Friday News: Music market controlled by four labels; Walmart says no to Kindle; eBook discounts are reaching 97%
Wait, it’s Friday already?
Universal-EMI Merger Could Yield New Mega-Label To Threaten The Future Of Music – Did the internet ruin record labels? I mean, Napster, Pandora, the decline of the CD and the rise of the low priced single heralded the end of labels, right? Apparently not. The four largest record labels currently control about 90 percent of the music market and FTC is considering whether to agree to a merger between Universal and EMI which would place control over 40% of the music market in the hands of one business. Huffington Post
Wal-Mart says it will no longer be selling Amazon’s Kindle – First it was Target and now it is Wal-Mart who is refusing to carry any Kindles for Amazon. In store displays are a fairly important part of buying an electronic as can be seen by Apple’s success and Microsoft following with its stores. B&N has an edge. Will this push Amazon into some sort of physical retailing? My guess is no. Instead, Amazon will ramp up its same day delivery services so that people can buy and return on the same day with no hassle. That sort of business seems more in line with their philosophies.
In the memo, Wal-Mart said the decision was consistent with its overall merchandising strategy. While Wal-Mart dwarfs other retailers in overall sales, it trails Amazon and others online and has been stepping up efforts to increase its presence there. Consumers who buy Kindle tablets such as the new Kindle Fire HD can shop on the devices for more than just digital books, pushing Amazon into further competition with stores. NBC
BBC News – ‘Wife of Jesus’ reference in Coptic 4th Century script – Oh the fiction that this find will fuel. A papyrus in a private collection which experts are deeming to be authentic has references to Jesus’ wife (presumed to be the reformed prostitute Mary Magdelene) but also that MM was worthy of being a disciple. BBC News
Ebook price war sees discounts reach 97% – Authors are worried that extreme discounting may lead to public perceptions that books should only be a certain price. This news follows the last weeks’ reports that ebook prices were rising after the fall of agency pricing. I wasn’t aware that Sony was discounting heavily as well.
Sony responded: Peter Shea, general manager for Sony Digital Reading Services, said the retailer recognised “that there is a concern about a perceived devaluation of ebooks”, and that it chose the price point of 20p for some titles “as we see this as such a significant discount off list price that consumers can appreciate it is not the ‘new price of ebooks’.” Guardian
All Romance eBook Survey – All Romance eBooks is running a survey on readers and digital books. The ladies who run ARE give speeches and talks at digital publishing conferences all over the world so this is important for us to participate in.
I took the ARE survey – it was quick and painless – and I hope your other readers will take it too.
OMG! Thanks for the memories of late nights with cheap wine and too much smoke in the air that led to long and often heated discussions about Mary Magdelene. Could she have been the wife of Jesus or married to Jesus and consequently really a nun or just a Jesus groupie or, if I could only remember, some other very funny answers to who she was. (not a religious statement, just a walk down girl-school memory lane!)
Actually, while the picture of Mary of Magdala as a prostitute has endured in popular culture, it is not correct. She was the woman from whom seven demons were expelled and who ministered to Jesus and the disciples, witnessed the crucifixion, etc. She was mistakenly identified as the penitent woman of Luke 7 at some point in history, but that woman is not named, and there is no basis for identifying them as one and the same.
Kris beat me to it. Magdalene was not a prostitute.
@kris fletcher – Thanks! You beat me to it! It’s always bothered me how poor Mary Magdalene got a bum rap as a a former prostitute because some Medieval Pope I believe, confused the two.
LOL, Christine and Moriah. Maybe we should form a Mary Magdalene Defense Society.
Funny you post about Mary Magdalene – was just checking Netgalley and new release listed, Daughter of Jerusalem by Joan Wolf. Clearly written before this news broke, but might be interesting to see what Wolf does with the subject.
@kris fletcher: I think there may be a few already and I would gladly join.
What has dismayed me the most are the out-of-the-gate reactions of “nope, not gonna happen, can’t be, the church says no.” I was taught to question because knowledge and faith can be found in the answers. If this is true, the earth will continue to spin on its axis and nothing and everything will have changed.
Off to take the ARE survey.
Also, the idea that Mary Magdalene might have been the wife of Jesus isn’t exactly a new one. Hello, Dan Brown!
@Jackie It’s a lot older than that. Foucault’s Pendulum. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And probably a hundred years before that. (All that said, I grew up with the concept, so it’s not a barn-burner for me. IMO, it was celibacy that made no sense.)
If I remember correctly, the manuscript in question (about Jesus having a wife) is dated to the 4th Century. The only impact it would have is to confirm that some early Christians believed Jesus had a wife. This isn’t an eye-witness account. So it simply continues the debate, it doesn’t prove one side or the other. No reason to get upset either way. ;-) But you’re right, there will be lots of books written about it, and they won’t all be fiction. (Or at least they won’t mean to be!)
Whenever I hear of these “historical finds” in the news, I think about David Macaulay’s excellent book, Motel of the Mysteries. It’s a hilarious and brilliantly illustrated children’s book about a future archeologist’s discovery of a “burial tomb” from 1985 and his interpretations of how humans lived based on the items in the room. One of my anthropology professor’s recommended to all of his students because it illustrates so cleverly that historians and archeologists don’t always have the correct answers.
On the wife of Jesus story, quite a few books have already supported this position mainly from late Gnostic texts but also by Judaic history scholars speculating on the history of the time. It will be interesting to follow this new development to see if the fragment is authentic and then the following debate.
One thing many, maybe most, scholars agree on these days is that Mary Magdalen and the prostitute & stoning incident are not the same woman, stemming from an ancient misinterpretation.
Many scholars, although not everyone, agree that Mary M. was indeed a dear disciple at the least. Jesus had women followers and supporters at a time when women were segregated from men in synagogue and otherwise.