Comments on: Jobs and e-books: The Guardian’s take

By: pond

pond — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:38:52 +0000

The iTunes Store has just put up their first ebook for sale — a comic book compendium called Mayhem. Included for the buck-ninety-nine is the book, some making of videos, a song or two (‘cos it’s from a musician) and a couple other comics.

That’s what I read at least. The framework seems to be the new ‘LP’ platform Apple announced this week. Out of the 9 albums available in the new format (only 9? what’s wrong?) one is the comic.

Interesting, eh?

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:40:16 +0000

Selling books… even e-books… isn’t the same as selling music. Just because Apple is selling one kind of media, does not mean they will necessarily sell others. At any rate, the e-book field leaves itself open to independents, perhaps more than music, leaving plenty of room to sell e-books inside and outside of Apple.

Apple is a leading provider of e-reading devices, just like every PC manufacturer and most phone manufacturers are right now. If our formats truly standardize to open formats like ePub, leaving the market to be defined by inventive hardware solutions, I doubt any one manufacturer will be able to dominate the digital product end of the market seriously. But Apple can still maintain a prominent position with popular hardware.

By: Josep

Josep — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:56:41 +0000

Please stop using the same image for apple tablet. It’s getting annoying to see it every day.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:13:41 +0000

Thanks for your thoughts, Aaron. If ePub continues going momentum, then Apple may not have any choice but to offer it.

I totally agree with you about the iPod and in fact worked a mention of it into our just-posted item on which Sony to buy (if any).

Thanks,
David

By: Aaron Pressman

Aaron Pressman — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:04:49 +0000

I think the real question about Apple that Telereaders care about is whether the company will start selling ebooks itself, perhaps in yet another proprietary format, out of the iTunes store.

Because regardless of what Steve Jobs says, Apple is already a leading provider of ereaders. On the iPhone/iPod Touch you can choose from a bunch of different formats/retailers including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Scrollmotion and more. The upcoming Apple tablet will extend that platform even further.

What does everybody think? And would it even matter?