One of the big issues looming on the digital horizon is the role libraries will play with ebooks. A pre-emptive move earlier this year by the UK government has upset booksellers and shows that the industry here, too, needs to get involved in this debate.

So far, libraries’ digital activity has mostly been confined to research uses. The prevalence of the cumbersome PC as the main reading platform means the bread and butter of the book trade, fiction and general non-fiction, has barely been touched. But mobile reading devices and a surge in availability of popular ebooks are pushing libraries into the digital mainstream.

The few libraries experimenting today with ebook downloads typically have very thin collections. This is partly due to tight budgets but also stems from concerns by publishers and authors about how—indeed whether—libraries should lend digital editions of their books.

It’s the latter that has prompted the UK government to legislate so that patrons in libraries can download digital editions to their ebook readers without libraries infringing copyright. At the same time, it will issue an order under legislation “preventing libraries from charging for ebooks lending of any sort, including remotely.”

On the face of it, this looks like a big win for the reading public. Most people I speak to about ebooks get excited by the idea that they’ll be able to borrow them free from their libraries. And most people have a visceral sense that borrowing from a public library should be free to all. But this excitement is not shared as acutely by publishers, authors and booksellers.

Macmillan US CEO John Sargent put the industry problem succinctly when he said recently, “In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time … With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it … You get the book, read it, return it and get another, all without paying a thing … How is that a good model for us?”

For much of the public, politicians, and librarians, this seems like a perfectly good model which accords with the common view that the digital world should operate the same way as print. But it is likely to be bad news for publishers, authors and booksellers. The former might lose sales because libraries can lend ebooks more efficiently (they need fewer websites than physical libraries) and they don’t wear out or get lost. And publishers, authors and booksellers all potentially suffer if the free option is as “frictionless” to get as their more expensive paid editions. And there might be less desire to “own” an electronic file than a real book.

Perversely, libraries are likely to suffer too from the UK government mandate to lend all ebooks free of charge. Most will not be able to afford a serious ebook lending programme without painful cuts to other services. If no other measures are taken, the result will be a crippled ebook service with a very limited selection. Ironically, booksellers concerned about competing with free loans should probably cheer the unintended consequence of this heavy-handed move.

But let’s not cheer too soon. Faced with this outcome, the government might tip the balance in libraries’ favour by forcing rightsholders to make big concessions, effectively subsidising libraries and setting up an even stronger competitor for booksellers. Its planned copyright changes to let libraries lend ebooks with or without publisher permission shows it’s not averse to forcing rightsholders’ hands.

So what is a reasonable role for libraries and how do we achieve this balance of interests? To avoid the heavy-handed legislative approach we’re seeing unfold in the UK, we need to talk directly to the library sector and other stakeholders in our own part of the world.

And we need to consider how the ebooks ecosystem will evolve.

If we look at the film industry as a comparison, there’s an initial cinematic release followed by release to rental and sell-through channels, then pay TV, then free-to-air TV. Through this measured roll-out, the industry manages to extract value at every price point, including free, and sells through many channels to reach as much of the market as possible. About 80% of the film industry’s income is earned after cinematic release.

Ebooks need a range of channels and price points too, to properly service the market and maximise the value of our creative assets. And with books it’s not just an economic equation: we have to consider social impacts.

So which channels will open up for ebooks? We’re in the early stages of developing a “full price” channel and still have a lot of work to do selling the value of digital books to consumers. And we can expect that libraries will offer some sort of free channel, whether selectively or open to all. Other (legal) free-to-consumer channels might emerge, perhaps through ISPs—and might have to develop to stem piracy.

I personally would like to see a vibrant rental channel for ebooks. And I’d like to see both libraries and booksellers participating, perhaps with release dates delayed just as DVDs today follow cinematic release. This would be an interesting “back to the future” scenario for booksellers. Before the public library movement, they had a thriving book rental market and in their heyday, there were more than 1000 “circulating libraries” in mid-nineteenth century Britain.

A paid rental option could bring much-needed money into libraries’ strained coffers, resulting in a better service to patrons who can pay and, with this improved funding, a better free service for those who can’t. For publishers and authors, it offers the prospect of fair compensation for readership through libraries.

While booksellers might be concerned that libraries are straying into commercial territory, it will be worse all around if they are backed into a corner by politicians and a public with high expectations, while not given the resources to deliver on these aspirations.

