Weekly Research Update | April 29, 2011

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 2011.

Delivery –> Discovery

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Higher Education | The Scholarly Kitchen — “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry. Okay, maybe a little vexed.

I have come to realize that the system that I went back to in 2006 is not the same system that I’m leaving in 2011, and it’s time to take stock. No one promised me anything except a good education, and that if I worked hard, I would come out a much better researcher than when I went in as a librarian. To that end, the system has done its job.

The rest is my responsibility.”

The Blackboard/Moodle FOIA Requests | e-Literate — “Anyway, a private equity suitor for Blackboard is one possible culprit for the FOIA requests. But another is a hedge fund considering or re-evaluating a short position. Blackboard is the eighth most shorted stock on the Nasdaq. Somebody interested in shorting Blackboard would want to have a strong understanding of the erosion of Blackboard’s core business as well, since they would essentially be betting that the contraction of the company’s LMS business will be faster than the growth of its other businesses over the next 24 to 36 months.”

Concerns Over the Higher Education Bubble Continue to Grow and Evolve | The Scholarly Kitchen — “In the past week alone, the Boston Globe (exploitation of adjuncts) and the Huffington Post (the debt burden) have picked up on the meme, and the idea is being syndicated from there.

As the public continues to notice, consider, and absorb these realities, and as this meme spreads, some form of accountability or correction seems inevitable. What form this takes may be depend largely on whether leaders take action to correct these trends now, before events spin out of control.”

Blog U.: Buying Blackboard | Inside Higher Ed — “Yet corporate expectations for growth notwithstanding, Blackboard confronts significant competitive pressures across most of its business units. As noted above, there has been continuing erosion in its LMS position in the higher ed market: more erosion seems inevitable as some 700 current LMS clients confront “up or out decisions” because Blackboard has announced plans to terminate support for the Angel Learning and WebCT platforms over the next two years. (The 2009 Angel acquisition accounted for 63 percent of the growth in Blackboard’s Enterprise LMS licenses between Q4-2006 and Q4-2009.) Some of the current Angel and WebCT client campuses will migrate to the Blackboard Learn Enterprise application (Learn 9.x). Concurrently, some current Blackboard LMS clients will move to Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Sakai, LMS applications
that have gained market share in recent years,. And still others may opt for one the newer LMS platforms such as Epsilon or Instructure that are beginning to gain attention and traction.”

Donald Clark Plan B: Is Higher Education a classic bubble? 7 reasons to think so — “The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that Higher Education has become simply an extension of school, but with delayed school fees. Shortly the majority will be moving seamlessly from school to higher education. Many will enjoy the fruits of a meander through University but may (literally) pay a heavy and disproportionate price later. However, as Shakespeare said in The Merchant of Venice, ‘All that glisters is not gold’, and debts, as that great play so eloquently shows, distort human behaviour in unpredictable and distasteful ways. A degree should be seen as more than a fiscal investment, but that does not mean taking ridiculous risks when you’re only 18 years old.

Money flowing into “open courseware” on college campuses — “With an infusion of money from US stimulus spending, groups like The Gates Foundation, and the private sector, the technological landscape in higher education is changing rapidly. In the recent past, classroom tech extended to YouTube videos, bare-bones online courses, or collaborative systems like Moodle; now, the emphasis is all about open courseware and analytics to monitor student behavior.

Major bets that institutions are placing on technology in higher education were unveiled recently through a round of grants funded primarily by The Gates Foundation and led by Educause, a nonprofit association that encourages technology in education.

In the first of two rounds, The Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) awarded $10.6 million to 29 organizations, with the potential for an additional $5.4 million to be doled out later. Close to half of the initial $10.6 million went to open courseware projects that seek to publish adaptable Web-based courses for the public.”

The New Normal | Stephen’s Web — Internet marketer Seth Godin created some ripples last week saying that there is no going back from the new economic reality. “Some people,” he writes, “insist that if we focus on ‘business fundamentals’ and get ‘back to basics,’ all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.” Quite so. Bosses beware.

