The Digital Reader

It’s a good year to fund publishing start-ups.

Yesterday, I picked up on an observation made by James McQuivey and Nate Hoffelder: publishers lack the mindset and skills required to disrupt their own business model. That’s a tough thing to change, but a window just might be opening.
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Several dozen editorials have been written in the 2 days since Amazon announced plans to buy Goodreads, but one in particular caught my eye today.

James McQuivey, writing over at Forbes, laments over the fact that no one in publishing bought Goodreads:
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Google’s new note-taking service launched last night and it’s been catching a lot of flack from bloggers. If the early responses are any indication, Google Keep is going to fail not because of any of the service’s shortcomings but because no one trusts Google.

When I reviewed Google Keep last night I pointed out that Google Keep’s biggest flaw had nothing to do with its features; the problem was the company behind the service. And from the posts I’ve read so fat it would seem I’m not the only one who thinks that.
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The week of March 3-10 was “Read an eBook Week,” which is a week that I particularly look forward to each year. It is the week when many authors put their ebooks on sale, with discounts ranging from 25% to 100% of the normal price. Smashwords is a major promoter of this event, and is usually where I go to buy more ebooks for my to-be-read pile.
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Here’s a story which isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

April Hamilton reported last night over at Publitariat that she had received a recruitment email from Simon & Schuster. They are trying to get her to become an affiliate for S&S Archway, the scam vanity press that S&S launched last fall:
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When The Atlantic Monthly published a paid article promoting Scientology a couple months ago, they were roundly castigated for lack of editorial integrity. With criticism and coverage coming from all sides, including Forbes, Techdirt, NY Magazine, and elsewhere, The Atlantic pulled the advertising and replaced it with a stub.

In retrospect The Atlantic said that they regretted not updating their policies and thinking the idea all the way through, but IMO their chief mistake was in not being subtle enough.

When it comes to selling blog posts to advertisers, that seems to be a not uncommon mistake. Take GigaOm, for example.
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Barnes & Noble is probably going to share bad news tomorrow when they release their latest quarterly financial report. I am expecting to hear that Nook sales were poor, and given the general poor financial state and the recent news that B&N CEO Len Riggio has plans to sever the retail stores from the rump of the company, it seems likely that Nook is going to be dead soon.

Today I came across what could be another lesson in why and how Barnes & Noble ran this promising platform into the ground. Not only was B&N incapable of supporting the Nook with decent customer service, according to one librarian the Nook platform is generally difficult to use.
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That’s what one Morgan Stanley analyst believes, though I have my doubts. A couple days ago Business Insider posted this one graph. It’s based on data from a recent report by Scott Devitt at Morgan Stanley, and it covers his best estimate for the revenue and profit that the Kindle ecosystem (Kindle, Kindle Fire, movies, music, ebooks, adverts) generates for Amazon.
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