Friday, June 12, 2009

Books vs. Kindle


Mobylives discusses the new war between the Kindle and those antiquated things called books.

From the story...

In a startling and possibly revolutionary development, one of New York’s giant conglomerate publishers has finally taken a stand against Amazon.com: Simon & Schuster will announce today that it has struck a deal to sell its ebooks on Scribd.The giant publisher will make some 5,000 titles available starting today and including such authors as Stephen King, Dan Brown, Mary Higgins Clark, and former President Jimmy Carter.

And, as a Wall Street Journal report details, the S&S ebooks sold on Scribd will be available as Adobe Acrobat files that can be read but not printed out on computers and iPhones and Sony Readers — “but not on Amazon’s Kindle.”

Further, “Several thousand Simon & Schuster titles that haven’t yet been published as e-books will be available for preview on Scribd via a search-and-browsing option. Readers will be able to buy the print edition of those books from Simon & Schuster directly or from various online retailers” — in other words, the early stages of an attempt to break Amazon’s overwhelming dominance of online retail by helping to develop alternatives, including directing customers back to the publisher.

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