ePublishing Week in Brief – April 9th to April 13th 2012

 

How Apple Can Defeat The DOJ’s E-Book Antitrust Suit

Did Apple conspire with e-book publishers to raise e-book prices?  That’s what DOJ argues in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. But does that violate antitrust laws?  Not necessarily—and even if it does, perhaps it shouldn’t.

Antitrust’s sole goal is maximizing consumer welfare.  While that generally means antitrust regulators should focus on lower prices, the situation is more complicated when we’re talking about markets for new products, where technologies for distribution and consumption are evolving rapidly along with business models.  In short, the so-called Agency pricing model Apple and publishers adopted may mean (and may not mean) higher e-book prices in the short run, but it also means more variability in pricing, and it might well have facilitated Apple’s entry into the market, increasing e-book retail competition and promoting innovation among e-book readers, while increasing funding for e-book content creators.

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Amazon Massively Inflates Its Streaming Library Size

Amazon counts individual episodes, not whole series, as “TV shows,” which makes its Prime streaming catalog seem 10 times bigger than it actually is.

Amazon boasts that it has “more than 17,000 movies and television shows” on Amazon Prime Instant Video, its streaming service that competes with Netflix and Hulu Plus. The “17,000” figure has been widely parroted in the media, but where does the number come from?

Upon closer examination, the total number of movies and TV shows available to Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year, is actually far lower. Only 1,745 movies are available to stream on the company’s Prime service, and just roughly 150 TV series. The “17,000” figure is not only misleading to consumers, but a faulty indicator of Amazon’s streaming library’s strength versus competitors and traditional entertainment offerings.

Amazon reached that number by counting each episode of a TV series as an individual TV show. For example, Amazon does not count 24 as one TV show; rather, it counts every episode in all eight seasons toward its library of 17,000 movies and television shows. So, according to Amazon’s logic, Kiefer Sutherland stars in 192 TV shows. Amazon counts The X-Files more than 200 times and Grey’s Anatomy 170 times. Sure, there’s an arguable distinction between all the offshoots of Power Rangers (Mighty Morphin, Dino Thunder, Space Patrol Delta). But by Amazon’s figures, Power Rangers-related episodes are counted as about 715 shows in its streaming library–that is, 4.2% of the 17,000 movies and television shows Amazon says it offers.

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Demand for Kindle, Kindle Fire Declining, Analyst

Demand for Amazon’s Kindle readers and its Kindle Fire tablet is decreasing, according to Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley. In a research note, the analyst told clients that an intent-to-purchase survey conducted by his firm found fewer people planning to buy a Kindle Fire, and far few people intending to buy one of Amazon’s E-ink Kindle readers.

In the brokerage firm’s Q1 survey, some 4.9 percent of respondents said they intended to buy a Kindle Fire tablet. In the Q2 survey, which was just conducted, that number had declined to 4.5 percent. This matches the analyst’s supply checks, which indicated a 10 percent month-over-month decline in component orders in February, and a further 15 percent sequential decline in March.

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Antitrust and ebooks: regulators miss the big DRM lock-in picture

US antitrust regulators have never really been able to find the right place to stick their lever and pry when it comes to the Internet (witness their failure to understand Microsoft’s platform dominance in the 90s). Now they’re going after various publishers and Apple over price fixing (my publisher is included, and for the record, I don’t agree with their stance on “agency pricing”), but they’re missing all the big elephants in the room: platform lock-in by way of DRM, prohibitions created by both Apple and Amazon on using third-party payment systems on their apps, and all the associated ticking bombs that represent the real, enduring danger to the ebook marketplace. Every dollar that is spent on a locked, proprietary platform is a dollar of opportunity cost that society will have to spend to get out from under the would-be monopolists of ebooks when (not if) they abuse their power.

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Three publishing veterans push English fiction in India

New Delhi: The growing English language publishing industry in India has taken a step north with three veteran publishers – David Davidar, Ravi Singh and Kapish G. Mehra – joining ranks to push high-end literary fiction from the subcontinent to a wider cross section of readers in the country.

The trio announced the formal launch of the Aleph Book Company – an independent publishing company in the Rupa group – at a low-key one-on-one interactive session with a small group of media people in the capital this week.

The trio also handed out “The Book of Aleph”, a designer catalogue listing the new firm`s spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, winter and spring titles.

The category on offer is quality literary fiction and non-fiction featuring writers like Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Jerry Pinto, Timeri N. Murari, Khushwant Singh, Cyrus Mistry, M. Krishnan, Ruskin Bond and Wendy Doniger.

Literary fiction is a genre distinct from mass fiction for a more niche audience.

Co-publisher of Aleph David Davidar, the former CEO of Penguin-International, said: “Only 15 to 20 of the books published in the country get the kind of careful focused attention one wants to give”.

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Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

A copyright lawsuit has pitted three of the four big American textbook publishers against a web startup in a dispute over the layout of textbooks.

Facts may not be copyrighted, but how they are laid out is, contends the joint complaint that publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed last month in US District Court in Southern New York.

Though educational start-up Boundless claims to use only free information and non-copyrighted text to fill the textbooks that it gives away free online, the big publishing firms claim that Boundless has copied their structuring down to the pagination and image-labelling.

The Massachusetts startup now has a hefty lawsuit on its hands before the product has even made it out of beta. The web firm has already gathered $8m in venture funding.

The lawsuit from the publishers states:

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