortive contracts from the delivery companies add a deleterious force on top of that, like when Netflix or Hulu get exclusive streaming rights to a show and shut the other out.
At some deep level, the players in the content game are fighting instead of cooperating. In the future, I hope content producers learn to exploit monetization models where they don't have to be so overbearing about exactly how content is delivered, and in general they promote rather than inhibit distribution of their content. The Internet provides unlimited ways to discover, consume, and purchase content, so rather than a vision of the future, I expect "digital storefronts" like we have now to look archaic.
That is, if the customers really do have the power to "demand" a good experience, as Jobs puts it. Otherwise, we're just along for the ride, occasionally pelted by shrapnel from wars between giant corporations.
It's impressive how dramatically wrong Steve Jobs was about the iPad when it came to the ebooks market. He missed by a mile in understanding exactly how customers wanted to consume ebooks. So here we are, Apple has sold a bazillion iPads, and yet Amazon dominates ebooks. And there's absolutely no threat on the horizon coming from Apple in the ebooks market.
> So here we are, Apple has sold a bazillion iPads, and yet Amazon dominates ebooks. There is a kindle app for the ipad. Even while the kindle experience on the ipad is sub par[1], I think the difference in price (cheaper), features (whispersync, email to kindle), and existing library keep people in the amazon ecosystem (via kindle app). [1]: you can't purchase books from inside the app because amazon doesn't want to…