Tools of Change for Publishing

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

2009-07-02T12:00:00Z

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

TOC Coming to Frankfurt

2009-07-01T20:30:58Z

I've had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my industry colleagues in Europe during the past year, and it became increasingly obvious there was an opportunity to bring the Tools of Change for Publishing message to a European audience. So we've teamed up with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on a special one-day TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday October 13, the day before the Book Fair begins.

Many of the topics (and some of the speakers -- including Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and Sara Lloyd) will be familiar to TOC New York attendees, but tuned for a European audience. And while the program is still in development, we're also trying to include some fresh voices who can bring a more global perspective -- such as Kotobarabia's Ramy Habeeb and Guardian Media Group's Simon Waldman.

If you have your own ideas for a session, speaker, or topic, you can submit it right here (just a simple Google Form).

TOC blog readers get a discount on registration by using the code TOC09BL when registering.

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

2009-06-17T19:11:35Z

Bookbuilders of Boston, a nonprofit membership organization for publishing professionals, held a panel on June 11 about open publishing. It attracted an usually large number of attendees--about 60--revealing the curiosity its members have toward the potential changes created by this movement.

I was one of the panelists, along with managers from MIT Press and Harvard University Press. In addition to a discussion of the core topic of open publishing--that is, distributing documents free of charge, often under a license that permits free alteration and distribution--I laid out a larger vision that places the publisher in a context where contributors hold conversations online and share large amounts of material freely among themselves. That vision is the center of the following remarks.

When trade publishers are invited to speak, we seem to be expected to follow a certain script. We must stress the importance of finding new ways to distribute and market our material online. We have to point out that only 15% of a book's cost goes to shipping and printing. We champion the importance of supporting authors financially, shed a tear or two for our sister industry, journalism, and so on.

When staff from O'Reilly Media are invited to speak, we defy expectations by throwing out all of that stuff, talking instead about the excitement exploring new technologies that can change people's lives, about working together to educate each other, about how sharing information in communities can help us all grow. This is the open source movement in a nutshell, as it were.

Tonight I'll take a somewhat in-between position: I'll talk about business models, but from the standpoint of open online content.

The bedrock principle in this environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Sound nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.

This is a classic application of the principles from The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic book by Clayton M. Christensen, where he talks about changes caused by disruptive technologies. In our case, disruptive social norms are just as important.

In many areas of publishing--including certainly my own, computer books--there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Much of the material can be edited and redisplayed instantly, particularly on wikis. That is the context in which we have to define the publisher's new roles.

I won't discuss marketing in this talk because I'm not a marketing person and because the rules are changing so fast that I'm afraid of making any predictions about what works. Focusing instead on content production, I've divided the roles publishers play in adding quality into four parts. For each one, I'll discuss how we're affected by the presence of so much online material.

Proofing for grammar, syntax, and consistency of usage

Publishers spend a lot of time making documents look professional and enforcing standards. We're obsessed with getting every comma and semi-colon right, ensuring that capitalization is consistent, and so on.

I think this as a valuable contribution to quality. Sometimes someone reading an article will stop and as me, "Here's an abbreviation spelled two different ways--does it refer to the same thing or two different things?" And sometimes I'll read a sentence that's missing a word, and have to go over it two or three times to see how the parts fit together. Proofreading can resolve real problems in comprehension.

But many modern readers don't value proofreading, because it comes at a cost. This cost, of course, is the extra time proofreading adds to publication. The modern reader would rather have the document right now, so he can get his tweet out before his colleague does. First tweet wins.

Proofreading is also like cleaning the Aegean Stables. I've found myself in the situation where I edit a whole book and get it looking really professional, then find that someone goes in the files the next day to make some updates--and there goes all my hard work.

But publishers can still offer professional proofreading. The time this is useful is when an organization needs a professional looking document--for instance, when it wants to print an online book in order to show off the organization's capabilities to a potential client. In the same situation where you take off your T-shirt and don a pants-suit, you want a professional-looking text. And publishers may be able to get revenue in such situations.

