Amazon has officially thrown it's hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?Some are not so sure.In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design "a thing of unsurpassed ugliness." and its "failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom."David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the "F word" as Rothman calls...
Shelfari Stumbles
It looks like things in the book social networking world are heating up.It seems that in their race to gain market share Shelfari has engaged in some pretty dubious behavior including astroturfing (posting on blogs pretending to be users, not employees) and partaking in widespread spamming campaigns.Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing has documented the travesty over at the Thingology blog. The post is titled Shelfari Spam: "basically social network rapists" with the quote coming from a Gawker post on the issue.Before you get into the well he is the competition of course he is going to knock them read the...
Kindle Good, Kindle Bad: Amazon’s New E-Book Reader
Next month Amazon will throw its hat in the e-book reader ring with the release of Kindle.Here is the good part:Kindle is clearly a cut above the existing e-book readers.-Its wireless capabilities allow the user to download content without having to connect to a computer.-It has a keyboard which allows the user to take notes and navigate the web.-It will come loaded with a few freebies like reference books.Now the bad part:With all this great e-book reader 2.0 functionality Amazon shoots itself in the foot by not supporting the open e-book standard that is used by most publishers. Using a...
Another Amazon Outgrowth: The Penny Pinchers
It is no secret that Amazon and has single-handedly corrupted the entire bookselling industry.We have lost 50% of our open bookshops since the birth of online booksellingand it almost impossible for the 50% who are left to be price competitive.Interestingly enough, while the number of open bookshops have been cut in half the amount of people calling themselves booksellers has skyrocketed.Within this tornado little cottage industries have popped up trying to capitalize on the Amazon effect.There is the whole Scoutpal culture where a PDA device and the Amazon database combine to remove much of human element from handling and pricing...
The Shelfari Climb
The big news in the book social networking world this week was Shelfari's announcement that it has created a branded application for Facebook.Facebook is the don of social networking sites and for Shelfari to implant their application in their playing field is a huge step in gaining market share.The recent Publisher's Weekly's article on book social networking sites placedShelfari a distant third in the marketplace behind Goodreads.com and way behind Librarything who were first in.This deal will close the gap considerably. Since the press release Shelfari has already seen record traffic and a record amount of new registrations.And while Shelfari...