Publishing and content

Microsoft has announced that for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), the company has a preference for HTML5 and the H.264 video codec. Flash plug-ins will continue to be supported, but IE9 will only have native support for H.264. This follows on the path blazed by Apple, which decided a while back not support Flash at all on the iPhone and iPod. The controversy has heated up with the release of the iPad, which continues the Apple strategy of no Flash support at all.

This article from Cory Doctorow is similar to a couple of other contrarian articles that have come out in the past week--they all complain about the perceived "closed" nature of the iPad and/or say that the iPad is not going to save the publishing business.

Earlier this week, I wrote how Apple is forcing publishers to move away from Adobe's buggy Flash plug-in, which is used for multimedia content display. Today, this article comes out about how Apple's pricing for books in the new iPad bookstore has forced Amazon to change its pricing model. Amazon was telling book publishers what they could charge for ebooks using the Kindle distribution system.

This article suggests that pay for play is doomed, because no one (according to the data) wants to pay for content.

Here is an interesting story. Apparently, a Microsoft exec has proposed that all bloggers need to have a license before they can write on the Web. And Time magazine and the New York Times think this would just be spiffy. This is not likely to ever happen, but the fact that companies like Microsoft and old media think it is a great idea suggest that there is still much resistance to the changes the Internet has brought.

Apple, as the company has in the past, has begun to upset, er, apple carts. With the announcement of the iPad, Apple also announced a book section in the iTunes Store, with a business model that is exactly the same as the hugely successful music model they use. For both books and music, Apple will collect 30% of the sales price of the item, and the publisher/seller collects 70%. The seller of the item sets the actual price. This is called the "agency model."

Here is a roundup of rumors about the new Apple tablet. Apple has announced a media event late this month, but is not saying what the announcement is about. Until very recently, most pundits were guessing Apple's table computer would not be announced until June of this year, but I think the increasing interest in the Google Android phone may have caused Apple to move up their announcement to suck all the oxygen out of the room and take the media focus off Android.

The Huffington Post has a couple of interesting articles on the direction of journalism today. It is a weird time for news, as the old media and the new media continue to collide. There is much finger pointing going around, with many old media journalists and owners trying to make a fiscally sound transition to new media while simultaneously complaining that new media bloggers and news aggregation sites (like the HuffPost).

Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.

In one of the strangest things to come out of government, the Federal Trade Commission has announced it intends to monitor and police.....blogs. That's right--there is apparently nothing more dangerous than a blogger who might be getting paid a few bucks to write a product review. So the FTC is setting rules for full disclosure on when a blogger might be getting paid directly or indirectly for writing a product review.

A sure sign that interest in TV is waning is the fact that major media firms like Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner have announced a partnership with some of the biggest advertisers in the country (Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Unilever) to create a new ratings system that will more accurately measure viewer habits. The current Nielsen system is decades old, and the complaint is that it does not accurately measure the effect that DVRs and broadband are having on viewing habits.

Sony has announced it's $400 ebook. Intended to compete with the Amazon Kindle, the device costs $100 more than the Kindle but works with several open ebook formats, giving users access to a wider range of books.

Amazon may have inadvertently killed its own Kindle ebook reader over the past week. The company discovered that pirated versions of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were available for sale on the Kindle bookstore. To comply with the copyright protection laws, Amazon removed the ebook versions from the online bookstore. But then Amazon also remotely deleted copies of the book from all Kindles and refunded the purchase price to the Kindle owners.

2008 will likely be remembered as the year of the tipping point for newspapers. A new study by the Pew Foundation indicates that more people now get their news from the Internet than from newspapers, a sharp increase over 2007. 59% of young people (under 30) use the Internet as their main source of news and information, a figure that has doubled in the past year.

Michael Smerconish, a newspaper columnist, writes today about the Martin Eisenstadt hoax. Eisenstadt was the source of the rumor that Sarah Palin had mis-identified Africa as a "country," not a continent. The problem was that Eisenstadt was an entirely fictitious person, or as Smerconish puts it, the "Borat" of the news business. Both Eisenstadt and the Africa quote were entirely made up.

Comcast, which has been criticized of late for apparently trying to throttle peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic, seems to be shifting focus by investing in a P2P business start up. This is a good sign. As I and others have argued for a long time, we need to shift away from the "bucket of bits" model of broadband and move toward a service-oriented business and network model. P2P file sharing is just another service.

A lengthy discussion on SlashDot highlights a new tactic by Amazon. The book distribution giant is trying to muscle out other print on demand services by forcing authors who use print on demand to use Amazon's print on demand (POD) service or else--the "else" being Amazon won't list their book.

Google has announced a new "search within a search" option that has online retailers worried that the search behemoth will steal customers. The new option lets you use Google to search only pages that are part of a single site. So if you want to buy a digital camera and go to Google to start the search, you get the usual search results page. If you click on a Best Buy site, as an example, Google will now do an extended search only on the Best Buy site.