This feeds directly into education. Gary Stager takes the pessimistic view. “Things can and will get worse, perhaps indefinitely. The public is on a collision course to defund education and other services intended for the common good.” Tim Stahmer points to the futility of ‘reform’: “At the same time we in education are also doubling down on the ‘back to basics’ and on teaching kids how to follow someone else’s instructions.” We get Charlie Mas’s Orwellian vision of education.

Washington State Starts New Online University Through Deal With Nonprofit | The Chronicle of Higher Education – Washington State is creating a new online institution through a partnership with Western Governors University. Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill (HB 1822) on Friday establishing WGU Washington, which had been touted as a way to expand access to education without spending state money. The arrangement is similar to an earlier deal struck between the State of Indiana and the nonprofit online university.”

Flat World Knowledge Releases “Make It Your Own” Platform for Textbooks — “Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of free and open college textbooks for students, announced the release of a new platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own). The fully-automated system gives professors greater control over textbook content, and the ability, with one click, to make their modified book available to students free online or in multiple, low-cost digital and print formats.

MIYO (mee-oh) transforms a static textbook into an adaptable learning platform by combining a digital-first architecture with Flat World’s open licensing model that grants faculty the right to revise, remix and share its textbooks. The new system uses familiar drag-and-drop and click features that allow instructors to easily move or delete chapters and sections; upload Word and PDF documents; add notes and exercises; insert video and hyperlinks; edit sentences; and incorporate other content that is free to reuse under a Creative Commons open license.”

The Changing Dynamics of the Educational Technology Markets | e-Literate — “So yes, there is clearly market opportunity that is attracting investment dollars. Companies are hiring and acquiring. Blackboard and Pearson, the two most acquisitive players in educational technology, have now been joined by Desire2Learn (as well as the mystery bidders for Blackboard), and I expect others to follow. This will drive up the prices of the companies being acquired which will, in turn, attract new investors. All of this means that new companies and new products will be coming to market faster and more frequently. Big changes are coming.

But how much will those changes affect LMS market share between now and 2014? We know that the main shifts in the LMS market are WebCT and ANGEL customers who are being forced to move as Blackboard retires those platforms. It typically takes a year for a school to select a new platform and another year to migrate. It can be done faster, but it usually isn’t. WebCT is being retired in January 2013. That means schools looking to make a decision (i.e., they are not just going to migrate to Blackboard by default) typically have already started their evaluation process. ANGEL is being retired in the summer of 2014, so those customers have about 12-15 months before they typically have to start their evaluation.”

Higher Education’s Toughest Test — “Today, however, the credentialing provided by universities is becoming decoupled from the knowledge and skills acquired by students. The cost of obtaining learning materials is falling, with OpenCourseWare resources from MIT and iTunes U leading the charge. Classes can be taken online on sites like Udemy and eduFire, either for free or a fraction of the cost to learn similar material at a university, and sites like Veri, which recently launched at TechStars NYC Demo Day, aims to organize and spread one’s accumulated knowledge.

While the “cost” of learning is falling dramatically, the cost of college continues to rise. College costs consist of a wide variety of items including room and board, entertainment, and materials. At least when it comes to materials (i.e. textbooks), start-ups are playing a disruptive role: Companies like Chegg and Bookrenter have changed the paradigm from owning to renting a textbook, and companies such as Inkling, Kno, and Flatworld are betting students will prefer to use digital and/or unbundled course materials.”

Online Education May Transform Higher Ed | US News and World Report — “Could an online education be the rock that disturbs the placid waters of American higher education? Several industry experts believe it will have a significant ripple effect on colleges and universities of all sizes in coming years—but only if it’s subject to regulation, governed by a common set of accreditation standards, and widely accepted by institutions who have long clung to the traditional face-to-face model of instruction.
Click here to find out more!