We’d then confront two equally grim scenarios: a high quality free service competing aggressively with booksellers and largely paid for by onerous terms thrust on publishers and authors by legislation. Or a crippled public library service struggling with dwindling patronage and increasing irrelevance.

These are tough issues with far-reaching impacts. Time to start talking and find a way through this.

While these numbers are still small by US standards, what’s especially interesting is that digital now represents 7.9% of S&S revenue. With growth rates like this, even off a small base, it’s easy to see how digital will rapidly become a significant revenue stream.

The S&S results are consistent with a recent prediction by Penguin Group CEO John Makinson who  said he expected Penguin’s digital revenues to hit 10% of sales next year, up from 4% this year.

But, notes this report from Paid Content, “The increasing opportunities in the digital marketplace should push the revenues and the percentage up in coming quarters but will it be replacement or additive? This time the higher contribution from digital helped offset a 6 percent revenue drop to $151.7 million from $161.7 million.”

There are hooks. The old 30% royalty still applies if your book doesn’t meet the terms Amazon specifies and you’ll also need to pay a download fee which varies by the size of your ebook file. According to the company’s announcement, to get the new 70% rate:

• Your book’s list price must be between US$2.99 and $9.99
• It must be at least 20% under the lowest print edition’s price
• It must be offered in all geographies for which you have rights

So to some extent, Amazon is paying for the higher royalty by saving itself from taking heavy discounts from its own margins. Still, for self-publishers and small publishers, it’s a useful improvement.

It looks like Amazon is trying to position itself better in anticipation of better deals from Apple’s forthcoming iSlate / iTablet and Google’s forthcoming Google Editions, both of which appear offer deals more in line with Amazon’s new option.

And in a further move to head off Apple, this New York Times story reports:

In its announcement Thursday, Amazon will say that it is letting programmers create what it calls active content — similar to applications — for the Kindle and keep 70 percent of the revenue from each sale after paying for wireless delivery costs.

Amazon will release a set of programming guidelines that other companies — including publishers of books and periodicals — can use to create and sell applications for the Kindle.

Until Amazon introduces more advanced models of the Kindle, developers will be limited by its slow-to-refresh black-and-white screen.

In the same story, the New York Times reports:

The move may also represent a shift in Amazon’s relationship with newspapers and magazines that make digital editions for the Kindle. Many executives at those organizations have expressed dissatisfaction with their 30 percent cut of subscription fees on the Kindle and lack of a direct relationship with those subscribers.

With a Kindle app store, those media companies will be able to sell more profitable Kindle applications, and present news that is updated throughout the day.

So it was good to hear this piece of news from Smashwords founder Mark Coker. US bookselling giant Barnes and Noble will be distributing Smashwords ebooks through its network (Barnesandnoble.com, Fictionwise, Ereader app, others).

This is especially impressive when you consider that most of Smashwords’ ebooks to date have been from self-published authors and small indie publishers who would usually have a tough time getting into these channels. Even in the online world, there are barriers to getting into retailers’ ebook stores if you’re small or new.

The Smashwords system is very easy to use and, since July, has been expanded to include a publisher section that allows publishers to manage multiple authors and titles rather than just one-offs.

To get the best results, you’ll need to do a bit of work tidying up the source document. Because it uses an automated process, it’s especially important to use a consistent style. From here, Smashwords will generate your ebook in all of the key ebook formats such as ePub, PDF or the Kindle’s .mobi format.

“Unless New Zealand authors or publishers formally opt out of the settlement, or formally opt in but request Google not to digitize and/or display their books, Google will have the non-exclusive right to digitize any of their books that were published anywhere before 5 January 2009, whether it has digitized them already or not,” claims a statement from the Society’s legal advisor Rick Shera of Lowndes Jordan.

The NZSA is also calling on the New Zealand government to conduct an enquiry into the Settlement to ensure that New Zealand authors and its literature are protected.

Ironically, it seems that non-US publishers and authors might be dragged into this US settlement through their countries’ being signatories of the Berne Convention. The Berne Convention is an international copyright treaty. One of its requirements is that signatory countries extend the same rights to other  signatories as they extend to their own rightsholders. Since the US is a signatory (as is New Zealand and most countries), the terms of the Google Books Settlement will be extended to other Berne Convention signatories.

