The Myth of Green Gadgets

Some interesting figures on the newly release iPhone 4.

“The bottom line: 77% of new iPhone buyers were existing iPhone owners (upgrades), compared to 56% in 2009 and 38% in 2008,” Munster wrote. “Apple is effectively building a recurring revenue stream from a growing base of iPhone users that upgrade to the newest version every year or two.”

Basically, of all those hundreds of thousands of phones sold, most were sold to people who already owned iPhones.

In other words, despite the fact that a company has built a tool that is both extremely useful for a very long time and among the highest quality cell phones around (despite some serious reception issues), users are still ditching perfectly good devices for something newer and shinier. The situation proves something about green gadgets — there’s no such thing.

Via: Treehugger

An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a buyer’s guide to E-Readers. Their rationale:

Unfortunately, e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users’ reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers have explained to consumers in clear unequivocal language what data is being collected about them and why.

You can find the latest buyer’s guide here.

Of Rights and E-Books

A battle is brewing between publishers and authors. The fight is over who benefits from E-Book publishing. Only in the last 15 years did contracts with authors explicitly mention digital publishing. Therefore, backlisted works that are covered by older contracts, and controlled either by the original author or the author’s estate are in a bit of a gray area when it comes to digital publishing. Publishers say they own the printed-book rights, and by extension the E-Book rights. Authors, unsurpisingly, disagree. From the New York Times:

Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

Some publishers have already made agreements with authors or their estates to release digital editions. All of Ernest Hemingway’s books, for example, are available in electronic versions from his print publisher, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster.

But with only a small fraction of the thousands of books in print available in e-book form, there are many titles to be fought over.

“This is a wide open frontier right now,” said Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group.

How this might impact the growth of the E-Book market is unclear. The number of copyrights being contested hasn’t been revealed, but given the infancy of the E-Book market, further litigation would not be a surprise as more and more royalties come from digital editions of books. But if a large chunk of the world’s older literature gets caught up in legal battles, might this impact the number of titles Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other digital retailers are able to provide? Could this limited selection of E-Books keep consumers away? All speculation, but the intellectual property issues surrounding E-Books won’t be going away any time soon.

Via: Authors and Publishers Argue Over Digital Rights to Older Books – NYTimes.com.

Information Consumption

A fascinating study out of the University of California Sand Diego’s Global Information Industry Center. Researchers there sought to quantify how much information, either via television, radio, the internet, newspapers, books, magazines, Americans consumed.

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

via UCSD: Global Information Industry Center.

‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years

Abruptly, and perhaps indicative of the times:

Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.

via ‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years.

Holding Back Content

Amazon’s Kindle and the burgeoning E-Book market has apparently frightened some publishers. Consumers might son expect to purchase books for around 10$, the going price for a book on a Kindle, which seriously cuts in to the margins of publishers. Further, Walmart’s recent fight with Amazon (here and here) suggests that prices for paper books might also be set to plummet.

The plan is this: If consumers want the latest and greatest from publishers, they are going to have to pay. Or so hope Simon and Schuster and Hachette, two major publishers. Rather than release E-Books at the same time of hardbacks, they plan to delay the electronic release by three months. This slots E-Books into the existing publishing cycle that transitions form hardback to paperback over 12 months.

From David Young, CEO of the Hachette Book Group:

“We’re doing this to preserve our industry,” Mr. Young said. “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.”

Amazon and other online retailers, unsurprisingly, disagree.

An Amazon spokesman said, “Authors get the most publicity at launch and need to strike while the iron is hot. If readers can’t get their preferred format at that moment, they may buy a different book or just not buy a book at all.”

And so we return to a the central problem for publishers: will consumers see E-Books as an evolution of the paper book, or an evolution of their electronic devices. The former has was well-established pricing regimes, and a marketplace that is willing to pay. Digital content, on the other hand, has seriously impacted the margins of the music, movie and newspaper industries, and is poised to do the same to book-publishing.

