Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon
On the Slate site, media gadfly Jack Shafer questions the seeming reluctance of the book industry to go along with Amazon’s $9.99 price point for books sold on its Kindle e-book platform. The argument resembles nothing so much as the music industry’s fight against electronic distribution of music tracks--a struggle that started in 1999, when Napster launched, and effectively ended in 2003, when Apple’s iTunes introduced a commercially viable platform for selling individual music tracks at $0.99 apiece. In the four years between those two events, a robust, underground, pirate music distribution system developed that has made across-the-board monetization of music content all but impossible. Will book publishers learn from the missteps of the music industry--or will they just repeat them?
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.
more media file links for July 21, 2009:
Publishers fret over e-book strategy
The New York Times reports on the collective hand-wringing in book publishing circles over whether and when to release their blockbuster titles in e-book form. Driving this question: Amazon.com has effectively set the e-book price ceiling at $9.99, versus $25 to $35 for a hardcover title. In reality, even at $9.99 e-books perform better financially for publishers than a hardcover book sold through a retail outlet, where publishers can expect to earn less than $1 on a book after point-of-sale discounts and manufacturing, distribution, and royalty costs. Nevertheless, publishers worry that the Internet will exert downward price pressure that will turn the whole enterprise into a painful route--particularly if Amazon succeeds in dominating distribution and thus gets to call the shots on pricing and margins.
“Chaos Scenario” in full swing
Almost five years ago, in early 2005, advertising guru Bob Garfield predicted the “Chaos Scenario”: a future in which brand advertising as we’ve traditionally known it is displaced by new, digital forms of customer engagement. Now, according to a Forrester report described on Internetnews.com, the Chaos Scenario has landed. According to the report, in the next five years, digitally based customer engagement spending will grow to over 20 percent of overall marketing expenditures--with almost all of that growth coming out of the hide of traditional brand advertising. Gone are the days when interactive marketing represents the experimental portion of the marketing budget, the report says. While brand advertising tanks, marketing budgets will shift toward IT infrastructure, customer service, and other forms of direct customer engagement.
Garfield’s”’Chaos Scenario” is now a book. Is that a good thing?
Advertising Age reviews media luminary Bob Garfield’s latest attack on the hand that feeds him: advertising. Garfield has published a new book, entitled “Chaos Scenario,” that forecasts the demise of the ancient art of persuasion, meanwhile using every lever that the new media affords to escape this fate for his new creation. For this, his third book, Garfield is skipping traditional book promotion channels in order to partner with an impressive network of next-generation social media marketing and distribution firms.
Google Wave is the new news
On the BuzzMachine blog, media pundit Jeff Jarvis argues that Google Wave represents more than just the next generation of email communications. It is nothing less than the future of news. Merging collaborative, live reporting and discussions with wikis and other kinds of content repositories, “waves” (versus “articles”) will epitomize the notion of information as process, not product.
Will Google Wave revitalize PR?
On Social Media Today, public relations specialist Valerie Maltoni explores the likely impact of Google Wave on the discipline of public relations. Wave is a sharp reminder that public relations is about “the public”--not “the media,” as much of contemporary PR practice has assumed. A wave will merge content, discussion, and live, real-time, shared judgment... reflecting the basic insight that “the truth” is not a fixed thing, but is instead an emergent reality that the public co-creates.
