Last week Amazon launched a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, immediately dubbed the “Netflix for ebooks” by just about everyone. It costs $9.99 per month to subscribe, which works out to be $120 per year. For that reasonable price you get unlimited access to a library of over 600,000 books as well as around 2,000 audiobooks. That […]
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Are eBooks Bad for Reading and Writers? Leasing vs. Owning and More
This week Wired published a provocative article about ebooks. In the piece, titled “The Abomination of eBooks,” author Art Brodsky points out how the applicable rules for ebooks are fundamentally different than those for print books; in particular ebooks are leased rather than actually bought and owned. Because of this, he argues that it doesn’t make […]
Adventures in Kindle Direct Publishing: New Book “Savvy for the Social Web”
Last week I published a book on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a fairly straightforward process, although I had to take some care with the formatting. I wrote my book in Word and was fortunate that I did not have any images or tables. Had that been the case I feel that using HTML would […]
Why is the Kindle Fire So Cheap? Thoughts on Amazon’s Strategy
Tablet computing is one of the hottest topics today in technology today, and the major companies are jockeying for position as prices fall and more and more people consider purchasing a tablet for their personal computing needs. But Amazon’s entry into the tablet market comes with a shockingly large drop in price: the Kindle Fire […]
Personal Cloud Computing Services: the Future of the Web?
Update 2024: This article is more relevant than ever today, with even major word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software (like Microsoft Office) has moved to the cloud to join competitors like Google Drive. These once were the foundational traditional software programs installed on just about every individual computer. Just about everyone in the industry is […]
Kindle eTextbook Rentals and the Future of Textbook Publishing
Amazon’s recent unveiling of a Kindle Textbook Rental Service, which allows students to rent electronic versions of “tens of thousands of textbooks,” is the latest news in the radically changing textbook publishing market. Amazon boasts savings up to 80% of the print cover price, offers very flexible rental periods, and enables students to access their […]