360 DEGREES Weblog

A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing happen to music.

The parallels are clear, though the situations and reactions of the RIAA and AAP are somewhat different. Mostly in that the AAP and other booksellers aren’t being dragged kicking, screaming, and suing into the future, but are embracing it despite its implications.

The attempt to push through that big deal with Google seemed to indicate willingness on the part of the publishers to be part of the new order of things. It got struck down by the judge as opportunistic and overreaching on Google’s part (a decision I agree with, personally, though the agreement was very forward-thinking), but the fact remains that booksellers are actually excited about the future of publishing, the money to be made, the markets to be reached, and so on. The fact that a report like this can be published without any kind of bitter commentary on the decline of paper books is telling. If the RIAA had issued a report saying that digital sales were up 150% but physical sales were down 25%, it would be accompanied by a few poorly-reasoned shots at piracy.

Piracy will in fact be a part of the bookmaker’s lot soon, as well; indeed, it’s already a problem, according to some. With greater sales of e-readers comes greater piracy and the threat of phantasmal “lost income,” as the music industry loves to say, but of course you can’t lose what you never had, and their disingenuous calculations of piracy’s effects poison their credibility. I imagine we’ll see a few quixotic stands by the booksellers as well, and battles like the pedophilia controversy and the 1984 remote detonation will continue for a few years as standards get hammered out. Right now, for instance, Harper-Collins is making a fool of itself by attempting to rip off libraries.

Changing the container we get our words in is a natural change, and this level growth should continue, or even accelerate, over the next few years. A $99 Kindle, ad-supported or not, will push another few million of the things out the door, and technological advancements like flexible devices have yet to make their impact. And unlike the record industry, booksellers are itching to get their hands on these new product vectors.

The market won’t begin to settle down until e-readers are as popular as mobile phones and PCs, which I believe will happen despite the threat of tablets. Once the device class reaches a reasonable level of saturation, then the real battle begins. This growth is the storm before the storm.

He just had to beat Rupert Murdoch, didn’t he? Project, Richard Branson’s iPad magazine, is now available in the iTunes store — at least in Italy and the United Kingdom, since it’s past midnight there. App is free, cost per issue is $2.99 for “a full month’s worth of updating content.” We suspect it’ll hit US, too, the next few hours, but for now, those across the pond can read up on Jeff Bridges (audio and video interview), Earth 2.0, and a “well-informed Godzilla.” Take that, yet-to-be-released The Daily.

iPad owners have had less than a week with iOS 4, but a software update offering news and magazine subscriptions targeted at them could arrive in less than a month.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs will join News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch onstage at a December 9 event to announce Murdoch’s new forthcoming tablet newspaper, The Daily.

According to Gruber’s sources, The Daily will be an app in the App Store, but make use of new recurring subscription billing on users’ iTunes accounts, and “developers at News Corp. building the app already have preliminary documentation on the new subscription billing APIs from Apple.”

Macstories’ Federico Viticci reports further that recurring subscriptions are part of a new version of iOS — iOS 4.3 — with a scheduled release date of December 13.

According to Viticci’s sources, iOS 4.3 wasn’t intended to be released so quickly after 4.2.1, which was originally internally slated for an early November release. It’s possible that 4.2.1’s later official release might also push back the release of 4.3. But with Apple playing such a large role in The Daily, both companies may stick with mid-December announcement and releases, after all.

Subscription-based recurring billing would likely increase the number of paid magazine, newspaper, TV, video and other media applications on iTunes. Really, any application that depends on continuous content or service delivery could introduce a subscription model: online gaming, data backup, GPS, office applications and more. Many subscription-based services already have iOS apps, but have to establish accounts and recurring billing separately from iTunes.

Another technical challenge posed by subscriptions that could require an OS update is automatic background content delivery. If you’re being billed every week for a newspaper or magazine, you shouldn’t have to go through a long, complicated routine just to download a new issue.

A final open question: How much customer information will Apple and app/content makers share with each other about their subscribers? This data has value, too — as does customers’ privacy.

Thanks WIRED

News Corporation and Apple are all set to launch a brand new digital newspaper exclusive to the iPad. “The Daily” will reportedly launch later this month, costing 99 cents (62p) a week.

Apple’s Steve Jobs and News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch are hoping the iPaper will become a game changer for digital publishing, following falling physical newspaper sales and the relative failure of The Times paywall. Interestingly, there are no website based versions of The Daily planned: this will truly be a tablet-only news source.

The US-focussed paper will have “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence”, with Jesse Angelo, managing editor of The New York Post most likely to take the position of editor.

“He envisions a world in which every family has a iPad in the home and it becomes the device from which they get their news and information. If only 5% of those 40 million subscribe to the Daily, that’s already two million customers,” a source said to The Guardian.

Just over a year ago, Barnes & Noble released their “Nook” device, a reader for books with a secondary Android-powered navigator. Now it’s time for color. Revealed (to the slight surprise of some, expected by half the universe) today at Barnes & Noble’s “very special event” is this lovely machine with a giant color touchscreen, and it’s half an inch thick.

All sorts of lovely things! First, there’s the claim that this portable tablet and e-reader in one is an “entirely new product category.” Then the awesome note that this is designed in part by Yves Béhar (industrial designer and founder of Fuseproject). Then, details!

8.1 x 5.0 x 0.48 inches in dimension. 15.6 ounces weight, partnership with Random House, MacMillan, Hearst, Penguin, Conde Nast, Simon & Schuster, and Harper Collins. Share your love via contacts, Twitter, and Facebook with the Recommend button, highlights, and notes. Over 100 newspapers and magazines in full color.

The screen is Vivid View from LG. It displays in 16 million colors, and they say “We invested in a full lamination screen film technology.” MicroSD slot, corner handle for locking it up, holding 6 thousand books out of the box. Daily Chef shows latest content like newspapers, latest books you’ve purchased, and etc. Pandora, music, sudoku, chess, and other Apps. All of this coming November 19th for $249.

At this point, you probably know a lot about the new Kindle. But it

The Wall Street Journal is running a piece that focuses on ad sales for the iPad. Pretty boring stuff except for a few nuggets related to the actual content we crave. Rupert Murdoch already confirmed that his monument to main stream media was coming to the iPad. Hell, they’ve even been treated to a rare, in-house device to assist with the development of the iPad version of the Wall Street Journal. Now it’s quoting “a person familiar with the matter” (wink) who says that The Journal plans to charge subscribers $17.99 per month for iPad subscriptions — for comparison, the print version of the WSJ costs $349 for 52 weeks or about $29 per month. Not bad, but you can’t roll up an iPad to swat the dog.

Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst’s Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase “somewhere in Mississippi,” oddly enough) to take advantage of the device’s multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men’s Health with match the glossy’s $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.

It must be getting close to April 3rd because the iPad news is hotting up. Today we get our first glimpse at Amazon’s free Kindle app for the iPad. We’ve also got a Barnes & Noble app on the way courtesy of a report in in the New York Times. The Kindle app has been completely redesigned by a team of 14 developers working since January to redefine the core screen and reading experience to allow for custom fonts in multiple colors, slow page turns, and new ways to view your eBook library. One view, pictured above, presents your books as large icons against a silhouetted figure under a tree — the sun changes position in accordance to the time of day. Of course, the app also gives you access to the Kindle bookstore (assuming Apple approves) and saves your reading position so that you can pick up any Kindle app (or device) and continue reading right where you left off.

The VIV digital magazine concept, created by Alexx Henry and Andrew Grant, is “an all digital magazine, which would allow us to create content that will be able to live on the iPad and other tablet devices where digital magazines can live.” Who’s next?

Mmm, digital magazines. They are the little bites of paid-for content that all the publishers believe we should be deeply enthralled with. Hoping to show us why exactly it is that we should all care (and pay) for prepackaged digital content is Wired’s latest and most comprehensive demo of its tablet app. Setting aside hopefuls like the Joojoo and Adam for a moment, it is clear that this is intended for Apple’s iPad — the device that stands by far the biggest chance of making the digimag concept a commercial success. Interesting choice of development partner, then, as Cond