Citing the vast online enrollment gains made by for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, Louis Soares, director of postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, recently dubbed online education a potential “disruptive innovator” in the higher ed landscape. Much in the way cell phones disrupted the traditional landline-based model or discount retailers like Wal-Mart revolutionized the nation’s retail market, the for-profit sector—though a subject of intense scrutiny in recent years—has driven changes that could greatly affect the world of higher education, Soares argues.”

Narrowcasting –> Nanocasting

Cheap iPad Alternative: Nook Color Android Update Review — “Despite a few initial glitches, the Nook Color update that went live on Monday, effectively turns the e-reader into a fully-functional Android tablet.

Not bad for $250.”

Google to Claim “World’s Biggest App Store” Title From Apple in Five Months | AllThingsD — “It was great while it lasted, but Apple’s dominance in the mobile app market is coming to an end. Though it remains by far the leader in sheer app-store tonnage today, Android’s surging growth will soon change that.

According to a new report from analytics outfit Distimo, if Google’s Android Market maintains its current rate of growth it will surpass Apple’s App Store to become the largest app store in number of applications. In fact, it’s already tops in the number of free apps it offers.”

Sixty Percent of iPad Owners Read eBooks on Their iPad | eBookNewser — “Simba Information has just published a new report on eBooks, eReaders, and how people are reading on their gadgets. The report finds that 40% of respondents don’t read eBooks on their iPad.

This is a rather curious number, but before you can proclaim that it is high, low, or unremarkable you first need to put it into context. Simba didn’t provide any extra info in the press release and I can’t afford the report (it’s $3200). But I did some digging and I came across a report from AdMob.”

Farewell, Kindle. Buh-bye, iPad | How The University Works — “Yesterday’s U.S. launch of the ASUS Transformer tablet with a detachable clamshell keyboard sold out in minutes on every major online retailer (hours if you were clever and out-thought the tech crowd by actually showing up in the flesh).

Why so popular? ‘Cause Asus clued in to the fact that we produce content with our computers, not just consume it, and addressed that insight with a stable mobile-computing design that everyone else will scramble to imitate.”

Nielsen Numbers Show Smartphone Market Tilting Android’s Way | AllThingsD — “The mercurial U.S. smartphone market has a new favorite and it’s not the iPhone.

It’s Android, which is now the leading smartphone OS in the States in market share, according to a survey released this morning by Nielsen.

As of March 2011, 37 percent of smartphone users own an Android device, said Nielsen–significantly more than the 27 percent who own an iPhone and the 22 percent who own a BlackBerry.

That’s quite a shift from last October, when 27.9 percent owned an iPhone, 27.4 percent a BlackBerry and 22.7 percent an Android device. But evidently there’s a new trend in smartphone buying intent and it favors Android. ”

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Motorola Xoom tablet sales could be even worse than feared | AllThingsD — “Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry estimates that Motorola Mobility has manufactured between 500,000 and 800,000 Xooms, but has sold only 5 to 15 percent of them.

Best case scenario then, according to Chowdry, is that Motorola has sold 120,000 Xooms; worse case scenario, it’s sold just 25,000. Now, admittedly, that’s a very large range, and one could argue that it makes Chowdry’s estimate largely meaningless. But remember that original forecasts suggested Motorola would sell between 3 and 5 million Xooms this year and earlier this month some analysts were calling for first quarter sales of 300,000.”

Sony Plans to Enter Crowded Tablet Market with Two Honeycomb Models Due This Fall | AllThingsD — “Sony became the latest computer maker to toss its hat in the Android tablet ring, announcing plans for two models during a press conference in Japan.

The Japanese computer maker announced plans for two Honeycomb tablets–the 9.4-inch S1 and the S2, with its dual 5.5-inch screens. Sony said the tablets will be available globally starting this fall.

With the move, Sony will join a crowded field that includes Motorola, which led the Honeycomb parade with its Xoom, along with LG, HTC, Samsung, Toshiba and Acer, to name just some of those with announced plans. Meanwhile, Apple still dominates the field with the iPad, while HP and Research In Motion hope to tackle the tablet market with homegrown operating systems.”

