As a voracious reader I am happy to see the success of the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader. But no matter how many devices Amazon or others sell, the whole eBook reader thing is fundamentally flawed.
Let’s be honest. Electronic reading devices mostly suck. The platforms or ecosystems eBook readers are built on — from content purchase and management to DRM — are awful.
So when I read that Mark Mahaney of CitiGroup says that Amazon is expected to sell about 380,000 Kindlesin 2008, I applaud. I desperately want eBooks and eBook readers to be as successful as the iPod — and that’s millions of units sold, not just a few hundred thousand.
But eBook readers will never be as successful as the iPod. Not the way that the publishing industry works today. Not the way eBooks are designed and manufactured.
Apple’s iTunes remains number one in the U.S. amongst all music retailers according to the latest NPD MusicWatch figures. Based on purchases of CDs and a-la-carte digital music downloads from January through to June of this year, the league table is as follows:
iTunes
Wal-Mart (Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads)
Best Buy (Best Buy, Bestbuy.com, Best Buy Digital Music Store)
Amazon (Amazon.com, AmazonMP3.com)
Target (Target and Target.com)
NPD says the results reflect “the ongoing consumer shift from physical CDs to digital music”, which has helped iTunes to consolidate the lead it established earlier this year.
Most notably, Amazon has moved from fifth place to fourth, which NPD attributes to stronger CD sales online compared to competing brick-and-mortar stores, along with the launch of the company’s own music download store, AmazonMP3, last year. As a result, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon overtake Best Buy in the not too distant future.
With the gradual roll out of Amazon’s new video service, starting today, the company hopes to have fixed everything that was holding back adoption of its original “UnBox” video download store.
Gone are the lengthy downloads or the need to install special software, and instead, “Amazon On Demand” utilizes streaming so that content begins playing almost immediately all within a standard web browser. Additionally, the relaunched service is now Windows and Mac-friendly, and will also be available through Internet-connected televisions, starting with Sony Bravia TVs that are compatible with the company’s rather costly Bravia Internet Video Link device.
“For the first time, this is drop dead simple,” Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media, tells the New York Times. “Our goal is to create an immersive experience where people can’t help but get caught up in how exciting it is to simply watch a movie right from Amazon.com with a click of the button.”
The details, unfortunately, are scant. This is what we know:
Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, will be launching an online streaming video service in the next several weeks, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said a little too matter-of-factly at the D: All Things Digital conference. (Reuters)
One detail: The streaming service will start immediately for viewers, unlike Amazon’s Unbox product, in which users are required wait a period of time as content downloads.
Another semi-detail: The streaming service will operate a-la-carte, but we don’t know what this means exactly. Can viewers stream movies on a pay-per-view basis, presumably at the industry standard $3.99 per rental? Or will this service operate ala Netflix, where people pay a monthly subscription fee (like $15) for a certain number of movies?
We’re sure additional details will be forthcoming in the coming days, or weeks.
April 15th, 2008 | Posted in Audio, Other, Social | Comments Off
It’s hard to fault Peter Gabriel’s logic: We are overwhelmed by the amount of information and choice we have on the Web. But is his solution — a recommendation engine called The Filter — really the answer?
Of course Gabriel, the genius behind the British rock band Genesis and the solo artist who gave us such tunes as “Solsbury Hill,” “Exposure,” and “Games Without Frontiers,” thinks so as he and England’s Eden Ventures have invested $8 million in The Filter. They believe people are overwhelmed by the Web and can’t find good content because it’s buried out of sight.
“When you drown people in an ocean of information, you’ve got to give them navigation tools,” Gabriel told News.com. “I know that there is better stuff out there than what I generally am exposed to . . . So if I have a sort of intelligent ally working with me 24 hours a day, I think I have a much better chance of getting stuff that will entertain, excite, and inspire me.”
The Filter, originally launched as a music recommendation service about a year ago in Europe, re-launched today in private beta as a more complete solution. It will be available to the public sometime in May.
But there’s something about The Filter that bugs me. What separates The Filter from any of the other algorithm-based recommendation engines out there, whether a human is a part of the process or not — Amazon, iTunes, lastFM, Netflix, Imeem, Digg, Pandora, and many more?
As a voracious reader I am happy to see the success of the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader. But no matter how many devices Amazon or others sell, the whole eBook reader thing is fundamentally flawed.
Apple’s iTunes remains number one in the U.S. amongst all music retailers according to the latest NPD MusicWatch figures. Based on purchases of CDs and a-la-carte digital music downloads from January through to June of this year, the league table is as follows:
With the gradual roll out of Amazon’s new video service, starting today, the company hopes to have fixed everything that was holding back adoption of its original “UnBox” video download store.
The details, unfortunately, are scant. This is what we know:
