Tag Archives: books

Let's Watch Where This Goes

Barnes and Noble just opened a digital audiobook store. From Publisher’s Weekly:

Barnes & Noble has taken another step in deepening its role in the digital marketplace, launching its Audiobook MP3 Store on Barnes & Noble.com. The store will feature spokenword audiobook MP3s available for download and transfer to iPods, iPhones, MP3 players and other portable devices. The site is launching with more than 10,000 titles across all genres, priced between $10 and $20 per download.

“As the use of MP3 players, iPods, iPhones and other digital devices continues to increase, it is important for Barnes & Noble to continue to expand our audio selections,” said Tom Burke, executive v-p, E-Commerce Barnes & Noble. Overdrive is managing the distribution of titles through the BN.com site. Later this year, B&N is expected to launch an e-bookstore, following its acquisition earlier this year of Fictionwise.

And it’s all DRM-free.

I wonder what that new e-bookstore is going to look like.

Something for Nothing Can Make You Something

Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired.

I don’t expect that to draw you in for a very exciting post. What I do want to share with you is that he believes that the future of commerce and business, especially over the Internet, is in giving things away for free. An article about this very subject was the cover story in Wired about a year ago, and Anderson is writing a book that will be out in July called, simply, Free.

Pay attention to this one, because it’s possibly very revolutionary and is likely to turn some heads. He thinks you should be giving stuff away in order to make money.

He’s not necessarily talking about the Gilette model, either:

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

As examples, he mentions that after experimenting with paid content, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are now free to read on the Web (excepting some information in WSJ). At the time of this writing, I can even browse NYT on my iPod touch, using an application they wrote that is also free to download.

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I Cannot Resist Peer Pressure, So Here's That Book Meme

I normally avoid memes like the plague, but I’ve seen it pop up three times in my RSS reader since this afternoon, and I’m waiting for a download to complete, so—eh—whatever:

(But I will spare some of you by placing this off the front page.)

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