The Financial Times brings to light a concern book publishers have regarding the pricing of digital text.
Random House, the world’s largest book publisher by sales, could keep its books from Apple’s iPad when it goes on sale next month, as the Bertelsmann unit fears the effects of the tablet device on the pricing of electronic books.
Details are slim but concerns appear to be focused on the pricing model in which Apple will take a 30% share for providing iBooks downloads. This is a different model compared to the one used by Amazon and other retailers.
Some philosophies suggest that changes are inevitable. Driven by a change agent, there is a paradigm shift and the world views are never the same. A competing philosophy is that nothing ever changes.
In 1996, IBM (remember them?) was weary of the web.
At the early-morning keynote that opened the Internet World conference in New York City today, IBM CEO Louis Gerstner set out to make sense of an industry in which “food fights” break out on a fairly regular basis and leave observers (about 40 million Internet users to date) mostly dazed and confused. As the year winds down, the browser wars are ending “without a clear winner and without a loser being carried off the field,” and the debate over personal versus network computers is still raging, Gerstner concluded. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if a backlash started soon and Internet weariness set in, with users wondering whether this whole Internet business is a big waste of time.
Apparently, the fear that exists between the unknown and known is just as common in technology worlds as it is in real life.
Here is another reminder of how things change.
So book publishers, fear or no fear, change is happening. Yes, protect your shareholders investments but don’t ignore an emerging market and find yourselves obsolete, like the land-line telephone.