Discover The World of Digital Books

Business Model : Free ipad/kindle with x years of subscriptions

dcestud4 — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 03:49:26 +0000

“Montreal, Canada-based newspaper La Presse unveiled a plan today to offer a free iPad to readers of the paper who sign up for subscription terms of at least three years, according to Projetj.ca“

This seems like an amazing business model. I wont be surprised if Apple/Amzaon/Barnes & Noble do the same. Lets wait and watch

Read full story here

Surprised why few ebooks cost more than a paperback!!!

dcestud4 — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 03:44:52 +0000

Recently I have heard several people complaining that the ebook that they bought on their device was more expensive than the paperback book. The problem lies in the details:

Most of the major publishers have come up with a Agency Model (where publishers define the final price at which retailers can sell the books and Retailers just act like merchant of records ) Which means that the retailers don’t have rights to discount these books similar to what they can do fro print books (most of the print books deals are on wholesale terms – which gives retailers right to discount this further)

Hope all this makes sense to you or may be not but this this how may be publishers are trying to make sure that ebooks do not kill their existing revenues from print books.

College Textbooks for Free – flatworldknowledge.com

dcestud4 — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:44:45 +0000

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com offers a very unique business model under which a student can read a book for free online but would have to pay if they want to download or print a portion of the book. If successful this can help reduce the cost of education drastically.

Few of my concerns are:

1. Availability of books: I believe no major publisher is participating in this currently

2. The quality and user experience of reading online is not great and it seems like the website is forcing you to print or download the books.

The only factor that can make this model succesful is if the teachers start recommending these books and if both students and teacher give feed back to improve the quality of the content.

Check out yourself and let us know what you feel.

Wow That was fast: Goodreads planning to acquire Discovereads

dcestud4 — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:33:17 +0000

Oracle of ebooks

Seems like an oracle moment. yesterday I talked about how anyone working on book discovery/sugegstion piece might potentially make millions. and rumours are already strong that Goodreads is planning of acquiring discoverreads.com to supplement its offering with a powerful suggestion engine.

Full story here on NY Times

Free Kindle for Amazon Prime Members??

dcestud4 — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:05:50 +0000

This could be a real game changer and yes Jeff Bezos is known to create game-changing business models.

Need for a great book discovery tool – Million Dollar Idea

dcestud4 — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:00:00 +0000

Several articles yesterday on paidcontent and Teleread talked about how important is to have a great book discovery tool and why it might fetch an entrepreneur a fortune.

I can not agree more with the authors that Book Industry has lagged behind music and movie in terms of being able to help users find books that they might want to read based on various factors. The reason for this is that Book Industry has not yet gone beyond collecting basic metadata elements about the books (price, no of pages, author, publisher, year of publication and genre) and used these basic metadata elements to filter down books. But I believe for an effective targeting system to work we would have to collect more granular/soft data about these books like mood of the book, Kind of ending, Male vs Female characters, Era etc that define the content better and thus could be used to effectively match the book to the users mood and taste.

I am sure someone soon would come up with a model to do so. Looking forward to that start-up. Great idea for us also

Digital books and devices: An opportunity or a Threat?

dcestud4 — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:43:24 +0000

Interesting article on the shift of paradigm within the publishing industry. where ebooks are no longer perceived as a threat but an opportunity (or may be I should say less perceived as a threat).

Peason and Bloomsbury reported that their ebook revenue increased by 186% and by more than 18 fold. In fact Bloomsbury had undergone a recent re-org in response to the ebook growth.

I am wondering, if this is a clear indication of the publishing industry embracing the digital world in fear of extinction? (specially with Amazon’s self publishing services). In that case is it truly perceived less as a threat and more as an opportunity? Interesting article.

More Restriction leads to higher Piracy!!

dcestud4 — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:34:33 +0000

One thing that publishers have to start understand is that the tighter control they try to put on the ebook industry by

1. Controlling the release of the books as ebooks

2. Controllling the price of ebooks

3. Controlling the ebooks access through DRM

would give users enough motive for pirating these contents. Several experiments in the music and Movie has clearly shown that together control on the distribution of these media content lead to an increased activity on P2P sites. Read this paper on SSRN

Publishers should work with Authors and Retailers to come up with a economical model that would duly compensate everyone without restricting the end users much.

Video Instructions on How to convert pdf file to iBooks format for free!

dcestud4 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:30:06 +0000

We are back!

dcestud4 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:00:26 +0000

Apologies for our absence!! We have been busy with the development of our website all this while. We are very close to launching and will keep you all updated on this as we bring all latest and hottest news/updates from the ebooks/digital world.

Big Things that happend during our absence

1. Google Launches Google ebookstore

2. Apple iPad has emerged as a competition to Amazon’s Kindle as the ebook reading device

3. Randon House decide to go Agency and included all its 17K titles in Apple iBookStore

4. European Agencies raid publishers office in France (related to Agency model probably)

5. Self-Publishing model is gaining relevance. Amazon makes a big move . Self-publishing Amazon author sells 100,000+ e-books per month

Detailed analysis of these observations to follow