Peter Bennett
Peter Bennett develops iPhone apps and advises companies on mobile strategy through his company Hablantia.com. He was a founder of a publishing business that grew rapidly and profitably, but didn't quite live to see its 10th birthday. In previous incarnations he has worked for the BBC in corporate strategy, and has written management reports on technology issues for the FT.
iPhone Not Hot in Japan
The Wall Street Journal says iPhone sales are stagnating in Japan: According to market-research firm MM Research Institute, Apple sold about 200,000 phones in Japan in the first two months [July and August]. Since then, however, demand has been falling steadily, and analysts now widely believe sales are unlikely to reach a total of 500,000 units. That is half the…
UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release
Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom: Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September. As I'm sure all of those working in…
Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions: But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says,…
Moving Ebooks into Mobility Culture
Sherman Young writes about how ebooks should be seen in the context of mobile platforms and as part of mobility culture. From M/C Journal: Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a…
Writing Novels with Twitter
ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.: In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so…
Shopping Electronic Publishing Rights
Kassia Krozser discusses why and how authors are getting savvy to retaining electronic publishing rights. From Booksquare: As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as "out-of-print", savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I'm a bit surprised this isn't happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to…
BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
BookTour, which provides author-generated pages and a listing of author tour events, has integrated their database with IndieBound. This is an interesting model, which obviously could expand in its breadth. From the BookTour blog: … the trouble is neighborhood bookstores are all different (that's what makes them great). That made it hard to dump all their data into our…
Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance: Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing…
Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
A fairly significant ruling came down Wednesday in Lenz v. Universal, a rather infamous case where Universal Music Publishing Group issued a takedown against a YouTube video of a young child dancing to a song in the background — a song in which Universal maintained some rights. Universal later acknowledged that this was a fair use of the music,…
Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital
Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist: There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading…