Curious…

And I’m no retail CEO, but it strikes me that selling a device which is locked into someone else’s virtual retail space is akin to signing your own death warrant. I’m sure there’s a reason that Waterstone’s has done this deal, but at first blush, I don’t get it. From Richard Lea in The Guardian:

Monday morning and already it’s the end of the world. Instead ofteaming up with Barnes and Noble to cast out the “ruthless money-making devil” Amazon, a tired-looking James Daunt has pulled up a chair and supped with him, striking a deal to “launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops”. Is that what he meant when he talked about being “different from Amazon … [and] better“?

16/100

In a broader opinion piece surveying the changing landscape of business and innovation fromThomas Friedman in the New York Times, there was this snippet:

This is leading to an explosion of new firms and voices. “Sixteen of the top 100 best sellers on Kindle today were self-published,” said Bezos. That means no agent, no publisher, no paper — just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader.

The (next) Library of Utopia

Nicholas Carr on Harvard’s latest attempt at a universal online library in Technology Review:

It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant’s book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors.