E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets | Wired

If you think the coming wave of tablets is about to make e-book readers obsolete, guess again.

Although dozens of tablets are scheduled to hit the market this year from companies like Apple, HP and Dell, as well as upstarts like JooJoo, executives in the e-reader industry aren't particularly worried.

Instead, they say, tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist, targeting different groups of consumers based on their purchasing power, the extent of interactivity they need and their reading patterns...

via wired.com

Nice, balanced and very credible articled from Wired. Echoes my feelings regarding the future of the eReader vs. tablet market and corresponding comments I've made on a few Fast Company posts, which are not quite so tempered.

Is Macmillan Fighting Free?

One of Chris Anderson's great coined phrases is that "information wants to be free."

It's very true. And it's not just consumers of information driving down its price. As information creators and distributors, we share important info with friends and colleagues almost incessantly, and we do it not to fill our pockets but to be of help to others and build our "reputational capital."

Bloggers and hardcore online content creators of all types show just how far we will go to give away information in exchange for other intangibles.

It's no wonder, then, that as newspapers, magazines, movies, music, etc. have all gone digital, where the variable cost of distribution is essentially zero and where competitors offering "free" abound, the price of information has continued to drop. Publishers can no longer hide behind the cost of physical distribution, they can scarcely differentiate on quality of content, and their relatively limited access to insider information is readily apparent via a simple Google search.

It's tempting to think that media executives were tacitly recognizing this by going free when they went online several years ago. And yet these same executives are not shy about sharing their regrets. They believe that "free" was not inevitable, but rather that they led people to undervalue their product by giving into the fad of "free."

And it's in this context that you have to understand the Macmillan-Amazon row. Books are one of the final bastions of physical information. They have successfully resisted digital distribution for years. As a result, you'll still pay $5-$10 for a book by a dead author that has been public domain for over a century.

However, the success of the Kindle and anticipated success of the iPad and other readers threaten to add eBooks to the list of information subject to the pressures of free.

Macmillan, learning from its peers in the newspaper and magazine industries, made a preemptive move to assert its belief in the intrinsic value of its products, regardless of whether they occupy a physical form, before consumers could fully make their value judgments known.

If you ask me, in the long term they are fighting a losing battle. I don't believe that good books will or should be "free." But I believe that consumers will ultimately be the judges of the value of paper-less books that compete for mindshare with the amazing amounts of good, free information out there. Like newspapers, books and book publishers, too, will ultimately have to reinvent themselves to stay in business.

Rather than defending its turf and outdated business model, Macmillan would be better served to start creating the future of books.

SAP Launches a Google Wave for the Enterprise - Mashable

Article at mashable.com

SAP is a good company, but they often make me wonder why engineers ever get to make design decisions.

Collaborative decision-making is something that most organizations are bad at. They're not going to get better because a technology now exists to support the process.

Is the iPad good for Amazon? - CNET Reviews

(Credit: Apple)

Now that the dawn of the iPad is upon us, the inevitable comparisons between Apple's wundertablet and the Kindle--and what it all means for Amazon--have begun in earnest.
For example, in its write-up of the iPad launch, The New York Times said that Apple's new deals with five major publishers basically amounted to a declaration of war. "The announcement puts Apple on a collision course with Amazon," the Times said. And Steve Jobs, while praising Amazon for pioneering the e-book category, told the world that, "we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther."
That may very well be true, especially when it comes to stuff like comic books, graphic novels, textbooks, and interactive children's stories, but the war we're looking at isn't the war we're used to seeing in the consumer electronics world, where one piece of gear simply is superior, sexier--and better-priced--than another.