This article was written by Rob Reynolds and originally published on 7/1/10 at http://blog.xplana.com/2010/07/e-books-smartphones-and-entertainment/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are e-books, smartphones, and entertainment. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.
(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)
The news today is all about e-readers and smartphones, and it begins with a number of Amazon announcements. Most interesting among these is Amazon’s new 70% royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform.

The new royalty option basically means that for each book sold from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Android phones, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, net of delivery costs. Those costs are based on file size (pricing is set at $0.15/MB), and Amazon claims today’s median DTP file size to be 368KB, which means delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold.

Obviously, this program is designed to attract more publishers and, more important, self-publishing authors. On that note, you may have wondered (like me) how self-published authors should determine a fair price for their e-books. This article provides a nice pricing breakdown for such indie books and, when you take out all the real and value-related costs/variables, you end up with a range of range of $0.99-2.99.
Back to Amazon, the company also rolled out a new version of its Kindle DX, this one with a 50% higher-contrast screen and a price knocked down to $380. And, Amazon is also introducing Web-based previews of its Kindle books. “Continuing it’s e-books everywhere approach to digital reading, the company announced Wednesday in a blog post that it would soon offer a product called ‘Kindle Previewer for HTML 5′ that will allow readers to view samples of books directly from within a Web browser.”
Yes indeed, it’s been an eventful week for Amazon, but take note that Google has been doing its fair share of ‘positioning’ for the e-book future. Both companies are pushing a “buy-once-play-anywhere” strategy and are forming alliances to promote themselves as the default option for buying digital books.The main strategy for Google Editions is to become an ally with the “little guy,” the local bookstore. “Lost in the midst of the Ebook wars between Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony are the independent bookstores who don’t have the clout to bang with the big boys. Not for long, they’re looking for help—from Google. Google is on the verge of striking a deal with the American Booksellers Association, home to 1400 independent bookstores, which will make Google Editions, Google’s upcoming ebook platform, the primary source of e-books on all those bookstores’ Web sites.”
Along with Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Google are all battling for the preferred e-book purchase/distribution ecosystem. To date, Amazon has the lead with Barnes and Noble playing runner-up. The competition will begin in earnest with the launch of Google Editions, however, and by this time next year we will have a pretty good idea of how the contest will play out.
The big buzz in smartphones this week was the rumor that Verizon would be offering an iPhone in the coming year. This has led different analysts to predict the impact of multiple iPhone carriers, and one has predicted that Apple would sell 12 million iPhones to Verizon subscribers and earn an additional $7 billion. Google seemed unfazed by these rumors and CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview this week that Google “is now activating 160,000 Android phones a day, up from only 100,000 a day in mid-May—indicating a monthly growth rate of 60 percent. At this rate, Google is activating 4.8 million devices a month and nearly 15 million a quarter. The trajectory is astounding considering that it was activating only 60,000 a day in February, but still pales in comparison to Apple, which reported 600,000 iPhone 4 orders in a single day last week.”
As you might imagine, the surge in smartphone growth doesn’t bode well for feature phones.

Trends captured by AdMob’s latest data “reinforce my concerns about companies such as Nokia, which rely on a broad range of feature phones — with a particular focus on emerging countries, no less — to offset a lagging smartphone strategy. While smartphones currently account for a small percentage of overall worldwide handset sales, they show the most growth — 48 percent in the first quarter of 2010 over the same quarter a year prior, reports Gartner — and potential as hardware prices decline. The most worrisome example of a feature phone strategy in upcoming regions is evident in AdMob’s look at worldwide operating system share.

Finally, for a little enjoyment, check out our most recent cartoon and InfoGrab video.

urrent News

Faster Forward - Microsoft's Kin smartphone: No, it kin't 44 mins ago
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Toshiba Book Place full-color e-book store is powered by Blio, launches soon (video) -- Engadget 4 hours ago
Copia Offers New Reading Devices, New Prices 5 hours ago

InfoGrab
July 1st, 2010 - InfoGrab is a mosaic of current statistics on technology, culture, and education, tied together in thought-provoking ways. This week, the InfoGrab mosaic is pieced together with information about the new iPhone, the eBook market, and Windows Read Article

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Weekly Research Index

June 25th, 2010 - Welcome to our Weekly Research Index, where we list links and summaries of the salient articles we have bookmarked this week. This list is culled and edited from our ongoing Delicious feed, which is also available via this blog. This Index is divided into broad categories based on our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. This week saw lots of media attention paid to iPad sales and the iPhone launch. There were also some strong pieces on Higher Education and pedagogy Read Article

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