Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
U.S. to sue Apple and ci for prices of eBooks
"WASHINGTON (AP) - The government says avid best-seller readers who use electronic books have been getting ripped off. Tina Fey's "Bossy Pants," Tim Tebow's "Through My Eyes" and Keith Richards' "'Life" - maybe they should have cost less.
The Justice Department and 15 states sued Apple Inc. and major book publishers Wednesday, alleging a conspiracy that raised the price of electronic books. They said the scheme cost consumers more than $100 million in the past two years by adding $2 or $3, sometimes as much as $5, to the price of each e-book.
If there was price fixing, even the e-book version of the hot-selling Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, the late genius behind Apple computers, may have cost too much.
Attorney General Eric Holder said executives at the highest levels of the companies conspired to eliminate competition among e-book sellers. Justice's antitrust chief, Sharis Pozen, said the executives were desperate to get Amazon.com - the marketer of Kindle e-book readers - to raise the $9.99 price point it had set for the most popular e-book titles, because that was substantially below their hardcover prices.
The federal government reached a settlement with three of the publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Shuster. But it will proceed with its lawsuit in federal court in New York City against Apple and Holtzbrinck Publishers, doing business as Macmillan, and The Penguin Publishing Co. Ltd., doing business as Penguin Group.
Connecticut and Texas, two of the 15 states filing a separate lawsuit, reached agreements with Hachette and HarperCollins to provide $52 million in restitution to consumers, using a formula based on the number of states participating and the number of e-books sold in each state. Other states in the case may sign onto the agreement, and other companies might be persuaded to join.
Susan E. Kinsman of the Connecticut attorney general's office said it's too early to say how consumers can go about getting refunds. But there could be millions of people applying. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 21 percent of adults said they had read an e-book in the last year.
Since Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, e-book sales have surged. They represented just 2 percent of all titles sold in the United States that year, but soared to 25 percent last year. In 2010, about 114 million e-books were sold at a total cost of $441.3 million.
Holder told a Justice Department news conference that "we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles" as a result of the alleged conspiracy. Pozen said the scheme added an average of $2 to $3 to the prices of individual e-books.
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said the individual book markups went as high as $5 and the total cost to consumers was more than $100 million since April 2010, when the scheme allegedly took effect.
The government lawsuits did not disclose individual titles whose prices were allegedly jacked up. The Fey, Tebow, Richards and Isaacson books all came out in electronic versions from the named publishers after April 2010.
According to Pozen, Apple's Steve Jobs told publishers involved in the alleged conspiracy that "the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway."
The lawsuit said the effort to get e-book prices increased by Amazon.com came as Apple was preparing to launch the iPad. The government said the conspirators agreed that instead of selling books to retailers and letting them decide what retail price to charge, the publishers would convert the retailers into "agents" who could sell their books but not alter the publisher-set retail price. The scheme called for Apple to be guaranteed a 30 percent commission on each e-book it sold, the lawsuit said.
"To effectuate their conspiracy, the publisher defendants teamed up with defendant Apple, which shared the same goal of restraining retail price competition in the sale of e-books," the lawsuit said.
The European Union conducted an investigation that paralleled the U.S. probe. The Union's Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the commission in charge of competition policy, said in Brussels that he welcomes the fact that the five companies are making proposals to reach an early resolution of the EU case. "We are currently engaged in fruitful discussions with them," said Almunia.
Hachette denied it was involved in any conspiracy to illegally fix the price of e-books and said it changed its pricing structure - the central government allegation - to facilitate entry by a new retail competitor, Apple.
"Two years ago, Amazon effectively had a monopoly on the sale of e-books and e-readers, and was selling products below cost in an effort to exclude competitors," said Hachette.
Amazon called the settlement "a big win for Kindle owners, and we look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books."
After reading the federal complaint, the Consumer Federation of America called it "a 'slam-dunk' case of collusive, anti-competitive behavior."
At Apple, spokesman Tom Neumayr declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Macmillan CEO John Sargent said in a letter to authors, illustrators and agents that the company has not settled because it is "hard to settle a lawsuit when you know you have done no wrong."
Sargent said there were months of discussions with the Justice Department over a possible settlement, but the government's proposed terms "were too onerous" and "could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency (pricing) model."
