Exact Editions Blog

The New York Times has been stealth developing a new format for its daily news. TechCrunch has a summary. The horizontal, grid-like layout is reminiscent of the Google Fast Flip, but I buy the suggestion in the TechCrunch comments that this format is being readied for the putative Apple iTablet computer, aka slate device.

That could well be; and it would make sense for Apple to launch the Tablet with something like the NYT as a core offering … Keep Reading

We sometimes think that we have heard them all. The reasons for not having a digital edition of a magazine….

But we are still finding some surprising responses in the market. And I do not mean:

• We will want to do a digital edition when we have sorted out our web site (I mean web sites are never, ever, in that sense ‘sorted out’).
• We will want to look at this when our publisher is back from her maternity leave

There are a few reasons for thinking that the iPhone’s App Store may become the next and best digital book store. These are a few of the reasons that occur to me:

• iTunes is already the most important digital music store and the AppStore is inheriting a lot of the momentum and the kharma of the iTunes e-commerce system
• the iPhone App Store is already a pretty good App Store and seems to be building Apple a possibly dominant position

The pace of change in the books space is hotting up. Two weeks ago Amazon announced that its Kindle will be internationally available. Google last week at Frankfurt announced its Google Editions proposition (or perhaps we should say they re-announced it). In three weeks Google has an appointment with Judge Chin on November 9, to re-present its much discussed Google Books Search Settlement. Techcrunch had a piece on 24 Android phones (some of which are admittedly merely rumoured, … Keep Reading

It looks as though Google has decided that it is going to get the Google Books Settlement that it wants (and I suspect that a large part of the American public want it too). Google is just going to push it through as close as it can to the original proposition. There were, after all, two ways of interpreting the decisive and late intervention from the DoJ. According to Michael Cairns it gives a blueprint for how the original Settlement … Keep Reading