I was provoked into writing this post today when Horace Dediu tweeted the following chart: The chart is a thing of beauty although we should take it with a grain of salt. It shows how value has been transferred from a set of incumbents to Apple over the last four years. It has some choices …
JK Rowling blows up the eBookstore business
Well, at least for her. Today, JK Rowling finally joined the eBook party on her own Pottermore website. As I write about at the Parentonomics blog at Forbes.com today, the pricing and versioning issues are kind of mysterious. But here I want to concentrate on what all this means for eBook publishing. First, some facts. …
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Encyclopedia Britannica folds its hand with class
Encyclopedia Britannica recently announced that it will cease publication of its books. This kicked up a range of sentimental reactions from those who grew up with the books. I would prefer to accentuate the positive: we are watching the end of a rather civilized economic transformation. This transformation is notable for the degree of civility …
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Cloud computing and the "me versus you" problem
This week I was invited to speak at a “guru forum” of managers and academics who work in information technology. Among the many issues that were discussed, two conflicting trends were identified. On the one hand many corporate organizations are moving towards cloud services and all-in-one outsourced solutions (Oracle, SAP, IBM, …). On the other …
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Does it Matter?
There has been much discussion over the last couple of days regarding Matter; the new long-form journalism experiment by Jim Giles and Bobby Johnson. The main news is that they made, virtually instantly, their $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter and are still going. That tells us that there are 787 people out there who would …
Reach vs readership: It's the advertising, stupid!
Felix Salmon has been getting lots of attention this week for his posts on 'quantity versus quality' in online news. It started with this post about the New York Observer [should it get italics if its mostly a website?] who Salmon argued has gone all in on a quantity strategy. Basically to publish more and not …
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How many customers does Facebook have?
That appears to be the question taxing analysts at the moment. The reason is that they want to work out if Facebook is worth $100 billion or not. For this, they guess that Facebook needs to make $5 billion a year in profit. Why? Well, if we go to its nearest neighbour, Google, it is …
Amazon and independent booksellers
There is all manner of concern about Amazon's relationship with independent booksellers. Basically, Amazon really annoyed them by providing price inducements for people to use Amazon's price check app inside their stores and bypass them for better deals. Of course, this is just strong price competition and could be matched by the stores but a …
The Wi-Fi Journey
Behind every successful technology lie many quirky stories showing how it grew like a teenager or barely averted disaster. With the passage of time, most of those stories fade into obscurity or, at best, become parts of verbal explanations accompanying countless resumes. The few events that find their way into public discourse, if any do …
Postal Mail in the Shadow of Email
Postal mail and electronic mail have coexisted for years, sitting next to one another in an uneasy tension. That was so thirty years ago, as it is this year. Two recent posts -- one from Robert Cannon, and one from Randall Stross -- offered a quick reminder about how that tension has evolved. Robert Cannon …
Digitopoly 