With several new E-Readers, including the Nook from Barnes & Noble and colour E-Ink devices set to be released in 2010, the next year will be a thorough test of the publishing industry’s ability to survive in a digital age.

Source: WSJ

Inside one of the world’s largest data centers | CNET News

As more and more computing takes place in the cloud, consumers and corporations alike will rely on massive data centers to manage and store data. Digital media is part of this data load, although what percentage isn’t exactly clear. Data centers are kept under tight wraps, but Microsoft took CNET News on a tour, and even allowed photography.

Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft’s soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system–Windows Azure.

Even with only half the site ready for computers, the center has 30 megawatts of capacity–many times that found in a typical facility.

What is clear is that, over time, Microsoft will need even more capacity. That’s what has Josefsberg returning to a custom “heat map” that figures out the best place to build data centers based on factors including cheapness, greenness, and availability of power, political climate, weather, networking capacity, and other factors. Choosing the right spot is critical, Microsoft executives say, noting that 70 percent of a data center’s economics are determined before a company ever breaks ground.

via Inside one of the world’s largest data centers | Beyond Binary – CNET News.

Not so fast…

From Jonathan A. Knee, director of the Media Program at Columbia Business School, opines about the demise of the newspaper. Key points:

Recent hysteria over the imminent demise of daily newspapers is misplaced. As an economic matter, most newspapers still are far more profitable than other, higher-profile consumer media. As a policy matter, those calling for government subsidies or other protections ignore the true state of the marketplace of ideas: It has never been so vibrant.

..

There are many newspaper industries. The handful of national newspapers that garner the most attention represent a tiny subindustry (about 10% of daily circulation) within the overall sector. These papers, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal (published by News Corp., which also owns Barron’s) and USA Today, have long been among the industry’s least profitable.

..

Large, fixed-cost printing machinery and distribution infrastructure are required to produce a daily local paper and represent the industry’s biggest barrier to entry. Unfortunately for the newspapers, efficient delivery of classified advertising — which represented barely a quarter of newspaper revenue but more than half of profit — turned out to be the Internet’s “killer app.” Monster.com, Craigslist, realestate.com, cars.com and dozens of other sites emerged to capture an increasing share of this once wildly profitable and proprietary domain.

..

The newspaper of tomorrow will indeed be very different in terms of how it is produced and delivered, what is in it, and how profitable it is. It will be part of a much more crowded and complex news and information ecosystem.

While short on data, Knee describes a Paper to Pixel transition that is more nuanced, not inevitable, and two-directional. Recent circulation data supports his central premise.

 

Newspaper circulation data

From Editor and Publisher, some numbers on newspaper circulation for six months ending September 2009. The percentage change compares the same six-month period ending  September 2008. Here are the figures for the top five U.S. papers by circulation:

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,024,269 — 0.61%
USA TODAY — 1,900,116 — (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES — 927,851 — (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES — 657,467 — (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST — 582,844 — (-6.40%)

Find the full list here:  Top 25 Daily Newspapers in New FAS-FAX.

The top 5 gainers in circulation in the same period were:

YORK (PA.) DAILY RECORD — 55,370 — 16.45%
WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY — 53,142 — 14.31%
THE OAKLAND (MICH.) PRESS — 68,067 — 7.26%
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL — 175,841 — 6.56%
CHATTANOOGA (TENN.) TIMES FREE PRESS — 69,569 — 2.18%

Find the full list here: The Top 10 Biggest Circ GAINERS in New FAS-FAX

Evidently, there are still viable markets for print based media. They just tend to be smaller.

 

Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format – PC World

An interesting twist in the E-Reader world, as another heavyweight enters the ring:

Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a “don’t be evil” twist. Unlike Google’s biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google’s store will not be device-specific–allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010.

Google’s e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. However, as democratizing as this sounds, it’s still unclear how many people are ready to curl up with a Google Editions title on their laptop or smartphone, instead of the traditional paper format.

I wonder, will the lack of DRM in Google’s offering encourage more people to embrace E-Readers?

via Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format – PC World.