According to the NZSA’s advice, the rightsholder has four options:

1. Negotiate a separate deal with Google under its partner program. For those that already have, the Partner Program agreement will take precedence although it may or may not cover all the rights that Google gets under the settlement agreement.
2. Opt out by formally notifying Google. The deadline for opting out has been extended to 4 September 2009.
3. Opt in. If you opt in and lodge a claim in respect of a book prior to 5 January 2010,you will receive a share of the $45 million that Google has put aside to pay rightsholders (the exact amount will depend on how many people claim but will be between US$60 and US$300). You will also receive 63% of any revenue received by Google (e.g. from advertising around your book search result or if it is made available on subscription to a library or other institution).
4. Do nothing – in which case you will lose the right to sue Google in the US even if Google does digitize your book and publish excerpts and you will not receive any revenue for that use.

The last option — do nothing — is the worst, says the NZSA. “[U]nless you formally opt out of the settlement, or you formally opt in but request Google not to digitize and/or display your books, Google will have the non-exclusive right to digitize any of your books that were published anywhere before 5 January 2009, whether it has digitized them already or not,” the NZSA says.

[I]f your book is not generally available for sale in the US, then it is considered out of print and Google can display excerpts without needing any consent. Google is also granted other rights such as the right to sell advertising alongside search results, to sell subscriptions to entire books to partner institutions (libraries etc) and to publish bibliographical material.

So it seems that, even outside the US, unless you want to be part of Google’s books programme, you should explicitly opt out.

The trouble started when Amazon withdrew an ebook version of Orwell’s novel after it found the edition infringed copyright. But its hamfisted method of doing this — dipping into its customers’ Kindles without them knowing and removing the offending work — has unnerved a lot of people. It also prompted an embarrassed, almost grovelling, apology from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

But as this New York Times story shows, critics are quick to use the issue as an attack on Digital Rights Management (DRM) as well as civil liberties.

The civil liberties issue is clear enough: If Amazon can withdraw a purchased ebook without consent from its owners’ Kindles, what could a ruthless government or censor do to remove material causing offence for other reasons? In this respect, it’s hard to miss the irony that it was an edition of Orwell’s 1984 that has prompted this fear.

The connection to DRM, widely hated and seen many many as infringing consumer rights, is an interesting turn in this argument. It looks like it was Amazon’s DRM system that was used to remove access to the offending file. Campaigners are now using this incident to attack Amazon’s overall use of DRM.

The legal problem comes from a related issue. An awkward aspect of US copyright law called the First Sale Doctrine could well create problems for Amazon and its publishers. The First Sale Doctrine is a US legal statute that essentially states that once a person buys a copyrighted item, the copyright owner’s control over how the new owner uses and transfers that item largely ends. So for instance the legitimate purchaser retains their right to resell, lend, rent or give the item away. Other jurisdictions may have a similar principle to contend with so the issue is by no means confined to the US or to works sold into the US.

In a possible attempt to circumvent this legal principle, Amazon’s terms of sale state that the ebook is licensed rather than sold outright. This is probably news to a lot of Kindle owners who feel like they’ve bought ownership of their ebook with the same rights as a p-book.

Personally, I think Amazon and publishers should be able to limit transfer of ebooks. But Amazon’s problem here — legal as well as public relations — is that it’s creating the appearance that its ebooks are sold outright rather than on some sort of royalty-free license-to-use basis.  This point — that if it looks like a sale, it probably is a sale in spite of what your terms of sale say — caught out software maker Autodesk a couple of years ago in a case that you could imagine would share a lot of similarities with ebooks if a disgruntled Amazon customer decided to challenge Amazon’s or a publisher’s post-sale behaviour. In the Autodesk case, an eBay trader was selling used copies of its software which it argued were only sold in the first instance on a license-to-use basis. The judge didn’t buy this argument, in spite of Autodesk’s explicit terms of sale, because it gave the appearance of being an outright sale.

The industry, and Amazon, needs to start an education process to make this issue much clearer. And they really need to do some soul searching about whether they can, in fact, have a bob each way on this issue. It’s understandable why Amazon, and no doubt many of its publishers, are being a bit ambiguous on this point. Who, after all, will want to pay close to the full price of a p-book for something that is essentially a long term rental?