Fact-checking

A more significant contribution publishers make to quality is fact-checking. Many newspapers and magazines hire staff to do it; technical journals and book publishers such as O'Reilly pay outside experts a few hundred or couple thousand dollars to perform the same service.

Few authors and readers online hold the view expressed by a blogger in last Sunday's New York Times who said, "Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap." But there is an attitude among responsible bloggers--which I adopt myself--that if you've gathered enough of the facts to propound a valid opinion, you can go ahead and put the opinion out for debate. If other people see errors or have evidence that weakens your argument, they can cite them in comments. If you write a wiki, they can edit it. In any case, you're encouraged to express yourself so long as you're sure you're heading in the right direction.

This approach is more limited than many of its adherents think, though. In the computer field I work in, especially, a lot of online participants hold to an essential philosophy of logical positivism. They believe that if enough facts are brought to bear and enough people comment, we will all converge on the truth. If this were the case, most of the articles in Wikipedia would be perfect by now.

But if course this is not the case, because new information, new opinions, new interpretations get added all the time, and with them new errors are introduced as well.

So there may be a role for publishing professionals in fact checking. It will probably not be a large part of our work, though because in the Internet age fact checking is a lot easier than it used to be. Just don't rely on Wikipedia.

Editing unclear and ambiguous passages

This task is probably where publishers create the most value, and where they can make some of their biggest contributions to Internet content. I find it sad when I read a document by someone who is clearly brilliant and knows his material well, and come across a passage that doesn't make sense because no editor said, "You have to work on this."

And every editor knows the work involved in making text comprehensible by ripping up paragraphs, rearranging points in the proper order, introducing connecting or transitional material, and even adding facts that the author took for granted but that the editor knows have to be explicitly told to the reader.

I've noticed that the give and take of modern online media compensates even for poorly argued text. If someone doesn't understand a point, she can just post a question. The author can come back to cover it in more detail, and after a couple rounds of discussion they work out the meaning. Other people can join in to offer explanations.

Still, I look at these exchanges and think, "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time if someone had just edited the document." And some projects are recognizing the value of having an expert eye look over a document, something few amateurs know how or take time to do.

Integrating facets of a large-scale text

We all know the difference between reading an anthology of diverse articles for different audiences, written from different points of view in different tones of voice, and reading a 250-page book so well integrated that you start on page 1 and can't put it down till you reach the end. Achieving this quality is where publishers shine, and I haven't found any process or mechanism in collaborative, online document production that can carry it off.

But even this has diminished value in the Internet world, because hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time. If we read chunks of a few thousand words at a time, we could just as well read documents the way they usually appear on the Internet: many small contributions by different people scattered among different web sites. (This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate.)

That doesn't mean the problem of integration has disappeared; it has just shifted. Now the public needs help finding their way among the different documents. Hints are needed as to what to read first, where to go when they encounter a new concept they need to learn, and how to harmonize documents that use different terms or approach a problem from different angles.

I think publishers can play a major role helping to organize content culled from around the Internet. But the process is a lot different from organizing material into a book. It requires a new online tools and a type of different interaction between experts and those tools. I will leave you with a pointer to an article I wrote proposing some tools, and another pointer to my collection of articles about community educational efforts.

In summary, publishers still have roles to play when we are no longer gatekeepers. But we have to renew our relevance in environments where enormous amounts of information are put online by different participants, with ample facilities for commenting and linking. These new technologies and norms force us to look at every area where we traditionally boast of adding quality, and to find new ways to apply our skills.

Inside Look at RAND's $9.95 Ebook Pricing Strategy

2009-06-09T12:39:31Z

Recently, the RAND Corporation announced that it has revised the suggested retail pricing on all RAND ebooks to $9.95 each. RAND ebooks are available through a wide variety of wholesale and retail partners.

The press release provided some explanation for the decision, also discussed in Publishers Weekly. I have been asked by Tools of Change to provide some additional insight into our ebook pricing strategy.

There were several things that went into our thinking on, as one of my colleagues appropriately called it, this "new math." Some of these factors will generally not apply to other publishers, though I do believe some factors should, and eventually will, affect other publishers' pricing strategies as well.

