May You Live in Interesting Times
It's been quite a week in ebook news, especially for Kindle owners.
DOJ Sues Apple and five major publishers over price fixing. Three of the publishers have settled:
CNN
ZDNet
Wall St. Journal
& many more
In other news, the big publishers are balking at renewing their contracts with Amazon.
So depending on your best guess, you might either want to hold off on buying any books from at least some of the big publishers from Amazon, because prices will probably drop soon, or you should hurry and buy them now before they disappear altogether.
My take? It's too early to say how any of this is going to shake out. I don't see books from major publishers being kept off of Amazon for any sustained period of time, because neither party can afford it. That is, unless, the big publishers are willing to do something truly daring, like abandon DRM and sell titles in all formats from their own web sites. But absolutely nothing I've seen about the big publishers indicates to me that they have a daring bone in their collective corporate patooties.
So anyway. If there's any doubt left that ebooks are one of the most disruptive technologies to come along in a long, long time... this week should lay those doubts to rest.
DOJ Sues Apple and five major publishers over price fixing. Three of the publishers have settled:
CNN
ZDNet
Wall St. Journal
& many more
In other news, the big publishers are balking at renewing their contracts with Amazon.
So depending on your best guess, you might either want to hold off on buying any books from at least some of the big publishers from Amazon, because prices will probably drop soon, or you should hurry and buy them now before they disappear altogether.
My take? It's too early to say how any of this is going to shake out. I don't see books from major publishers being kept off of Amazon for any sustained period of time, because neither party can afford it. That is, unless, the big publishers are willing to do something truly daring, like abandon DRM and sell titles in all formats from their own web sites. But absolutely nothing I've seen about the big publishers indicates to me that they have a daring bone in their collective corporate patooties.
So anyway. If there's any doubt left that ebooks are one of the most disruptive technologies to come along in a long, long time... this week should lay those doubts to rest.