But if they don’t come clean, there might be some unpleasant and unexpected consequences. If First Sale rights, or a similar legal doctrine, is recognised in case law or statute as covering ebook sales, there could be interesting consequences, particularly if DRM is also challenged on similar grounds. For instance, a second hand copy of a paper book is generally much cheaper than a new one, doesn’t travel widely, and gets less valuable as its wears out. But what value will a “second hand” ebook file have? If it doesn’t wear out and it travels well, a library or rental store can lend it continually for years with no discernible lessening of quality and no further payment to the author or publisher. And hey, let’s not forget how sociable the web is these days. It’s easy to imagine your favourite internet book club becoming a vast channel to free loans from your large network of online “friends”. Sound familar?

More on the European move here.

The “stupid publisher” notion has gained wide currency. It stems from the view that the internet is very different and “old media” publishers are set on bringing old media thinking to it. But the main piece of old thinking that publishers like Colman are trying to bring to the internet is the idea that publishers should be able to pay people real wages to create content.

The fact is, it’s not stupidity at play here. The internet is actually broken. Here’s why.

Media, for the most part, rely on two sources of income: what people pay to read/view/listen, and what advertisers pay to reach those readers/viewers/listeners. Some media, such as books, have little or no advertising. Others such as newpapers and magazines have a combination. And some, such as free-to-air TV or radio, rely almost entirely on advertising.

Let’s look for a moment at the business that Colman is in: news. In the virtuous circle that characterises “old media”, publishers pay for writers to write stories that appeal to a market that advertisers want to reach, then sell advertisers access to it via paid ads. Readers usually, but not always, pay for their newspaper (free community newspapers and free trade publications are common exceptions as 100% ad-supported publications). There are many differet models. But markets have developed with economics that make this equation work in anything from a large, mass circulating national newspaper to a small community newspaper or niche trade journal. The point is that both large and small scale enterprises can thrive, and content creators are paid living wages.

Compare this to the “free” internet. Contrary to popular belief, people already pay for content. The trouble is, they mostly pay their ISP who presently remits almost nothing to the content creators. Advertisers are piling into the internet but as most site operators can tell you – even successful ones – the rates publishers get for online advertising are extremely low and seldom cover the real cost of doing business.

There are three reasons for this.

First, there is a vast amount of advertising inventory available (ie places you can run ads) and this drives down the cost. You’re not just competing with your home market. Because of geographic targeting, if you’re a New Zealand publisher, you’re competing with sites all around the world that attract New Zealand visitors. It means typically that you need very big traffic to make even a modest income. And it means that carefully targeted, niche content, or local interest content, doesn’t get the premium for ads that it needs to cover its higher unit costs.

The second, related problem is that most of today’s online advertising falls into what advertisers call “response” advertising rather than “brand” advertising. Brand advertisers care about the environment in which their ads run. But response advertisers care about clicks and cost-per-click and don’t much care about where the ad runs as long as the right people see it and respond. This means advertisers care little about the difference between their ad running in a quality online news site or on a Facebook page, an online shop, or an email inbox. They have to compete with a much wider range of “media” so, again, better content – the main way that media have competed in the past and a big benefit to consumers – doesn’t always lead to a better price for your advertising.

The third problem is that most of the online advertising today doesn’t even go to the media companies that create content. The world’s most successful “media” company, Google, takes almost half of online advertising and doesn’t create any content at all. This disconnect between advertising and content creation has broken another strand of the virtuous circle that has paid for media in the past.

Which leads back to the question: how do you actually do business if you’re an “old media” company like The National Business Review that’s trying to pay people properly to create content, as opposed to a “new media” company like Google syphoning off close to half of the online advertising dollars, running ads in anything from online newspapers to shopping sites and email accounts with little differentiation between them, and sharing very little of the advertising income generated.

The proffered solutions seem to fall into the following camps:

1. “We don’t know either but just go and find a way.” This argument is probably the most common. It is fuelled by optimism that the unfettered internet will solve these problems, and is usually supported by examples of ‘successful’ new media companies. There are a relatively small number of these successes, certainly not enough to make a big dent on a trillion dollar worldwide industry. And because there are so few, the same examples keep coming up. In New Zealand, Bernard Hickey’s interest.co.nz site is frequently cited. But Hickey, of course, had the advantage of targeting a niche that he knew would work in this environment. You might find it a bit harder to cover court news, local councils, or other important but less advertiser-friendly beats.

