The publishing industry has a problem. The old guard haven't innovated. And neither their business models nor their products embrace the digital books revolution. Take the ongoing and complicated spat between Apple and the Justice Department over the agency pricing model and alleged collusion which ended up with consumers being forced to spend more than they needed to. The battle may expand internationally, in fact. Apple tried to expand its 30% revenue share model, which has done very well in the billion-dollar app economy, into books. It also pushed publishers to agree to a very different way of selling their products: Instead of buying books traditionally, at a pre-agreed wholesale price and then pricing them as Apple saw fit in the iBookstore, it would let the publishers set their own price and extract its usual fixed share of the income ... as long as the publishers wouldn't sell ebooks elsewhere.It was a bold move, and one that could and did shake up the industry a bit. Amazon, the publishers contend, had established a monopoly on ebooks, and was selling their wares at overly discounted prices. With Apple's model they could choose to price ebooks lower than physical books cost (appeasing consumers who expect to pay less for a non-physical product), and yet extract more money due to the cost-savings of e-publishing.The DOJ disagreed, and says Apple's deal meant consumers ended up spending much more than they needed to, hence its action against Apple and a laundry... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2012-04-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
Although big media brands like The New York Times and The Economist aren't going away anytime soon, the online publishing industry increasingly includes brands, marketers, and independent journalists. With the launch of a new content network, the tech startup NewsCred wants to be the liaison... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-10-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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@Horse_ebooks is the Twitter account that, until today, spewed frequent bouts of eerily poetic nonsense to more than 213,000 followers: @Horse_ebooks was widely believed to be a Twitter bot whose tweets were sent out by a robot that scraped text from obscure parts of the Internet. That is, until... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-09-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Mark Johnson is possibly the only person in the world who has gone through two pairs of Google Glass in five weeks. (He chalks up the loss of his first pair to an unfortunate brunch incident.) During a recent interview with Fast Company, the CEO of personalized news app Zite was staring into the... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-08-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Get it now as an ebook, or from our iPad app. Hacking Hollywood: The Creative Geniuses Behind Homeland, Girls, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Lost, and More is a special edition of Fast Company that is available starting this month. Besides chronicling the tales of disruptive entertainment startups,... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-08-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The three best things Fast Company's assistant editor found on the Internet this week. Name: J.J. McCorveyRole at Fast Company: Assistant Editor, printTwitter: @jmccorveyTitillating fact: J.J. has a massive comic book collection–-thousands--of mostly Marvel Comics. “Pshh, plenty of folks love... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-07-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Flipboard latest update democratizes content curation on the service, introduces search, and provides integration with Etsy. With 50 million users, Flipboard, the social news magazine available on the iPhone and iPad, has become a dominant player in content curation. Now, with competition in... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-03-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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News updates all day from Fast Company.One of the advantages that Google's Nexus 7 tablet may have over its Amazon rival the Kindle Fire is that Google wants to push it out internationally sooner, whereas Amazon is overly US-centric now. But it's emerged that when the Nexus hits British shores,... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2012-07-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Today Amazon announced that it's improving the code behind its Kindle app for iOS and Android to allow support for graphic novels and children's illustrated comics. The iOS app is also being polished to alow better searches of your library of downloaded titles and to better fit the iPad's... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2012-06-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The publishing industry has a problem. The old guard haven't innovated. And neither their business models nor their products embrace the digital books revolution. Take the ongoing and complicated spat between Apple and the Justice Department over the agency pricing model and alleged collusion... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2012-04-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Getty Images is getting with the 21st century today.With its new Connect system, Getty is making it easier for web publishers and certain platforms like blogging tools to embed Getty's image products in their online publications than it may have been before. This is clever, definitely designed... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2012-02-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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