Nook Friends is a Shot Across the Bow of eBook Lending Sites | eBookNewser — “One of the apps that comes with the update is Nook Friends. This app is designed to help readers form virtual book clubs (like GoodReads) but it also will let you share an eBook. That could be a serious blow to the eBook lending sites if properly managed. People would no longer have to go look for a site; all they’d have to do is open the app on their NookColor.

Then again, far more people have Nooks than NookColors, so perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Also, given that B&N has shown no sign of updating the original Nook, it seems likely that there will always be a large group of Nook owners for the eBook lending sites to support.”

Is signing with a mainstream publisher now a ‘mistake’? | TeleRead — “I suppose it was inevitable. As self-e-publishing has drawn more and more attention, with relatively major-name authors deciding to forego pro-publishing and go it alone, and over 1/4 of the Amazon Top 100 list being made up of such books, now signs of an anti-pro-publishing “backlash” have popped up. Blogger switch11 at iReaderReview points out the “mistake” one popular self-publishing author made when he decided to sign up with Macmillan.”

Tablets Will Generate 17 Percent of Wireless Data Demand by 2020 | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD — “According to Cisco’s Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, the iPad and tablets like it generate 5 times more data traffic than the average smartphone. In 2010, for example, mobile data traffic per tablet was about 405 MB per month, compared to 79 MB per month per smartphone (see chart below). Not much of a surprise, really, considering tablets excel at media and information consumption.

What is surprising, though, is the rate at which that data traffic is growing.

With connected tablets growing in popularity network usage is ramping up–and fast. Goldman Sachs figures it’s increasing by 30 percent per year and by 2020 will account for 17 percent of all wireless data demand.”

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Nook Color Update Brings Support for Apps, Better Browsing and Froyo Version of Android | AllThingsD — “Starting on Monday, Barnes & Noble is delivering a promised software update for the Nook Color that will further tilt the device from being a multi-purpose e-reader into a full-fledged Android tablet.

The free update will add an e-mail program, as well as support for a variety of third-party programs that have been customized for the 7-inch device. ”

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B&N Nook Color update released, brings Froyo, apps, and Flash, we go hands-on (video) | Engadget — “Obviously the biggest addition here are the apps themselves, and sadly we’re not talking full Market access — nor access to any of the standard Google applications like Gmail or Maps. Barnes & Noble has its own set of libraries that software developers must include and use, providing the unified experience the company wants to bring to its little ecosphere, making the look and feel of apps jive with the rest of the system. As to which apps will be available, we saw a number of games, cooking helpers like Epicurious, and, yes, Angry Birds.”

Amazon Hints at Android Strategy With Latest App Promotion | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD — “Beyond its cellphone store at AmazonWireless.com and the digital Appstore, Amazon has also released a bevvy of applications, including shopping portals, barcode scanners, Kindle apps for virtually every device and an MP3 store. More recently, it rolled out a Cloud Player, which allows people to store their music and other digital content in the cloud, making it accessible from both Android devices and an Internet-connected computer.

Monday’s promotion is just the start. “We will continue to do things like this in the future,” Camp added.”

Details Leak On Lenovo’s Secret ThinkPad Honeycomb Tablet — “This Is My Next got its hands on the presentation and spilled the beans on the ThinkPad (or Think Slate, there’s no official name yet), which should be available this summer.

It will be slightly thicker and heavier than the iPad 2, but it rocks several hardware goodies we haven’t seen in a Honeycomb tablet yet including USB 2.0 and a SD card slot.”

CHARTS OF THE WEEK: The iPhone Is Now Half Of Apple’s Business — http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4db045a4ccd1d50d18350000/sai-chart-apple-revenue-by-segment-march-2011.jpg

Tablets: Maybe They Really ARE A Passing Fad — “What if the analysts predicting that tablets will cut into PC sales turn out to be using faulty data? What if Acer’s horrible recent performance is more about Acer’s specific shortcomings than the PC market as a whole?”