Interestingly, this argument is used by author Chris Anderson in defending his new book Free from attack by the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. And the example he cites of why we shouldn’t worry — that the internet can sort it out somehow — demonstrates one of the very problems I’ve highlighted. A parenting site that Anderson started, which by most measures has become very successful with a million page views a month, can pay just one part-time wage for its editor and makes almost no payments to its volunteer contributors. Anderson seems to think this is OK but if this is the best that the economics of the internet can manage, it worries me.

2. “You’ll just have to lower your costs and downsize.” Related to this is the belief that, in this lean revenue environment, resources can be fleshed out with the free labour of volunteers — Wikipedia is a commonly cited example — or the cheap labour of underpaid part-timers who must keep their day jobs. Again, Anderson makes this case when he suggests that “the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all.” But even if this is true, isn’t there something wrong with accepting this model? No-one would question the value of bringing more voices to the public arena, but should we really be paying for essential information services this way? Should we encourage the use of free labour to drive down the cost of paid labour?

3. “We don’t care.” While there’s a lot of merit in the Darwinian approach that will see many old-style businesses collapse and be replaced by something completely new, a professional media and news capability is too important to most societies’ effective functioning to see it weakened.

The fact is that we need to care about the media and not think of it as just another industry to sweep aside. We need to think carefully about what replaces it and whether it’s what we want. Wishful thinking and blind faith just won’t cut it because it’s too important to leave it to a free — as in, unfettered — market to sort out. More than 15 years on from the emergence of the world wide web, this still hasn’t been sorted out. No-one has found a way to pay fully for an effective professional online media. It’s still subsidised by a dwindling “old media”, or staffed heavily by volunteers, underpaid and under-resourced part-timers. And when a million pages a month won’t pay an editor’s wage, let alone writers, how will smaller markets cope – small countries, small communities, small and advertiser-unpopular issues?

Publishers that struggle with these issues are not stupid. That these problems haven’t been solved after so many years isn’t just because of a lack brain power and creative risk-taking.

We need a bigger discussion here. When someone like Barry Colman takes a shot at trying to bring some sanity to this dysfuctional business model, whether we think his particular solution will succeed or not, we should cheer him on, give him some credit for trying and maybe some pointers to help.

The good news is that technology itself might overcome some of this dysfunction as the first generation of the world wide web, driven by the PC, is replaced by the mobile web and better broadband. Among other things, this transition might make it easier to charge users their share for content and encourage more brand advertisers who will pay a premium for the right environment.

But we might also need to consider some regulation — especially against the internet’s propensity to create enormous global powerhouses. It’s time to start debating not just the way the internet is, but the way we want it to be.

So to Barry Colman, I’d say this. I don’t know whether what you’re doing will work — I suspect it won’t without some changes — but good on you for giving it a go. And if you learn anything from your past failure, it should be that you gave up too soon. Keep trying, keep testing, and keep sharing your experience with the rest of us. We need you to get there in the end.

Spain’s three biggest publishers have joined forces to form a digital distributor with the aim of influencing how the Spanish-language ebook market develops.

The three companies — Planeta, Random House Mondadori, and Santillana — collectively control 70% of the Spanish book publishing market and hold worldwide digital rights to most of their Spanish language titles. They’ve launched this initiative in conjunction with the Association of Spanish Literary Agencies (ADAL). What’s particularly interesting is the terms they’ve collectively agreed in an effort to control the direction of the market early. Among them:

• They’ve agreed to price ebooks at 80% of the standard paper book cover price and are intent on enforcing this as far as they can.
• Authors will receive a standard 25% royalty (I presume based on net receipts but this is not clear in the article reporting the initiative).
• Booksellers will receive a maximum discount of 50%.
• Publishers plan to apply DRM to books but hope to soften the impact by providing the consumer-friendly right to download to multiple devices.
• They hope to be publishing all front list titles simultaneously in ebook and pbook editions by mid 2011.

They are looking at the market for smartphones as an early target — no talk of sitting on their hands waiting for Sony or Amazon’s readers to appear. In fact, the initiative is positively hostile to Amazon based on Amazon’s heavy discounting strategy. The Spanish market, it seems, has a policy of selling books at fixed retail prices and the publishers are hoping to bring some of that order to the digital marketplace. This would be music to the ears of this English language publisher who has taken to delaying ebook releases in order to retain the premium associated with the first hardback edition of new books that is common in US and UK markets.

