Black Plastic Glasses » Music Industry

Quo Vadis, Amazon?

Evan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:20:51 +0000

Reading Nicholson Baker's long piece in the August 3^rd New Yorker while on the beach last week, got me thinking about the role of Amazon in the future of print book publishing. Mr. Baker, a novelist, is coming to terms with his new Kindle - its benefits and as well as its drawbacks. While I don't get a few of his observations (especially his preference to read on the much smaller and much harder-on-the-eyes LCD screen of the iPhone), one comment made about the Kindle struck me as particularly eye opening.

“If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top...

Demand Pricing for Ebooks

Evan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:18:25 +0000

A stir was created recently when Sourcebooks announced the delay of the ebook version of a brand new title for fear of cannibalizing print sales. CEO Dominique Raccah said, "Hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it," adding, "It doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99." Is Dominique Raccah making a smart decision? There are a lot of factors to consider. Amazon has claims that sales of ebooks are 35% of the same print titles on Amazon.com. If the hardcover is priced at $25 and the ebook $10, then one can see Dominique’s point quite clearly – delaying the ebook version could mean that demand for 35% of the...

Generation On-Demand

Evan — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:52:20 +0000

Generation On-Demand is the second of a 3-part series. The first installment, Disruption, explored my personal content consumption over the years and ended with the observation that everything that I used to enjoy had now seen a dramatic reduction in consumption. I ended the piece with the question “So if I am not purchasing as many new books and I don’t buy as much new music and I don’t really watch TV and I only watch movies when I want to in my own home, what the hell am I doing with all the time I must have on my hands?" I will now try to answer that question. I was interviewed the other day Adam Penenberg,...

Bang the DRM Slowly…

Evan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:47:58 +0000

Two weeks ago on NPR’s All Things Considered I had a brief sound bite about DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the music industry. What you didn’t get to hear was the larger point I was trying to pull together – which is that DRM is not bad, nor is it good. It is like any tool, only as good (or bad) as it is implemented. DRM has gotten a lot of press over the years as there is a quite vocal group who are politically/philosophically, perhaps even morally opposed to any restrictions on the use of content once disseminated. I call them the “Anti-DRMers.” They come in many forms – from scholarly archivists to Swedish anarchists.