Content –> Services (business models)

Most Americans Not Willing to Pay to Read News Content Online — “As businesses explore best practices for success in the changing landscape created by the Internet, some companies have discussed charging for access to online content that was previously free. Some media outlets have discussed doing this, and The New York Times recently began charging online readers who view over 20 articles per month. But there may be trouble ahead as a recent Adweek/Harris Poll found that a large majority said they would be willing to pay “nothing” per month to read a daily newspaper’s content online (80%). Of the one in five who would pay, 14% said they would pay between $1 and $10 per month while very few said that they would be willing to pay between $11 and $20 (4%) or more than $20 per month (2%).”

One in 4 Americans Read eBooks | eBookNewser – “Some of the results include the fact that fiction continues to dominate downloads with SF, romance, and literary fiction each accounting for 20% of the market. Also, samples and sales were named as the biggest influence on the decision to buy. And 2/3 of eBook consumers have gone exclusively digital.

But there’s one detail that didn’t quite make it into the report, and I think it’s important.The survey group covered 3 thousand people, and this report is drawn from the responses of the 750 who own an eReader or eBook. So 1 in 4 respondents are into eBooks. This would suggest that the adoption rate for eBooks in the US is about 25%.”

Derek’s Blog » Next generation e-book — “I’ve just watched Mike Matas introduce the first full-length interactive book for the iPad on TedTalks. The “book” has clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with.I’m fascinated to see the developments that are occurring so rapidly in this area, and as competition hots up in the development of the new generation tablets and touch surface computing becomes more common, this will only increase – confirming that 2011 may indeed be the year of the e-book!

The book is called Our Choice and is written (and in parts narrated) by Al Gore, who surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. It’s available for both iPad and iPod on iTunes.

It’s interesting to read the comments that have been posted on the TED site for this video, with some questioning whether this can actually be called an ‘e-book’ given the extent of the multimedia use and interactivity – I guess this is a part of the journey we’ll see towards re-defining what a book is and will become in the future.”

SharedBook Now Offers DIY Textbooks | eBookNewser — “This new service works something like the MIYO service that Flat World Knowledge launched a few weeks back. Educators can build their own textbook or other course materials by gathering content from any number of sources, including the AcademicPub Content Library, their own original works, or the Web. Once assembled, AcademicPub will automatically organize the content, which can then be published in both print and digital.

AcademicPub does have one interesting difference from MIYO. SharedBook is promising that all content in the textbooks will have a valid copyright and none will be pirated. The service has been in beta since January, but it was only 2 weeks ago that SharedBook opened it to the general public.”

In the Era of eBooks, What Is a Book Worth? (II) « An American Editor — “Interchangeability eliminates the notion of author uniqueness. In the absence of uniqueness, what justifies the pricing of an ebook. To say it is what the market will bear is inaccurate. Since agency pricing entered the pricing scheme, the idea of market forces working their magic on pricing appears to have dissipated like the sands of time. Certainly, the laws of supply and demand do not exert much force on ebook pricing, especially pricing by the Agency 6, because the supply of an ebook — unlike of a print book – is infinite and it is long-tail demand that matters most to book publishing. Perhaps publishers are failing to see that the long-tail demand for their products will be in electronic form rather than the traditional print form, and that failure is driving their pricing decisions.”

Amazon Launches The Backstory; A Content Hub For Author Interviews And More – “Amazon has launched a new content hub for its Books area, called The Backstory. The content destination includes interviews with authors, guest reviews, authors’ favorite playlists, recipes, podcasts, essays and more.

Amazon is also debuting “Author Interviews@Amazon,” as part of the launch which is a new author interview series. Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef Tom Douglas, Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Amazon says that new author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions on these pages for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview.”

Apple Signs Warner To Its Cloud Solution — “As we’ve previously reported, Apple is moving iTunes to the cloud and is slowly signing on record labels to supply content. The latest company to fall is apparently Warner Music. The company signed a deal with Apple on Friday.

The iTunes cloud should work like a locker/streaming service. This would allow users to dump their music into the cloud and access it anywhere or, barring that, offer a monthly service to access albums on the go, a concept similar to Rdio and Spotify.

