Here are a couple of recent shots fired across the bow of e-book readers and content aggregators.
In a conference call, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch called e-book readers, tablets, and smartphones “lifeless” without the kind of print or video content that News Corp. can provide.
“Content isn’t just King anymore but rather the emperor of all things electronic,” he said. Bigger and flatter screens are nice, but without the content, the devices will be “unloved and unsold.”
Update: News Corp. also owns “big six” publisher Harper-Collins, and Gizmodo reports Murdoch said, “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.”
And here’s the deathblow: Murdoch says News Corp‘s deal with Apple “does allow some flexibility and higher prices” and now Amazon’s willing to renegotiate.
It seems likely that the first domino has fallen: look for the other publishers to follow Macmillan into an agency model sooner rather than later.
Murdoch also said that the Wall Street Journal’s subscription model is doing well, and is the model that others are trying to emulate. Murdoch has been well known for his opinion that Google News and other such aggregators are freeloading on the efforts of news content providers.
Meanwhile, in a keynote address, maverick media mogul Mark Cuban echoed some of the same kind of rhetoric. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.”
Cuban urged news sites to “show some balls” and block Google News from indexing them. He also panned the Kindle for “[looking] like a first-generation product that has no future” but was much more positive about the iPad.
Personally, I have long hoped that some of these news sites would block Google News and stop complaining, so they could see for themselves what effect it had on their traffic and ad revenues.
(We previously covered a proposal by Mark Cuban that newspapers should offer their on-line versions exclusively to cable TV subscribers.)
Am I the only one who thinks it’s ironic that paper publishers say screen technologies aren’t good enough because they don’t do well what paper doesn’t do at all?
Rob Preece
Publisher