

Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? - jakarta
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all

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jakarta
I thought this was a great bit on how backwards the publishing industry still
is:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about
two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is
fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says.
“Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without
bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books
directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their
customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible
exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no
particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the
brand name. To attract consumers, publishers would have to build a single,
collaborative Web site to sell e-books, an idea that Jason Epstein, the former
editorial director of Random House, pushed for years without success. But,
even setting aside the difficulties of learning how to run a retail business,
such a site would face problems of protocol worthy of the U.N. Security
Council—if Amazon didn’t accuse publishers of price-fixing first.

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FluidDjango
I don't understand where Ken Auletta gets his figure of Amazon charging $9.99
for all Kindle editions. --or was that only until they caved to Macmillan?

Maybe he took the example of Mossberg challenging Jobs in January on Apple's
$14.99 for "True Compass" when Amazon sold it for $9.99, but at the moment
Amazon's Kindle price for it is $16.99

But in my memory it's always seemed that Kindle editions (and I'm at
Amazon.com daily) were priced a dollar or two less than the Amazon price for a
paperback edition -whatever that might amount to [allow for my short memory].