First of all, and this is important, RAND is not a traditional publisher. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. RAND research, which spans a broad base of subjects and is funded through hundreds of resources, is dedicated to serving the public interest. RAND's focus is on conducting objective, high-quality research, and every publication endures a rigorous review processes. These exacting standards are the foundation of RAND's impeccable reputation throughout the world. No consideration is made on whether a particular topic or book might be a good title for sales -- the emphasis is on quality of the research. In addition, RAND's revenue comes primarily from its research and philanthropic support, not from the sales of books and ebooks.
Going along with the first point, a crucial component of RAND's mission is operating in the public interest. This was written into the our charter, in 1948: "To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." This is one of the reasons why we post all of our publicly available books and reports online for free PDF download; we had ~4.3 million PDF downloads from our site last year. Dissemination is more important than sales. (I do believe there is a compelling argument, supported by many, that free electronic dissemination helps drive sales, instead of cannibalizing sales.) We have posted all new titles since 1998 on our Web site, and sales of book sales have still increased during that period.
Book sales help support the marketing and publishing program, but the main consideration, as a nonprofit, is to break even, not recoup a huge profit. Book sales need to recoup the costs of printing, distribution, marketing, etc., and with ebooks, conversion costs.
Previously, we had been pricing ebooks at the price of the printed book, which in our case is nearly always paperback; we publish few hardcovers. This seems to be the most common model for publishers, price the ebook at the print price. RAND prints nearly everything print on demand (POD), and sells the majority of our print titles through our distributor, NBN, so the price of the print book factors in POD and distribution costs. POD cost rises when the book is longer in length and/or has color charts or graphs. Thus one book may be priced at $44 because of color charts, another may be $25 because it is shorter in length and entirely black and white. These factors have nothing to do with an ebook, however. Ebooks are agnostic as to length (except as the length may affect the costs of editing) and color charts and graphs have no bearing compared to black and white in terms of ebook costs.
We have no manufacturing, distribution, or warehouse costs with ebooks, nor do we have to deal with returns, so the back end is much cleaner.
I believe firmly that customers have an expectation, which is only likely to grow, that ebooks should cost less than printed books. I believe this is being reinforced, but not driven by, Amazon's decision to make many Kindle ebooks $9.95, even when they must pay the publisher more. I don't believe they pulled that number out of thin air, though that is possible. At $9.95, RAND hopes to make up in volume what it may lose in profits from a higher price on each ebook.
Library funding is tight. Increasingly, libraries want to buy ebooks on demand, when a patron asks for it, not before. Jobbers and wholesalers are now entering into relationships with ebook distributors to aggregate ebook purchases, and the library market is a key market for us to reach. Libraries may balk at $35 for a printed book, or lack the shelf space to store it, but they can afford and store a $9.95 ebook.
Since we post PDFs for free download, two reasons we are able to sell ebooks on other sites such as Amazon.com, Books 24x7, EBL/ebooks.com, ebrary, Ingram Digital/ MyiLibrary, netLibrary and Questia, and soon Sony and Overdrive, is from a convenience standpoint (customer has a particular device and wants it seamlessly integrated, or a library subscribes to an ebook service and makes all titles available to their patrons) and/or ignorance (the customer may not be aware that we post PDFs for free). I don't want to bank on customer ignorance, but the convenience factor can hold up over time.

These are the main factors influencing our decision making on this new ebook strategy. It will be interesting to see if others follow.

John Warren is marketing director, publications, at the RAND Corporation. He contributes to the Publishing Frontier blog. He was recently selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper, "Innovation and the Future of ebooks," which is available for free download on the RAND Web site.

CrunchPad Tablet Prototype Coming Together

2009-06-04T11:59:04Z

The low-cost tablet project ("CrunchPad") from TechCrunch is nearing the working-prototype stage:

This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we've decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device ...

The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley.

The post's associated pictures and video are worth viewing. CrunchPad looks like something Apple would cook up.