"We also felt the settlement the DOJ wanted to impose would have a very negative and long-term impact on those who sell books for a living, from the largest chain stores to the smallest independents." he said.
Sargent denied he colluded with competitors to change Macmillan's pricing. "After days of thought and worry, I made the decision on January 22nd, 2010, a little after 4:00 AM, on an exercise bike in my basement. It remains the loneliest decision I have ever made, and I see no reason to go back on it now," he wrote.
"We have done nothing wrong," said Penguin Group's chairman and CEO, John Makinson. "The decisions that we took, many them of them costly and difficult, were taken by Penguin alone."
At the heart of the e-book pricing debate is the industry's ongoing concern about Amazon. Publishers see the "agency model" as their best, short-term hope against preventing the online retailer from dominating the e-book market and driving down the price of books to a level unsustainable for publishers and booksellers.
What the agency model achieved was to shift the power for setting retail prices on e-books from the retailer - in this case primarily Amazon - to the alleged conspirator publishers, who then exerted pressure on Amazon to comply with the higher prices. The alleged scheme applied to New York Times bestselling titles, all titles that have gone on sale in the current year and mass market paperback titles.
Amazon's $9.99 price for best-sellers was such a deep discount from list prices of $20 and more that it was widely believed Amazon was selling the e-books at a loss to attract more customers and force competitors to lower their prices. Amazon also has been demanding higher discounts from publishers and stopped offering e-books from the Independent Publishers Group, a Chicago-based distributor, after they couldn't agree to terms.
When Apple launched its tablet computer two years ago, publishers saw two ways to balance Amazon's power: Enough readers would prefer Apple's shiny tablet over the Kindle to cut into Amazon's sales, and the agency model would stabilize prices.
Apple's iBookstore has yet to become a major force, but publishers believe the new price model has reduced Amazon's market share from around 90 percent to around 60 percent, with Barnes & Noble's Nook in second at 25 percent. The iBookstore is believed to have 10 percent to 15 percent.
Macmillan's Sargent has been at the heart of the dispute. In early 2010, as publishers were trying to get Amazon to agree to Apple's pricing system, Amazon pulled all the listings for Macmillan books, including titles like Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed." Sargent refused to back down and Amazon eventually gave in.
New e-books from Macmillan and the other publishers investigated by the Justice Department often are priced initially between $12.99 and $14.99, with Amazon making a point of noting that the price was set by the publisher. Ironically, publishers usually make less money off the agency model than the traditional one because they receive a smaller percentage of the proceeds.
Random House Inc. was the only "Big Six" publisher not to agree to the agency model in 2010 and was not part of the lawsuit. But it did agree to terms with Apple last year. Spokesman Stuart Applebaum said Random House would have no comment Wednesday.
According to federal court papers, the settlement agreement with three publishers said that for two years they will not restrict, limit or impede an e-book retailer's ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price of any electronic book. It said the retailers will be able to offer price discounts and other forms or promotions to encourage consumers to buy one or more electronic books.
The 15 states in the state complaint are Texas, Connecticut, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia. Puerto Rico also joined that lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Austin, Texas." - Pete Yost, Associated Press.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Stop SOPA or loose your internet rights! Watch this video and pass it along!
Watch and pass it along to everyone you know!
Friday, December 23, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
A tale of two media: Despite the iPad, traditional books aren't going anywhere.
"It was the newest of technologies, it was the oldest of technologies. A while back I wrote an opinion piece on my lament over Penguin Books' John Makinson trying to reinvent books on the iPad. In response to the article, I received emails that ranged from people calling me a Luddite to readers asking me to petition Penguin to keep books from becoming audio, video, and streaming monstrosities. What people on both sides of the debate misunderstood was that I am not against ebooks. I'm against turning an ebook into a multimedia experience that detracts from the work of literature.A few days ago I was in London having drinks with a novelist and a literary agent. We discussed the pros and cons of the iPad as a book reader and how the iPad as a medium and its iBookstore affects the reading public. The novelist and agent gave me their impressions of the device and how it will, if at all, change the way readers consume books. We also spoke about Penguin's ideas to reinvent books as apps and discussed my previous article on the subject along with the notion that some people in the tech world think that the iPad and iBookstore will kill traditional books.
