The latest Amazon Kindle deletion hoo-ha involves erotic incest fiction removed from users’ devices. This, apparently, is the kind of knowledge I process in my dreams, because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking – Here we are in the future, when ereading is the norm. But our behemoth ebooksellers, skittish or [...]
Entries Tagged as 'ebooks'
ebooks, Plato, and the unchanging agony of change
July 6th, 2010 · 17 Comments · Uncategorized
In a belated, post-Battledecks orgy of reading the judges’ blogs, I came across the strange librarian’s post on ebooks vs “real” books. She’s very much on the it’s-the-content-not-the-format side of things: “Tree*” books, “real” books or just plain “books” as they’re often called have been around for 5,000 +/- years and now i swear there [...]
Tags:change·ebooks·literacy·orality·phaedrus·plato·strange librarian
rent v. own: cultural paradigm
February 2nd, 2010 · 11 Comments · Uncategorized
One of the things that I’ve been wondering (e.g. in re my last post on serials subscription economics) is how this rent v. own dichotomy for books is going to play out. Because the fact that e-resources subscriptions are like renting, not like owning, is very salient to librarians, and was not obvious to some [...]
Tags:ebooks·economics·john murphy·john scalzi·paradigms·serials
ebook strategy
January 23rd, 2010 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
Helpful thinking on ebook purchase strategy, from the Letters page of The Economist: SIR — One of your readers urged us to “remember the lesson of Betamax video” when considering which e-book reader to buy. One of the factors in the demise of Betamax was the availability of pornographic movies on VHS. I bought a [...]
Tags:ebooks·The Economist
your economic model, dear sirs, makes no sense
December 8th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
Amazon loses $2 on every ebook sold?!? This makes exactly as little sense as you’d think. (h/t Jim Henley, via Google Reader.)
Thing-ology on the library ebook market
October 8th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized
Thing-ology has an interesting post on the economics of ebooks in libraries. They argue, essentially, that libraries need site-licensed copies of ebooks rather than ones tied to specific physical devices; this will split the library and direct-to-consumer ebook markets and allow for runaway rental/licensing costs for library ebooks. There’s an apt comparison to runaway journal [...]
Tags:budgets·copyright·digitization·ebooks·economics·serials