Apple has already signed deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music to offer cloud-based versions of their catalogs.”

Curation Tool Storify Opens To The Public — “Storify allows users to pull together information from social media – tweets, videos, photos, links – and build stories that include both content and commentary. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the items from your Twitter timeline, from Flickr, from YouTube, from RSS feeds into the story-builder. You can also add your own text to the story.”

Digital Reading: Easy to Read, Hard to Learn? | Digital Book World — “New research has upended our assumptions: it now appears that font size has no relevance to “ease of learning” (which I equate with “ease of reading”)—it can be as tiny as a bedbug, for all your brain cares—but UNfAmILIArITy oF FOnT makes things more learnable.

You read me right. Throw out all you know about readable fonts, be they Swiss or Metropolitan Transit Authority. Should text be white-on-black, or the other way around? It doesn’t matter.”

In the Era of eBooks, What Is a Book Worth? (I) « An American Editor — “Perhaps we have been drilled over too many years to believe that each author is so unique that one author cannot be substituted for another, that we actually believe author uniqueness to be a truism. Perhaps there is a shade of gray to that statement. Consider this: Do readers of Stephen King only read horror genre books written by King? Do they read other horror authors while waiting for the next King novel to be published? Is Tolkien the only fantasy author Tolkien fans read, especially knowing that there will be no more Tolkien novels forthcoming?

If we read other authors in a genre, are we not really saying that it is the genre that we like more so than the author, and that King and Koontz are at least near equivalents? I accept that there are tiers of authors; that is, some authors are better than others and that some are first tier, whereas others are third or fourth (or even lower) tier. But I also accept that authors in a tier are, for the most part, interchangeable for each other. Perhaps scarcity, in the sense that each author is unique and not interchangeable with any other author, is not truly a criterion applicable to books even though we have been indoctrinated to believe otherwise. Consider that other authors are hired to complete books in a series because of the original author’s untimely death. Isn’t that the publishing world’s equivalent of saying Brandon Sanderson is interchangeable with Robert Jordan?”

Why did Amazon charge $23,698,655.93 for a textbook? — “A textbook on Amazon was recently listed at more than $23 million. As it turns out, an algorithm was to blame.

College students have long complained that text books cost too much. But woe is the poor sap who has to pick up a copy of genetics textbook, The Making of a Fly, by Peter Lawrence, which was recently listed at the ridiculous price of $23,698,655.93 on Amazon.com.

The absurd price of this out-of-print book, first published in 1992, was discovered by UC Berkley evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen, who went to Amazon to purchase the book. There, he found “17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).””

28 out of 100 top Kindle ebooks are self-published, by Piotr Kowalczyk | TeleRead — “Top Self-Published Books In Kindle Store – April 21st, 2011.

Interesting numbers:

- 28 out of 100 top e-books in Kindle Store are self-published; 11 are in top 50,
- all of those publications are priced $3.99 or less; that means 28% of top Kindle e-books cost less than $4,
- 18 of the titles are given the lowest possible price tag: $0.99,
- the shining star is John Locke with 8 titles (7 of them in top 50); Vegas Moon is the best self-published book – ranked #4,
- Amanda Hocking is sliding down; her best selling book, Ascend, is #64 (a result of signing a contract with a publisher?),
- authors to watch: Heather Killough-Walden, Julie Ortolon, J.R. Rain and Debbi Mack – with 2 or more titles in top 100.”

What Is a Book? The Definition Continues to Blur: Tech News and Analysis — “Byliner is one of the most recent entrants into the micro-publishing field, offering a selection of longer works by well-known, non-fiction authors such as Krakauer, who wrote a long magazine-style article about the alleged irregularities involving a charitable effort by fellow mountain climber Greg Mortenson. The piece was available as a free download for the first 72 hours – and saw more than 50,000 copies downloaded – and then was expected to become a paid download. Byliner said it’s planning to publish original works soon by authors William Vollmann and Anthony Swofford as well.

