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.

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.

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, 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.