Thursday News: Apple settlement details revealed, Amazon’s “Kindle Unlimited,” online media & reader attention, and book cover quiz
Publishing NewsAmazon / Apple / book-covers / collusion / digital lending / digital publishing / Ebooks / media / quiz / reader engagement / settlement13 Comments
Apple in $400m settlement over e-book price fixing – It seems that it’s either feast or famine in the news arena, and this week it’s feast, so I’ve had to pick and choose which stories to highlight today. First up, the terms of Apple’s proposed settlement in the collusion case have been released. If Judge Cote accepts the settlement, it will mean up to $400 million paid out by Apple direct to consumers. As the Washington Post pointed out, if Apple’s pending appeal results in a reversal of Judge Cote’s ruling, Apple may owe consumers anything from $0 to $50 million.
If approved by a judge, the $400m will go to consumers. Apple will pay an additional $20m in legal fees.
“In a major victory, our settlement has the potential to result in Apple paying hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers to compensate them for paying unlawfully inflated e-book price,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who announced the settlement ahead of a damages trial that was set to begin on 25 August. –BBC News
Amazon’s Prepping a “Kindle Unlimited” Subscription Service For Books – So once again Amazon set the Internet afire (hahaha) with an *ahem* apparently unintentional posting of “test pages” for a new service in direct competition to lending programs like Oyster. Promising “unlimited” lending (or, more properly, “renting”) for $9.99 a month, including audiobooks, which are currently not supported by Oyster, the program may or may not overlap directly with the current Prime Lending Library included in Prime members’ yearly fee (currently $99/year). There’s also a video up at YouTube.
The current Kindle Owner’s Lending Library has a one-book-per-month cap, so this could be an option for Prime users who want more access. The Kindle Unlimited test pages also offer around 8,000 audiobooks, something the current lending library doesn’t have. And the promo banners for Kindle Unlimited said subscribers could access their books from “any” device. This likely means any device that supports the Kindle app, like iOS, Android, and Windows phone. –Gizmodo
The news about reader attention and the evolution of media isn’t all bad — there’s the “hill of Wow” – I love this post from Gigaom, in large part because it provides what I think is a very astute and helpful analysis of the dual faceted treatment of information and opinions expressed online. While shareability is a huge draw for many, and does, unfortunately, result in a much more shallow engagement with the information being shared, there is also much deeper engagement with long form articles that speaks of a much more thoughtful and careful consideration and analysis of content and related issues. Although we tend to focus more on the first (perhaps because it’s easier to spot), the possibility that the second is contributing to a stronger online foundation is certainly heartening.
So what we really have are two versions of the online-media world, both of which exist at the same time: one is the noisy, click-driven, social-sharing ecosystem, which favors speed and shareability — and is more noticeable because of all the Like buttons and Favorite meters and other share-tracking widgets — and the other is a deeper and less noticeable ecosystem of longform articles that people actually read, and likely get shared through slower forms of media such as email newsletters and what some have called “dark social.”
Borthwick argues (and I share this view) that businesses or people who focus on the right-hand side of the chart embedded above — the “hill of Wow,” in other words — may not rack up the huge pageview numbers or highly-visible sharing statistics, but ultimately they will build stronger businesses. As Betaworks data scientist Suman Deb Roy puts it in a quote that Borthwick includes: “The landscape of media content diffusion… is a hill-valley-hill of attention, and you’d probably do better sitting on the right hand hill. People sitting on the left hill appear to be more visible, but there are people on the right hill too. And the latter is growing.” –Gigaom
Guess a Book By Its Cover 2: A Quiz – I’ve seen a few discussions about book covers lately, and when I ran across this post, it seemed apropos. How many of these famous covers do you recognize, and are there certain cover images you’re more likely to notice and remember? –Book Riot
I got 7/20 on the book cover quiz and I missed one I should have gotten considering I’d read the book…
I only recognize three of them and I’m not sure which Seuss book that is) . Clearly mostly drawn from lit fic and/or mainstream fic, aka not stuff I spend a lot of time reading.