In effect, Byliner is a publisher just like Random House or Macmillan, but it is going to publish small runs of e-books, like a micro-imprint would at one of the larger publishing houses. Because it’s online only, however, Byliner’s costs are likely orders of magnitude lower, and it shares the revenue from the books 50/50 with the author. In a way, the service is positioned midway between the magazine industry and the book-publishing business. (Byliner CEO John Tayman is a former editor for Outside magazine.)”

Message –> User

E-book self-publishing makes million-book milestone | TeleRead — “On Forbes a couple of days ago, Haydn Shaughnessy wrote an interesting blog post noting that, assuming the trend of the last few years remains in effect, over one million people in the United States alone wrote e-books over the last twelve months. (Or at least, over one million e-books were self-published. If some people wrote more than one book, it could potentially be fewer than one million authors.)

Shaughnessy sees this as a continuation of a trend toward self-expression that started with blogging, though declined with Twitter and other social networking applications. He would like to see a movement in politics or business that recognizes and engages with this movement toward self-publishing self-expression.”

Price war! Amazon launches 69-cent MP3 store for top-selling tunes | Pop & Hiss | Los Angeles Times — “Amazon.com, which is a distant No. 2 to Apple Inc. as a retailer of downloadable music, has upped the ante or, rather, lowered its prices to compete with iTunes.

The Seattle online company is now pricing select top-selling tunes for 69 cents, down from 89 cents previously. Many of the songs in Amazon’s 69-cent store sell for $1.29 on iTunes, including Katy Perry’s “E.T.”, Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

Amazon, which in March launched a cloud music locker service, has tried over the years to chip away at Apple’s dominance in the digital music download business by pricing most of its songs below what they go for at iTunes. So far, however, Amazon’s market share remains where it has been the last two years, around 10%, while Apple continues to have about 70% of the digital download music market, according to Russ Crupnick, digital music analyst at the NPD Group, which no longer publicly releases market share data.”

iPad magazine publishing with Adobe costs at least £7003 per year | TeleRead — “How expensive should it be to publish an iPad magazine app? If you said it should cost at least £7003 ($11,537) per year, then you’ll like the deal Adobe is offering with the latest version of its Digital Publishing Suite, the iPad magazine InDesign plugin.

Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for each issue.”

FINALLY: YouTube Launching Streaming Movies — “YouTube will imminently launch a movie-on-demand service charging users to stream movies off the world’s largest video sharing site, TheWrap has learned.

The new service means a full-bore challenge to Apple’s iTunes service – currently the most powerful player in paid video streaming — and a welcome new revenue stream for Hollywood.

The service may start as early as this week or next, and is expected to be announced imminently by YouTube.”

Microsoft sells 350 million copies of Windows 7 in 18 months | TNW Microsoft — “In a blog post today written to celebrate the 18 month anniversary of Windows 7, Microsoft announced that it has sold more than 350 million copies of the software.

That breaks down to roughly 19.4 million copies sold per month, or about 648,148 copies per day. Continuing the math, that is roughly 27,000 copies sold per hour since launch. Even more, that is 450 copies sold per minute over the last 18 months.”

Google Data Shows Netflix Searches Booming, DVD Dropping | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD — “Here’s a very nice explanation of why Hollywood is so freaked out about Netflix: A chart that shows Web searches for the movie rental service booming, while queries for “DVD” are plummeting.”

Cloud –> Universe

The Cloud and Outages : Five Key Lessons — “There are some clear lessons to be learned from this latest outage, not just relating to the cloud but relating to how to build resilient infrastructure set-ups that can keep delivering when things go wrong (because they eventually will). In this post I’ll examine what this outage tells us about the cloud and data centre based computing in general and how customers might best respond and adapt.”

Lesson 1: Both Cloud and Dedicated Computing Have Single Points of Failure
Lesson 2: Size is No Protection from Outages
Lesson 3: All Data Centres Are Not Equal
Lesson 4: The Price-Performance-Reliability Metric
Lesson 5: Achieving a highly robust set-up is cheaper and easier in the Cloud

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