I find this Spanish initiative really interesting because it’s trying to tackle the key challenges that all book publishers are facing as they migrate to the often free-for-all internet. Their actions won’t please the “internet should be free” believers (‘free’ in the sense of uncontrolled as well as unpaid).

On a related topic, I’m currently listening to the excellent Reith Lectures from the BBC (try here if there’s still not online on BBC Radio 4). The present lecture series from Harvard’s Professor of Government Michael Sandel is on the topic of a ‘new politics of the common good’. There are some interesting parallels between our present faith in the internet to manage itself for the common (global) good and our faith in the markets to do the same in the economic sphere, a faith that has taken a battering.

We have some difficult issues to work through about how we keep what’s good about the global internet while trying in rein in some of its excesses. The issues book publishers are grappling with as they migrate to digital forms bring a lot of these challenges into sharp focus.

One of these is the propensity of the internet to create huge, globally dominant players like Google and Amazon whose scale can create serious problems. For instance, they can be price setters rather than takers, imposing a pricing regime that might not work in some markets. This will be part of the Spanish publishers’ challenge with Amazon. It’s also a big problem that Google has created for the advertising-supported media industry such as newspapers. Unlike ‘old’ media companies, Google doesn’t itself create content, but by selling advertising impressions so cheaply the income flowing back to content creators will no longer cover the real costs of producing that content.

My guess is that anti-trust actions that have characterised each wave of information technology (AT&T in the US phone market, IBM, Microsoft and probably soon Google) will be played out across many sectors as these mega-sites begin to infringe on the viability of local and national economic and social interests. It’s certainly something that all publishers, politicians and the wider public — among many other groups — will need to do some hard thinking about. Another pick: copyright (in particular territorial rights) and taxes will be two of our allies in the forthcoming battles for national and local sovereignty and sustainability. Twitter It!]]> http://activitypress.com/2009/07/16/spanish-publishers-form-ebook-distributor-hope-to-set-markets-direction/feed/ 0 http://activitypress.com/2009/05/12/kindle-sales-data-points-to-growing-preference-for-ebooks/ http://activitypress.com/2009/05/12/kindle-sales-data-points-to-growing-preference-for-ebooks/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 11:29:25 +0000 Martin Taylor http://activitypress.com/?p=526 Take a look at the chart behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on stage at the launch of the big-screen Amazon Kindle DX last week. Bezos revealed that, where Kindle editions are available alongside paper editions of books, the  Kindle sales are running at 35% of book sales. What’s more, as the chart shows, there’s been a big up-tick since February when the Kindle 2 launched.

I think most people would be surprised at this figure. Bezos has already acknowledged that Kindle owners are bigger book buyers than non-Kindle owners which would indicate that at least some of this 35% figure comes from incremental sales rather than cannibalised print sales. This new figure, if it represents a trend, points to a much stronger preference for digital media than most people would have picked at this stage.

And let’s face it, this preference can only grow. While cutting edge right now, today’s ebook reading devices are only for the hardy and technically savvy. They’re a fair way from mainstream levels of usability, price and general consumer appeal.

While we’re on the subject of the Kindle DX, coverage has been less enthusiastic than we’ve seen for earlier Kindle models. Much of this luke-warm reception is based on its high price (US$489) and differing views of how likely the Kindle is to succeed in the newspaper and textbook markets, the two niches that Amazon is targeting with this larger, 9.7-inch (25cm) version.

The New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post will be embarking on a restricted trial, offering cut-price subscriptions with a Kindle DX deal. The offer will be made to subscribers outside of the papers’ home delivery areas to avoid cannibalising existing print newspaper subscribers.

One newspaper baron who won’t be supporting Kindle, however, is Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. “I can assure you, we will not be sending our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle,” he told the Wall Street Journal last week. “We will control the prices for our content, and we will control the relationship with our customers.” This is a clear reference to widely held fears that handing too much control to Amazon will turn publishers into price-takers as Amazon dominates the market for digital content.

Hopefully, Murdoch plans to tackle this threat by promoting an open, rather than closed, system. If so, this could be the global muscle the industry needs to counterbalance Amazon which, right now, has the market to itself.

Rumours about Murdoch looking at his own e-reader device have been floating around for some time. They’ve received a further boost with his comments following last week’s results announcement that the days of his newspapers being available free on the internet are numbered. Such moves could start within “the next 12 months”, said Murdoch.