One publisher I can think of is Scholastic, who brought the writing room concept to publishing with 39Clues. An update on the Carolyn Keene model but still an innovation.

Seems to me the argument isn’t if what the publisher does adds value or not… it is how much is that truly worth?

See also Paul Carr in Tech Crunch and Ursula MacKenzie in The Guardian.

Stupid. But they learned their lesson right?

Wrong. Their deal with Kobo two years later is the exact same thing. They have built a presence in the ebook space but they have no expertise — which will only foster a false sense of what is at stake. Techcrunch is right to only link out to Kobo — and not Borders — at the bottom of this press release. They are the only company in that post that matters.

What Mathew Taylor is doing with lectures reminds me of The Story of Stuff videos. Lots of potential here for enhanced ebooks.

via LaughingSquid

More genius from FTPubW.

I am surprised, seeing the popularity of Alex Rider and Charlie Higson’s young James Bond, that no one has riffed on/updated the Three Investigators Series. Make them computer hackers instead of investigators and have Richard Branson or Damien Hirst be their benefactor?

The Kindle will be three years old in November. At age three, iTunes had 88% of the download market. Kindle is tracking behind iTunes’ progress at the same age, but probably not by much. They need to beat back more numerous competitors than iTunes did at this stage in life and the rate of adoption of the ereaders is no where near sales of digital music players. So let’s say by 2013, ebooks are 50% of the total reading market. Even if Amazon owns all of that, there still  won’t likely be enough groundswell to crack open the AZW file format.

I expect it will be 9+ years before a comparable percentage of readers are in the Kindle ecosystem as there was in the iTunes universe in its sixth year. That is far enough away to abandon all hope we will ever see DRM-free Kindle books. I wish adoption was quicker, so Kindle could dominate sooner, so publishers would lose their minds faster, so alternate sellers would rise higher, so I could own more ebooks.

‡The audio book market must be nearly controlled by DRM-happy Audible (also owned by Amazon) so speculation about how Bezos responds to customer pressure is admittedly a spin in the dark.