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

2009-06-01T12:59:38Z

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times:

Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We don't believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go," he said.

He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover -- typically around $13 or $14.

In addition -- and this is pure conjecture on my part -- Google's push into HTML 5 is a potential shot across the bow of e-reader manufacturers. Assuming it's widely implemented, HTML 5 will further blur the line between standalone software and Web browsers/cloud-based content. Toss in Google's Chrome browser and the Gears plugin and you can see how the dots (might) connect.

According to the Times, Google intends to launch its ebook project in 2009. This effort is separate from the pending Book Search agreement.

New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System

2009-05-21T15:00:35Z

O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:

Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.

You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.

Undocumented Kindle "Clippings" Limit?

2009-05-20T14:25:04Z

O'Reilly author Shelley Powers is a heavy user of Kindle's "clipping" feature, and has run into an apparently undocumented clipping limit imposed by Amazon:

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Shelley also notes that the clipping limit applies to DRM-free books as well, which definitely doesn't make much sense.

Amazon's Physical vs. Digital Dissonance

2009-05-18T12:00:00Z

In March of 2008, I wrote about the frustrating experience of trying to get this blog added to Kindle. Fourteen months later, apparently that "rather large ingestion queue" is still full, because the blog never showed up, and I never heard another peep about it. (There is now a self-publishing feature for blogs, but as with their self-publishing book feature (known as DTP), the standard terms of service you must accept to participate aren't something many commercial publishers will be willing or eager to swallow.)

As you might expect, Amazon is one of our biggest customers, and our relationship with them is an important one. They give us far more (virtual of course) "shelf space" than most retailers could possibly provide, and their lean ordering systems mean much less exposure to the risk of significant returns. But much of the efficiency and innovation that is the hallmark of their physical-goods business doesn't seem to be translating into their newer digital programs.

Cory Doctorow has a post over on boing-boing venting his own frustrations with trying to get answers from Amazon:

I love Amazon's physical-goods business. I buy everything from them, from my coffee-maker to my DVDs. I love their consumer-friendly policies, and their innovative business practices. I just wish their electronic delivery business was as good as their physical goods side.

(For the record, we're the "major publisher" Cory references -- I passed his questions along to my own contacts on the Kindle team, and despite repeated attempts haven't been able to get a response either.)

I do understand that many of these are new products and systems, and it's inevitable that there will be glitches and problems; it's often important to be willing to be "good enough" in order to move quickly. But some of these things are bordering on the absurd (like the 14-month wait for ingestion of this blog...). For example, while we were thrilled they worked quickly to help us get The Twitter Book up for sale on Kindle, for more than two weeks (until just last Friday) the product page for the print version not only didn't show the Kindle version as available, it actually included a link saying "Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle." Sigh.

In the wake of releasing about 200 of our books onto Kindle, more than one customer complained that the Preview wasn't up to par:

@timoreilly I love how the Kindle sample of the Twitter book doesn't even get past the preface for the book. Not much of a sample.

Turns out the default preview percentage is 5% of the book, so we asked if we could dial that up to 20% (in line with the amount included in a preview of one of our books on Google Book Search). The response? Since we're the only publisher that's asked for it, it's not a high priority change they're prepared to make right now. (Note to other publishers: please let Amazon know you'd like the option to increase the preview percentage on your Kindle books.)

Amazon is a business like any other, and they're entitled to prioritize as they see fit. And I hope that all of the new vendors, sites, and services popping up (or ramping up) to sell ebooks create some urgency for Amazon to improve their own programs so they're as efficient in the digital supply chain as they are in the physical one.

Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

2009-05-18T01:52:48Z

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar:

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.

Ebook Piracy is Up Because Ebook Demand is Up

2009-05-12T13:48:55Z

My email, twitter, and "real-world" information stream is abuzz today with references to a New York Times story about the increase in piracy of ebooks:

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.”

John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the “Dummies” series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies. Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books.

