There was an interesting overview of reader privacy issues in this week's Guardian. I wonder if most e-book readers have given any thought to the issue. I bet it hasn't even crossed their minds that the customer profile Amazon or Kobo or Sony might have on them—detailing what they've purchased, and when—would be valuable to someone. And if they did see the value (I myself find Amazon's recommendations engine both useful and surprisingly accurate), I wonder if it's crossed their minds that this information could potentially be shared once Amazon has it. As the article points out: "Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon...

I’ve been a bit too busy to write for the last few days, so I went to catch up on some stories I missed covering. For starters, here’s one that seems to have little to do with e-books at first, but does have to do with the difference between physical and electronic media causing problems of legislation. In 1988, a reporter obtained copies of Judge Robert Bork’s movie rental information from a video rental store. This disclosure spurred Congress to pass the Video Privacy Protection Act, which required rental stores to obtain written consent every time they wanted to...

Here’s another new media magnate warning old media that the time is nigh to ditch the old print and jump into the new electronic world. Harvey Levin, founder of entertainment news site TMZ.com, spoke at the National Press Club on Monday where he told newspaper and magazine publishers to get out of the print business and get on the web. As the Washington Post points out, it does take some chutzpah for Levin to issue prescriptions to traditional news media, given that most celebrity gossip isn’t exactly Pulitzer-quality journalism. But on the other hand, in the six years since...

The major publishers seem to be desperate to hold onto printed books for as long as they can, doing everything possible to try to make e-books less attractive than print books. (Though to what extent they’re really doing this has long been a subject for debate. Consumer complaints aside, even agency-priced e-books still seem to be selling pretty well.) But what might it look like if they went the other way—shoved the New Media throttle wide and cut the rope to the Old Media barge they’re towing? It might look more than a little like what Reed Hastings is...

Sometimes I think you can make e-reading news out of just about anything. Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics, has taken a look at the recent Netflix price hike in an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog, and compares Netflix’s attempts to shift customers to digital streaming and away from costly physical media to newspapers’ attempts to move customers on-line and away from costly print media. (Mathew Ingram also has a piece analyzing Doctor’s analysis on GigaOm.) Doctor’s piece is long and involved, going into detail on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s strategy. It also discusses newspaper publishers’...

And speaking of cloud-based subscription models for e-reading, Publishing Perspectives has another company-founder-written column. Justo Hidalgo, co-founder of 24Symbols (which we covered here and here), writes about the cloud-based subscription model of his company and how he believes it can turn pirates into paying customers. Hidalgo points out that the music and movie industries have shown that trying to fight piracy is a fairly futile, and that pirates are usually dedicated fans who want more control over the way they consume their media. (Which makes sense, really—why would you pirate something you didn’t want?) He thinks that publishers...

Scribd is launching an iPhone app called the Float Reader, through which it hopes to become “the Netflix of reading.” Unfortunately, I can’t try this app out on my first-gen iPod Touch—it requires iOS 4.0—but from the news coverage it looks like an interesting attempt to bring some of the benefits of iPad-only reader apps like Flipboard to the smaller smartphone interface. The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or...

Netflix recently caused a stir when it decided to split its formerly-all-inclusive, DVD-rental-plus-streaming subscription fee into two separate subscriptions, effectively nearly doubling the price to those who wished to continue both streaming and receiving DVDs. A number of Netflix subscribers have been up in arms over this change. Gizmodo points out that this shows demand for DVDs is still tenacious—perhaps more so than Netflix expected when it bet so heavily on the streaming future. It costs Netflix as much as 75 cents each time it rents a DVD through the mail, while it may only cost 5 to 10...

FutureBook reports that UK mobile company Orange released an Orange Book Club Android app, allowing customers to browse and download thousands of books, billing them directly to their Orange mobile accounts. However, an iOS version of the application is nowhere to be found. It turns out that Orange submitted the iOS app at the same time as Apple announced its in-app purchasing policy change, requiring applications to direct in-app purchases through the app store, to the tune of a 30% cut of the revenue. An Orange spokeswoman said, "Orange had submitted the Apple app at the same...

Its name starts with a “B”, and new methods of media distribution drove it into bankruptcy. No, not that one. The other one. Blockbuster, which filed for bankruptcy back in September, is now putting itself up for sale to try to “accelerate our Chapter 11 proceedings and move the company forward.” It claims to have a $290 million offer by a group of its debt holders, but wants to see if anyone else might be interested. It’s interesting to compare the cases of Borders and Blockbuster. As I mentioned above, both of them were driven to bankruptcy in...

A question came up on a message board I frequent, about whether an ebook reader can help you lose weight. I have been using the text to speech feature on my Kindle while I walk (in fact, this feature was a selling point for me as I am not a music fan) but that has not been as part of a structured fitness program per se. I am a transit user, but my bus ride home only saves about 15 minutes over a walk, so if the weather is nice, I am happy to take in the scenery. That's more...

Received the following email from B. Scott Andersen and I thought it should be brought to your attention: Slashdot has a pointer to an article on TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/17/hollywood-dvd-rentals/ that quotes Paramount Home Entertainment President Dennis Maguire about Paramount's reversal of their policy of "windowing" (delaying) new releases to DVD rental outfits like Redbox. The following is from the article: Why is Paramount taking such an old school stance? Because they actually did some tests and realized these stupid windows will do nothing to help them sell more DVDs. Imagine that. And it’s not just that — giving new releases to services like Redbox have actually...