I might be up for a $10/month library subscription, but it has to have the majority of books I decide to read, which is not true of the on-line collection of my hometown library. The Kindle Owners’ library is so useless I never use it.
I agree with SAO. I’ll sign up like a flash for this new service if it has most or all of the content I want. But if I’m limited to what’s available now in the Kindle Owner’s Library, then forget it! I struggle to find something worth reading there once a month. I certainly wouldn’t pay for what’s available now.
After clicking through multiple links and reading about various attempts to measure time/engagement, I still can’t tell if Upworthy’s measure is primarily about video consumption or if it includes longform text to any great degree (their own discussion refers to video). And I don’t see how GigaOm knows that the “hill of Wow” is growing, or at what rate (if it’s a small absolute number, then obviously even if it doubles in size that absolute size stays small).
@Isobel Carr: Same here. I’m in my own little romance book world most of the time.
@Karenmc: I read a lot of SFF and mystery, too. I’m an unrepentant genre fan.
I recognized 7 of the covers, but considering some of those books have changed covers at least once over time, I can’t say its the greatest quiz idea. (I’m rereading 12. I don’t recall ever seeing that version of the cover.)
@Sunita: As you know, there’s a long chain of entities and articles and research projects here, including a post by Mike Hudack and a post on The Verge to Borthwick’s post on Medium, which is essentially what Gigaom is pulling from (https://medium.com/makers-perspective/you-gotta-read-this-59e07bdf9cd1). All of that seems to be connected to the Alexis Madrigal article in The Atlantic Moriah Jovan tweeted this morning (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/#comments). In fact, Borthwick references Madrigal right at the beginning of his article. Borthwick is CEO of betaworks, which includes Chartbeat, on whose data both Madrigal and Borthwick seem to rely.
Anyway, I note all this to say that I *think* (and god knows I could be wrong) that it’s Borthwick who’s making the claim re. the hill of wow, and that Ingram is just referencing it in the Gigaom piece. In fact, looking closer it seems like Suman Deb Roy, a betaworks data researcher, seems to have made the claim. Which may not make it any more reliable, although it seems to be coming out of their ongoing research. I don’t know about the Upworthy graphic, beyond how the The Verge and Borthwick treat it (although, like you, I clicked through to the article and caught the video reference), but here’s another Gigaom article that links their research to a broader mission: http://gigaom.com/2014/02/06/whats-the-best-way-to-measure-attention-online-upworthy-thinks-it-has-the-answer/. At the very least there seems to be a fair amount of overlap among all of these research projects, which, for a non-scientist like me, means I’m just trying to follow the dots.
I missed a number of the covers for books I own in digital form, I guess because I really don’t pay attention to ebook covers. (But I do get pissed if they’re not provided. Go figure.) I did marginally better for books I own, or have seen frequently, in paper.
Like others, I’ll reserve judgement on the Kindle subscription thingy. It has the potential to be good, especially with the audiobook component.
I have to agree with others, if this is just essentially giving non-prime members access to the Kindle Owner’s Library it is not worth it to me.
@Amanda: What I *hope* is that it includes audiobooks, which for me, would be a huge selling point. I currently belong to Prime, plus I pay $15/month through Audible for one credit. Now, a lot of Kindle books come with a “but the audiobook for only a few dollars more” offer, but $9.99 for unlimited access to audiobooks? THAT would hook me, for sure.
@Robin/Janet: Thanks for that Medium link, I missed that one when I was clicking through. The “reading more and for longer” comes from data use of the Instapaper app. Which is interesting, but if you’ve downloaded Instapaper you’ve already decided you want to read articles. And the two that are growing the most (leaving out the two that started v. small so have huge percentage increases) are the NY Times and the Guardian. That seems to me to signal time-shifting, which is not unimportant (people are still reading, which is good), but which I find less Wow than they do. Basically, Instapaper app users still read articles in the newspaper, they just read them from a saved file.
I agree the Dark Social concept and article are fascinating and deserve more research.