Disqus - Latest Comments for ampressman

Re: What the New York Times Missed: 71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century

ampressman — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 21:36:45 -0000

Glad to see Suzanne Clarke’s footnote besotted epic and Jeff Vandermeer’s stunningly original novel here. But Killing Commendatore should be the Murakami pick. And no love for William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition?

Re: Chromebook

ampressman — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:32:08 -0000

The Pixelbook is one sexy beast and I appreciate the tablet mode when I get into lean back reading mode. It works fine sitting on a desk plugged into a big monitor, too, via the Moshi USB-C dock. And this is my savior for Chrome password management: https://blog.agilebits.com/...

Re: My Wishlist: What I Want in the Fujifilm X Pro 3

ampressman — Sat, 25 Aug 2018 11:09:17 -0000

BT connection for GPS on every shot.

Re: The dominance of Amazon needs to be addressed but it is far more attributable to natural circumstances than it is anybody’s fault

ampressman — Tue, 08 May 2018 11:10:21 -0000

I truly thought David Leonhardt's piece was going to close with the fictional catch phrase from the movie You've Got Mail: "Save the Shop Around the Corner and you will save your soul." Of course, that movie was a loosely fictionalized account of how B&N terrorized the indy bookstores back in the 1990s, making the current lionization of B&N more than a bit ironic. "In the 1990s heyday of the superstore, Barnes & Noble reigned supreme, expanding its reach rapidly and dazzling customers with an enormous array of books and steep discounts that smaller, independent stores could not match." - from 2010 https://www.nytimes.com/201... (which also quotes a wise industry player by the name of Shatzkin). B&N later pulled those discounts after wiping out much of the competition. Amazon has kept its print discounts in place since the beginning, encouraging more book buying.

The Leonhardt piece is also fact-challenged. Amazon sells virtually no ebooks for $9.99 and publishers set the prices of all ebooks under agency pricing in any event. The notion that Amazon's retail discounts on print books, which it absorbs on its P/L, somehow reduces the amount of royalties back to authors, set by publishers, is also debatable, at best. The death of the mid-list author, also somehow Amazon's fault, has been a disturbing trend for decades now and has a lot more to do with economies of scale in distribution, marketing and promotion brought on by the massive consolidation of the publishing industry. (see this 1998 piece for example https://www.sfgate.com/ente... I'm not sure, but it sure seems like the self-publishing market, largely backed by Amazon, would help smaller selling and part time authors get back in the game after big publishing left them out.

Regulation of Amazon may or may not be a good idea, but I think we should start by acknowledging that it is not to blame for many (most?) of the current ills of the book trade and has done much to promote reading and book buying.

Re: Airpods (continued)

ampressman — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 08:38:09 -0000

Fred, do you wear an Apple watch? You can apparently set up the new LTE version with an iPhone and then move your phone SIM card to an Android phone and many things including iMessage still work via the watch. These folks tested it out: https://www.imore.com/how-u...

Re: Season 3, Episode 1: Cake

ampressman — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 22:18:52 -0000

When will new episodes from season 3 be posted online?

Re: Amazon and Hachette have settled so there will be no big bang change in the publishing business model

ampressman — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 12:08:22 -0000

Did you see loyal authors who stuck by Hachette have immediately pivoted to seek higher ebook royalty rate? https://finance.yahoo.com/n...

Re: Print book retailing economics and ebook retailing economics have almost nothing in common

ampressman — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 10:00:46 -0000

Amazon doesn't run its book business, either print or ebook, at a loss. The DOJ and Judge Cote covered this in the price fixing trial -- not to mention it is not possible under either the price-fixed agency contracts or Judge Cote's court-mandated terms (which said total discounting could not exceed the total cost of ebooks from each publisher on an annual basis). In fact, Amazon maintains P&L statements internally at a level much more granular than even the "book business," as Brad Stone detailed at length in his book about the company.

The confusion often arises because Amazon as a whole reports quarterly losses. That's because operating profits from the retailing side are used to enter new businesses like cloud services and streaming video.

Re: About

ampressman — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 13:45:35 -0000

Thanks!

Re: The motivation of the publisher-bashing commentariat is what I cannot figure out

ampressman — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 11:26:20 -0000

Again, that's your reasoned and experienced opinion about the likelihood of change from one side or the other. I didn't take a side. Others, especially indie authors, speculate differently about those hypothetical outcomes and you asked for their economic motivation.

I do think you weaken your case when you say things like "if Amazon can steamroll the publishers." It's a business negotiation and both sides seem pretty capable to me.

Re: The motivation of the publisher-bashing commentariat is what I cannot figure out

ampressman — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 10:01:21 -0000

In the status quo, indie authors get paid by Amazon selling their ebooks. The more money Amazon makes, the stronger Amazon is, thus their chief source of income is maintained. If Amazon loses to Hachette and the other big 5 publishers, Amazon is weaker and has less money, and the indies source of income is threatened.

The exact same thing is true of the successful, traditionally published authors backing Hachette. I don't think it's very surprising that people support the side that provides their income.

