Marketing guru Seth Godin has a piece on PaidContent (reposted from his Domino Project blog) responding to an interview with the head of Ingram Books about the future of books and publishing. In the interview, Ingram CEO David “Skip” Prichard trots out some of the usual predictions about the future of the book—multimedia extras, print-on-demand, physical bookstores finding “niches” to adapt to, and print publishers still being necessary. Godin calls Prichard’s views “economically ridiculous,” basing his argument on Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory. Godin suggests that the broad consumer choice the long tail makes possible will drive down production...

On PaidContent, Bill Rosenblatt looks at whether we can ever expect a universal format for e-books, equivalent to “MP3” for audio. He doesn’t think so. For one thing, he points out that MP3s aren’t actually used all that much in digital music sales. Apple uses AAC, which has generally better sound quality. The only major commercial market for MP3s is Amazon, and it only has 10% of the music market. And whereas MP3 had a number of advantages over the competing CD format (in particular, it was much smaller and easier to transfer digitally), EPUB doesn’t offer...

On FutureBook, Richard Stephenson has a brief piece looking at the interactivity now possible in iBooks. Since iBooks 1.5 supports Javascript, this means that e-books can take upon themselves abilities formerly associated with stand-alone appbooks. Stephenson uses the example of the Beatles Yellow Submarine iBook, available for free from the iBookstore, which uses embedded Javascript to add interactivity. He suggests that this interactivity could be a great way for publishers to add additional revenue streams, such as the ability to purchase music from within the Yellow Submarine book. While I will admit that it’s good to see...

I had been planning to leave this story alone for a while, given that it’s not directly about e-books. But Universal made a really dumb move that should remind us all about the dangers of giving the content industry a bigger padlock to slap onto our digital printing presses, whichever medium we use. Remember that Megaupload music video that Universal slapped with a DMCA takedown? Tom Merritt of the daily news video blog Tech News Today covered the controversy on Monday, including the use of a couple of clips of the Megaupload video in question. By Monday night,...

The saga of the Megaupload viral video takedown just got weirder. Universal has responded that several of the artists portrayed in the video did not consent to appearing in it, and Techdirt reports featured artist will.i.am filed a takedown notice of his own for that reason. Megaupload insists that it has contracts for all artists and material featured in the video, so someone on one side or the other is obviously either lying or mistaken. I do wonder why those artists allowed Megaupload to film them singing its praises if they didn’t want Megaupload to use what it filmed....

This story might need to be taken with a grain of salt based on its sources, but it could have some serious implications if true. Megaupload, like Rapidshare, is a cyber-locker site where people can upload files of any kind for others to download. Many of those files are illicitly-copied commercial material, which naturally gives Hollywood, record labels, and publishers (after all, this material does include both e-books and audiobooks) conniptions. Recently, a number of music celebrities recorded a music video in support of Megaupload. This was considered a newsworthy event, and covered by a number of places, but...

Perhaps it’s a sign of how the digitization of media has changed the marketplace that its misuse can be interjected into a complaint over the pricing of traditional media—and misinterpreted. A complaint by Elvis Costello that his record company is pricing his new album too high has been interpreted by BoingBoing and Techdirt to mean he thinks fans should pirate the album. However, the evidence on the site suggests this interpretation is not quite accurate. On the 18th, Costello posted an entry to his blog entitled “Steal This Record.” decrying the price of over $200 for his...

ReDigi, that startup that aimed to allow people to buy and re-sell “used” digital music, has come under fire from the RIAA. Ars Technica reports that the RIAA has sent company a letter demanding that it cease and desist all “infringing activities” and make its records available to the RIAA as evidence. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised; I expected it would come to this when the company announced its plans back in February, let alone when it started buying tracks in October. The company does bend over backward to try to make sure that the resold copies weren’t...

Amazon issued a press release today touting the thousands of apps it will have available for its Kindle Fire. It name-dropped a number of popular apps that will be available through its app store, including “Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio.” It also pointed out that the apps will be 1-click purchasable, and have been tested for Kindle Fire compatibility. Most of the press release is made up of statements from the developers and publishers of the aforementioned apps talking about how awesome it...

TechCrunch reports that digital music resale firm ReDigi, who I mentioned back in February, is actually launching its eMarketplace to allow people to buy and sell “pre-owned” digital music. ReDigi claims that it has consulted with lawyers and determined what it’s doing is legal, but I’m not so sure. ReDigi hopes to succeed where others have failed by designing a marketplace that is not about file sharing, but is instead a method of “facilitating the legal transfer of music between two parties”. Really, the key here is that the startup’s technology is able to actually verify...

More news out of the Supreme Court: today it considered a case in which copyright reformers want to remove thousands of works by foreign authors from the public domain in order to “harmonize” US copyright law with international copyright standards. Ars Technica claims the case rose from the ashes of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the court ruled that Congress was entitled to extend copyright because "when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary." So copyright reformers looked for cases where Congress had changed those contours...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...