Our conversation got me thinking: I normally read about 50-60 books a year in paperback format, but I had owned my iPad for a week already and had yet to try my favorite pastime on it. So I decided to compare how reading the same book in paperback would compare with reading it on the iPad. In order not to bias the medium I was reading it on by already having discovered the story on another device (and thus being a little bored with it on a second reading that so closely followed the first), I decided to read one novel -- every other of its chapters on the iPad and then in paperback.
The novel I read was the paperback edition of Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen (iBooks/paperback links). I decided to let random chance choose if I should start chapter one on the iPad or on the paperback. The coin landed on heads: iPad won. In order to conduct a fairly thorough reading experiment, I chose to read the novel on each of its mediums in locations where people normally read novels: their home, on their commute (trains and planes), and in parks and cafés.
The chapters I read in paperback (in all locations) was an experience one would expect from reading in that medium: comfortable, easy to use, immersive (immersive in how books should be -- by using your brain power, not by throwing audio and video in your face). The iPad however, was another story.
In my flat, I enjoyed reading the novel on the iPad more than in any other location (why, I'll get to in a moment). One thing I love about ebooks on the iPad is the in-text dictionary look-up feature. This is something the iPad will always have as an advantage over traditional paperbacks. I sometimes come across a word I don't know while reading a book. It's much handier to be able to look up the word on the same screen as the text as opposed to having to grab a dictionary or my iPhone to look it up while I'm reading a paperback. I also like the bookmarking feature. Though bookmarking has long existed in paperbacks (when you dog-ear a page), bookmarks excel on the iPad's ebooks because they allow you to do two useful things: highlight a word or block of words (much like you might highlight or underline text in a paperback), but the iPad also displays a bookmarks Table of Contents that list all your bookmarks and the date you bookmarked them.
However, when it came to actually reading the ebook, the iPad's advantages as a medium to consume literature began to pale. The iPad was relatively heavy and large (compared to a paperback) in my hands and the swiping and tapping to turn a page soon became tedious. A normal paperback edition of a book is roughly half the size of the iPad and slips snugly into a pocket while traveling. Even when the book is opened, it's still smaller than the flat and hard surface of the iPad. Though resting the iPad my lap resolved the weight issues, most people do not read books by lying them on their laps. Most people read books lightly grasped in their hands, or even laying down in bed. There is no way to "lightly grasp" the iPad and when you hold it for an hour while reading, your hands feel the strain.
Another big issue I had with reading the ebook chapters was that, since they were on the iPad, I was always tempted to navigate away to check an email, browse the web, or look for another book on the iBookstore. This short attention span of mine only existed while I was reading on the iPad and not from the paperback, which means it wasn't the story's fault that I was so tempted to navigate away. The iPad is a wonderful device that cries "touch me", and that's what I constantly wanted to do while holding the iPad -- touch, swipe, IM, check email. Push notifications from different apps didn't help the reading experience either.
Let's leave home and move on to another place where people read books: on their commute. Being in London, I did what most commuters do: I rode the tube. Forget about resting your iPad on your lap to read, your knees get bumped too much from the constant flow of commuters entering and leaving the train. Your only option is to hold your iPad in your hands, like you would a paperback. Now when I say "hold" what I really mean is "grip." This is where a huge drawback of the iPad becomes apparent. That drawback is called fear.
When I read the paperback on the tube, not once did I worry about hanging on to my paperback for dear life. A $7 paperback book is a pretty low target for a thief. A $500 iPad out in the open on a crowed train, on the other hand, is prime theft material. The reading experience goes down dramatically when you need to keep an eye on the people walking past you. Think I'm being paranoid? The New York Times reported in April that smartphone theft increased 70% year over year in Boston and 65% year over year in Washington DC. Those aren't pickpocket thefts either -- they're snatched-out-of-your-hands thefts. The iPad is a larger and easier-to-snatch device than a small smartphone, especially when you're reading it on a crowded city train, and the constant awareness that you must keep an eye out for potential theft detracts from the reading experience.
