The publishing industry had the luxury of sitting back and watching everything that happened to the music industry and they learned almost nothing. They had 10 years to watch record stores vanish, the rise and fall of Napster, the felling of empires (hello, Mr. Bronfman!), downloading, the rise of the indie artist, the uptick in touring, everything, all of it happened to a comparable industry a decade earlier and the publishing industry…dithered. They watched what happened to Hollywood and the video industry and they…dithered. A collective Nero playing the violin.

12 February 12 Permalink

infoneer-pulse:

What does your gut tell you about this statement: “Kids in high school read more books for fun than their parents.”

In fact, it’s true. Young adult reading is up 20% since the last time the survey was done by the Feds, and a recent commercial survey finds the same thing.

Of course, these kids aren’t reading the right books, the books we read, the hard books.

» via The Domino Project

This is exactly why the book as physical product of dead tree are being marginalized. No, it is not going to disappear anytime soon. It is just being dwarfed by all other ways of distributing stories and knowledge.

4 January 183 infoneer-pulse Permalink

infoneer-pulse:

A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.

Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Hmm… so the publishers are using the university organization to blackmail students with a 20% decreased price in order to get them used to e-books and at the same time becoming dependent on the publisher as a provider of e-books?

What Indiana U should see here is that they are in the longer run supporting the publisher’s agenda of permanenting themselves in the educational system, a system which have all the possibilities in the world of transforming education away from traditional dependencies which is just draining and slowing down the knowledge spreading and learning process.

26 September 139 infoneer-pulse Permalink

infoneer-pulse:

As reported earlier this year, Amazon and digital content distribution service OverDrive are teaming up to bring Kindle library lending to thousands of public libraries across the U.S. That partnership, rumored to be launching this month, has apparently now gone live in select locations.

According to postings on Amazon’s Kindle Forum, some users are already seeing this option in the Seattle area. A page on Amazon’s website describing the new service has also gone live.

» via TechCrunch

21 September 213 infoneer-pulse Permalink