Ars Technica tries a new way to monetize a much-anticipated article with a Kindle ebook for Mac fans
“It’s the same review that you get for free on Ars. You don’t have to pay for it,” Fisher said. But people have: The ebook sold 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours, Fisher said.
Full Story: Nieman
Reblogged from futuramb|34 notes |# Comments
Open access services are thriving, however; they just aren’t thriving in libraries. BioMed Central, a commercial venture, created an author-pays model for open access that has now been widely imitated. BMC, of course, was subsequently acquired by Springer, among the largest publishers of scientific research. The Public Library of Science has established a highly regarded open access service, and they have done it entirely outside of libraries. Now PLoS has attracted many imitators: Wiley Blackwell, BMJ, and, in the social sciences, SAGE. Most intriguing is an open access service from AIP, which seems likely to create competition for the library-sponsored physics arXiv at Cornell. What we have seen with open access publishing is that publishers, rather than being disintermediated, are learning how to coopt it. With open access publishing, libraries have succeeded in disintermediating themselves.
In the book world, there are signs that publishers are indeed being disintermediated; the question is how exceptional are these instances of disintermediation. An established mystery writer named Joe Konrath decided to move his books over to Amazon’s self-publishing service because of the promise of earning higher royalties. I doubt that there is a trade publisher in the world who has not been following Konrath’s career closely, praying that he will fail. Even more fascinating is the case of a young woman named Amanda Hocking, who came to self-publishing with no prior publishing experience. Her young adult novels earned her a small fortune, attracting the interest of major commercial publishers, one of which has now signed up Hocking to a million-dollar contract. One emerging pattern seems to be that publishers are initially threatened with disintermediation, whether through open access or self-publishing services, and then find a way to reinsert themselves into the value chain. Having a big checkbook helps.
Interesting and pretty nuanced article about what is happening in the book value chain. Well worth reading!
(I have a million comments about this but this is just Tumblr… right?)
Apple’s primary business is selling computing devices and related hardware, with healthy margins and tightly integrated experiences, to customers who generally replace them with the newest models every 1-3 years.
Marco believes that Apple is going to stay out of the tv business.
I have no idea if Apple will ship a hdtv.
But i do feel like the status quo needs disruption given all the ads we don’t watch, poor UI’s on set tops, forced bundling of content, dated content windows models, displays that are uninspired, tv that doesnt’ take advantage of the web or social data or experiences, nasty remote controls, confusing wiring and set up….the list goes on.
Someone needs to step up and make a change.
“Our business model is built on all kinds of assumptions that don’t hold anymore,” said Richard Holmgren, associate dean and CIO at Allegheny College. “Over the last 40 years of the last century, we built a model based on the assumption that net revenues per student would go up every year.…We have a culture built on that assumption,” Holmgren said. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve been struggling because net revenues have been flat.”
None of the participants in the daylong business-model workshop that followed seemed to dispute the basic premise that liberal arts programs are plagued by twin threats of inertia and economic unsustainability. To make matters even more grim, one self-described envoy of “the corporate world” — Kit Stinson, a vice president at the telecommunication giant Avaya — spoke up early on in the conference to testify against the truism that liberal arts graduates make for more creative and critical-thinking workers, setting off a parallel discussion about whether today’s incarnation of liberal education, sacrosanct to many, actually increases students’ employability outside academe.
» via Inside Higher Ed
In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011.
Full Story: Kevin Kelly
Gym-Pact offers what Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Mark Zuckerberg is Time’s Man of the Year, the movie about him seems likely to be an Oscar winner, and now Goldman Sachs is raising $1.5 billion from its favorite investors on behalf of the social networking company……. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.
via @futuramb
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