You seem to be making assumptions about the indie authors that you don't make about traditional authors. Shouldn't traditionally published authors worry that if Hachette wins and Amazon is weakened, Hachette and the other big 5 will next turn to squeeze their authors more on ebook royalties? Or if the big publishers win and strengthen the relative importance of print books physical distribution and promotion, why won't they seek more from authors for access to their networks? You only seem to worry about the reverse scenarios happening.

Given that we can construct those hypotheticals in either direction, the question becomes how do we assess the likelihood of either side putting a squeeze on authors if it wins. Some believe publishers love authors more, some believe Amazon loves authors more (often based on their particular, personal experiences).

Re: Bijan Sabet — The Nexus 5

ampressman — Wed, 21 May 2014 12:15:57 -0000

Might try Keep as a Drafts substitute. It's very lightweight, autosaving for text entry, and you can even get from a widget. Then the share menu sends your text to almost any other app, kind of like Drafts.

Re: How close is the UK to smartphone saturation?

ampressman — Thu, 08 May 2014 12:11:25 -0000

There may be continued growth but isn't the rate of growth slowing? It's hard to eyeball the graphs but how many quarters are needed, say, to go from 40% to 50% penetration versus 70% to 80% penetration and then 80% to 90%. And, again, it's difficult to eyeball, but it appears that the actual rate of increase in penetration in the UK is slipping below the predicted rate, implying even more slowing than your model predicts.

Would also be interesting to learn about whether phone preferences for later adopters differ from early adopters. Are they more price sensitive? Are they less likely to be on postpaid phone plans that benefit from phone subsidies? While iPhone sales growth has held up well lately in unit volume, revenue growth has been lower for at least the past 6 quarters, sometimes considerably so. In other words, even if unit volume has lots more room for growth, sales growth may not be as healthy.

Re: Review: LG G Pad 8.3

ampressman — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 17:04:15 -0000

There is the Google Play edition, bloatware free

Re: WSJ’s Apple/Comcast Story Not Accurate, News Being Overblown On Wall Street

ampressman — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 16:29:42 -0000

Apple isn't in the Internet sector, stock market wise, nor should it be. Here's a good list from an excellent research firm: http://www.bespokeinvest.co...

Re: Benedict Evans

ampressman — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 11:33:59 -0000

Awesome news. Congrats.

Re: How many Americans will be using an iPhone when the US smartphone market saturates?

ampressman — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 14:13:41 -0000

We would get a test of your hypothesis a lot sooner if you also included at what point in total saturation the iPhone crosses 50% in market share and iOS becomes the most popular phone OS in the United States.

Re: How Apple iBeacon Will Transform Local Commerce

ampressman — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:04:39 -0000

Can't Google use its carrier-bypassing services app to add this capability to any Android phone with BTE? http://arstechnica.com/gadg...

Re: Fingerprints and Passwords: A Guide for Non-Security Experts

ampressman — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:14:51 -0000

Apple just clarified that it does not store fingerprint image on the phone but some magical mathematical signature of it. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits...

Re: What is a fanboy?

ampressman — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 12:18:42 -0000

Following what Jason said, I think it's important to realize that even though the first Urban Dictionary definition is pretty benign, the next bunch are all pretty offensive ("A pathetic insult," "An arrogant person who goes into an outburst every time something he likes is questioned," "Known for a complete lack of objectivity," etc). And the Urban Dictionary is just one dictionary. The Reference.com slang dictionary's first definition says the term is "often disparaging."

So it goes back to a pretty common problem we encounter in civil discourse. Someone uses a term with multiple meanings, some of which offend, and then, when people get offended, the speaker points to the non-offensive meaning. Unless the speaker is secretly aiming to offend, it's probably better to choose a less ambiguous term.

Re: Bijan Sabet - Spending the weekend in Vermont with the family.

ampressman — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 15:11:39 -0000

I love the flatbread pizza place. Looks like you had perfect weather!

Re: Let's not repeat the Google Reader mistake

ampressman — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:05:00 -0000

Dave, in principle I like your stand on principle. I am worried about how it will work out in practice. Saying a feed reader "dominates" the market is also another way of saying that it's where by far the greatest number of readers live. People obviously blog for many different reasons and some may not care about excluding a lot of potential readers. For those who write to reach an audience, however, they may not be interested in blog software that can't reach most of those readers. Then again, maybe the future dominant feed readers will be more standards compliant and/or responsive to feedback. So it will be interesting to see how all this plays out.

Re: Measuring US Mobile Platform Shares: Kantar vs. comScore

ampressman — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:06:50 -0000

One problem with relying on browser stats to measure smartphone share/usage is that almost all provide a total iOS number which combines iPads and iPhones. Yes, you can try to tease out some of the difference with screen resolutions, as another commenter did, but that gives you only a small segment of the iPhone population.

Re: Why There Was No New Hardware At Google I/O

ampressman — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:24:01 -0000

Great post. Another aspect is that by differentiating with (and publicizing) services, Google does an end run around those who have tried to bend stock Android to their own advantage (like Amazon).

Re: Addressable markets for high-end phones

ampressman — Tue, 07 May 2013 07:12:39 -0000

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mob...