So, we've left home, taken the train, and walked a few blocks to the park or café. Again, with a paperback, it slips nicely into my back pocket while walking -- something the iPad cannot do. Previous issues I noticed with the iPad as a book replacement also apply here. Like at home, in a café you will be holding the iPad in your hands, which gets tiring, and like the train, you feel a need to keep one eye on your surroundings, though, admittedly, there is much less fear of theft when you're in a café than on a packed commuter train. Should fear of theft keep you from using your iPad in public? Of course not. But it is an extra strain that you don't have to worry about while reading a paperback or while reading your iPad at home (which is one of the reasons why reading an ebook in my flat was more enjoyable than reading it on the train or in the café).
I want to address another point. I've had people tell me that they've "read more books than they ever have before" since they got their iPad (to them, I would like to point out that reading the free Winnie-the-Pooh book that comes with the iBooks app doesn't really count). They also say they love carrying their entire book library around with them. Their last point is something I discussed with the novelist and literary agent. Similarly, the agent loved his Sony Reader because he could throw the twenty manuscripts he needs to read over the weekend on it and take them anywhere with little effort -- quite a space saver. My point of contention when other people say this library-in-your-hands feature will destroy paperbacks is that, unlike the agent who will commonly read sections from twenty different novels in a weekend, your average reader reads one book at a time.
There's a reason books are primarily sold as stand alone editions and do not bind the first four chapters from five different novels into a single volume -- because most people will not read two or more stories at once. Novels typically involve multiple story lines, characters, and settings; at best, reading more than one novel at once will distract from the stories of the novels, at worst, doing so will confuse the reader outright. So while carrying your entire library with you is nice, once you begin a book, chances are you'll see it trough to the end and not flit from one novel to the next. Besides, the average person takes two weeks to read one book. Books are not like music, movies, and magazines -- they take much longer to consume. Unless you're on a round the world trip, there's really no reason to have your entire library with you because you won't be using it.
After finishing my read of the novel on both mediums -- the iPad and the paperback -- I am more convinced than ever that the iPad and its iBookstore will not usurp traditional print editions. A paperback is just a too versatile and easy device to read from. It's cheap and replaceable and takes a very low level of care to keep it in working order. It's much lighter and the page turns flow more naturally in your hands than page swipes do on the iPad. Also, a paperback offers no distractions from the printed words. Despite my love for the traditional medium, I do want to say that I love the iBookstore. I use it now to browse for books I think would be interesting and use the "Get Sample" feature to explore the first few chapters. If I like what I read, I'll purchase the print edition from Amazon or at my local bookseller.
Now, before I get any angry emails, let me state emphatically that I love my iPad (I'm currently writing this article on it on my flight back to Portugal). It's an awesome leisure device. I love browsing the web on it and even love reading magazines and comics on it. But I can do those things comfortably because reading a website, a comic book, or a magazine article does not take the length of time and the concentration commitment that reading a book does.
People will read books on the iPad, and I'm glad for that. The more people who read, the better. But digital books will not put paperbacks out of circulation. There's room for both mediums. But, unlike MP3s that replaced CDs, the original medium for the novel is still the superior one in both form and function." -
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
911 will soon be able to get your texts, photos and videos.
"FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a five-step plan on Wednesday to update the technology that powers the 911 emergency response system.
The plan will enable the transmission of text messages, voice calls, videos and photos, as well as automatic location information. The FCC hopes that such a plan will enable emergency responders to respond faster while also giving individuals more options for contacting 911, depending on the emergency situation.
Implementation of Next Generation 911 (NG911), the official project name, will be charted by the following five-step plan, according to the FCC’s press release:
- Develop location accuracy mechanisms for NG911
- Enable consumers to send text, photos, and videos to public safety answering points (NPRM)
- Facilitate the completion and implementation of NG911 technical standards
- Develop an NG911 governance framework
- Develop an NG911 funding model
Genachowski began working on this plan last year — his catalyst for taking action was the fact that trapped students could not text 911 during the Virginia Tech campus shootings in 2007.
Being that texting has replaced talking in the teen demographic, this plan seems like a step in the right directions, as it aligns with the evolving nature of telecommunications.
What are your thoughts on this new plan to roll out text, voice, photo and video for 911 emergency response?" - Erica Swallow.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
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