-Ventajas económicas de la producción y la distribución digital
-Ahorro de papel, tinta, y transporte
-precios más bajos
- nuevas pantallas de alta resolución con mayor resistencia al trato físico (vizplex)
-nuevos softwares que facilitan la navegación y el marcado de paginas, el subrayado de texto, ademas la posibilidad de poder realizar anotaciones en los margenes.
-almacenamiento de cientos de libros en pequeños dispositivos
Brad Stone y Motoko Rich. The New York Times, "El libro electrónico está aquí para quedarse"
The New York Times
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Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement
By BRAD STONE
Update | 7:01 p.m. Amazon relents and is selling Macmillan books again.
Update | 2:39 p.m. Adding reporting from Motoko Rich, the Times reporter covering the publishing industry, on Macmillan’s side of the dispute.
As Venture Beat and other blogs have noticed Friday evening, books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, have vanished from Amazon.com.
The question is why.
I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store. Its imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt. The publisher’s books can still be bought from third parties on the Amazon site.
Apple, as we’ve reported before, will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. It’s not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. I’ve spoken to two antitrust lawyers who say it could raise legal issues.
Motoko Rich, my colleague, spoke with a person who had a direct conversation with a person at Macmillan familiar with the conversations with Amazon. Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.
Macmillan has not yet returned a request for comment. Amazon refused to comment.
Update | 2:39 p.m. Adding reporting from Motoko Rich, the Times reporter covering the publishing industry, on Macmillan’s side of the dispute.
As Venture Beat and other blogs have noticed Friday evening, books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, have vanished from Amazon.com.
The question is why.
I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store. Its imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt. The publisher’s books can still be bought from third parties on the Amazon site.
Apple, as we’ve reported before, will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. It’s not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. I’ve spoken to two antitrust lawyers who say it could raise legal issues.
Motoko Rich, my colleague, spoke with a person who had a direct conversation with a person at Macmillan familiar with the conversations with Amazon. Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.
Macmillan has not yet returned a request for comment. Amazon refused to comment.
El Kindle es una tecnología digital desarrollada por Amazon, que permitirá al lector abordar de nuevos
Kindle Owners' Lending Library
Read for free. With Prime, Kindle owners can borrow any title from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for free, as frequently as a book a month, with no waiting and no due dates. The Kindle Owners' Lending Library features over 180,000 titles, including all 7 Harry Potter books, and over 100 current and former New York Times best sellers.
El periodista y editor Jacob Weisberb, antaño escéptico ante el libro electrónico, ahora elogia al Kindle.
Curling Up With A Good Screen
Why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so?
I'm doing my best not to become a kindle bore. when I catch myself evangelizing to someone who couldn't care less about the marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon's reading machine—I can take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the morning paper without getting out of bed!—I pause and remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four records because he wasn't really that into music.
So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. Like early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. And like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its limitations—the black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. The marketplace will mutate and mature. Sony and Google have already announced a new challenge to Amazon's leadership. But however the technology evolves, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
Though the PC and the Internet taught us all to read on screens, they have not actually improved the experience of reading. I remember Bill Gates, back in Slate's Microsoft years, mentioning in an interview that he read our Webzine printed out—a tribute that underscored an inherent flaw. For all their advantages in creating and distributing texts, screens have compromised, rather than enhanced, the feeling of losing oneself in a writer's universe. You can't curl up with a laptop. Until now, Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best available technology for reading at length, or for pleasure.
The Kindle is not better than a printed book in all situations. You wouldn't want to read an art book on one, or a picture book to your children, or take one into the tub (please). But for the past few weeks, I've done most of my recreational reading on the Kindle—David Grann's adventure yarn "The Lost City of Z," Marilynne Robinson's novel "Home," Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times—and can honestly say I prefer it to inked paper. It provides a fundamentally better experience, and will surely produce a radically better one with coming iterations.
The notion that physical books are ending their life cycle is upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with literature, and terrifying to those who make their living within the existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever-crappier paper, with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.
As to the fate of book publishers, there's less reason to be optimistic. Amazon, which is selling Kindle books at a loss to get everyone hooked, will eventually want to make money on them. The publishers will be squeezed at best and disintermediated at worst. Amazon is already testing the idea of becoming a paperless publisher itself. It recently released a Kindle-only book by Stephen King. In the future, it could become the only publisher a bestselling author needs. In a world without the high fixed costs of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter-weight model of publishing emerges.
What we should worry about is that the current system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there's also a chance it could allow more writers make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just as Gutenberg did.
So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. Like early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. And like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its limitations—the black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. The marketplace will mutate and mature. Sony and Google have already announced a new challenge to Amazon's leadership. But however the technology evolves, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
Though the PC and the Internet taught us all to read on screens, they have not actually improved the experience of reading. I remember Bill Gates, back in Slate's Microsoft years, mentioning in an interview that he read our Webzine printed out—a tribute that underscored an inherent flaw. For all their advantages in creating and distributing texts, screens have compromised, rather than enhanced, the feeling of losing oneself in a writer's universe. You can't curl up with a laptop. Until now, Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best available technology for reading at length, or for pleasure.
The Kindle is not better than a printed book in all situations. You wouldn't want to read an art book on one, or a picture book to your children, or take one into the tub (please). But for the past few weeks, I've done most of my recreational reading on the Kindle—David Grann's adventure yarn "The Lost City of Z," Marilynne Robinson's novel "Home," Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times—and can honestly say I prefer it to inked paper. It provides a fundamentally better experience, and will surely produce a radically better one with coming iterations.
The notion that physical books are ending their life cycle is upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with literature, and terrifying to those who make their living within the existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever-crappier paper, with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.
As to the fate of book publishers, there's less reason to be optimistic. Amazon, which is selling Kindle books at a loss to get everyone hooked, will eventually want to make money on them. The publishers will be squeezed at best and disintermediated at worst. Amazon is already testing the idea of becoming a paperless publisher itself. It recently released a Kindle-only book by Stephen King. In the future, it could become the only publisher a bestselling author needs. In a world without the high fixed costs of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter-weight model of publishing emerges.
What we should worry about is that the current system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there's also a chance it could allow more writers make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just as Gutenberg did.
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