The reason there's an "exponential" increase in piracy of ebooks is because there's an exponential increase in demand for ebooks:

That's not a bad thing! It's an indicator of unmet demand (and in particular for non-DRM encrypted content). I know I have no interest in buying an ebook that's locked to a single vendor or device, and I'm sure many of these "pirates" feel the same. This is a good time to revisit Tim O'Reilly's seminal Piracy is Progressive Taxation, which includes the following lessons:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Piracy is progressive taxation.
Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
"There's more than one way to do it."

I'm not suggesting publishers stop sending those DMCA notices; but 3 full-time staffers? Putting those resources toward building new ways to meet that demand is a much better investment.

Coincidentally, our research report Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales is now available.

Twitter Boot Camp Coming June 15 in New York

2009-05-12T11:48:45Z

Twitter seems simple on the surface, but it takes practice to harness Twitter's audience development power. That's why we're hosting a one-day Twitter Boot Camp in New York City on June 15.

Join O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, Edelman Digital SVP Steve Rubel, Twitter expert Sarah Milstein and others at this one-day educational event. Speakers and instructors will reveal best practices you can immediately apply to engage your audience and grow your business.

Full event information and registration details are available here. Use the discount code "toc" to get $50 off the registration fee.

Authoring Tools from Alpha Geeks

2009-05-11T15:04:21Z

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) has posted a nice article covering some of the tools he's built or borrowed to make his writing life more manageable. I'm especially intrigued by the Flashbake project, which augments simple use of version control (something many of our authors have been using for years, and which we use extensively in our production toolchain) to automatically capture contemporaneous data about the writing process:

Now, this may be of use to some notional scholar who wants to study my work in a hundred years, but I'm more interested in the immediate uses I'll be able to put it to — for example, summarizing all the typos I've caught and corrected between printings of my books. Flashbake also means that I'm extremely backed up (Git is designed to replicate its database to other servers, in order to allow multiple programmers to work on the same file). And more importantly, I'm keen to see what insights this brings to light for me about my own process. I know that there are days when the prose really flows, and there are days when I have to squeeze out each word. What I don't know is what external factors may bear on this.

Thinking about content like code opens up a wealth of tools and techniques for managing that content. After all, programmers spend more time than just about anyone doing what can very easily be called "creative writing" with text, so it's no surprise they've built tools to make their lives easier and more productive. We're getting ready to announce a new project over at O'Reilly Labs, one also built on top of version control (Subversion in our case) and another example of using software tools to improve the writing (and in this case reading) experience.

Amazon Demos Large Screen Kindle DX

2009-05-06T15:57:33Z

Amazon released the large-form Kindle DX this morning. Notable specs include:

The $489 DX ($130 more than Kindle 2) will be shipped this summer. It's currently available for pre-order through Amazon.com
The DX screen measures 9.7 inches diagonally; 3.7 inches larger than the Kindle 2. Including the frame and keyboard, the DX is 10.4 inches high x 7.2 inches wide x 0.38 inches deep.
The DX holds 3,500 books. Kindle 2 holds 1,500.
The DX has built-in PDF support. The Kindle 2 requires conversion through the Personal Document Service, which was recently switched to a $0.15 per megabyte variable fee.
Auto-rotation switches between portrait and landscape modes.

During this morning's demonstration, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addressed the DX's two target markets: textbooks and newspapers. Bezos announced an agreement with Pearson, Cengage and Wiley to bring textbooks to the device.

In its live-blog coverage, Engadget offered this quote from Jeff Bezos in regard to newspapers:

"We're pleased to announce that three papers have signed on with us, the NYT, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. They will offer reduced prices for long term commitments on subscriptions."

Adam Ostrow from Mashable says the "reduced prices" pertain to the cost of the Kindle DX, but I'm looking for clarification. Technically, those price reductions could apply to subscription fees. The Kindle-based New York Times subscription currently costs $13.99 per month, and the Times may knock that monthly fee down in return for a multi-year commitment. More to come ....

(Update, 5/6/09, 2pm) -- Ars Technica says a lower-cost DX will be available with newspaper subscriptions. Further details have not been announced.

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

2009-05-05T13:10:45Z

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market:

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

There's also considerable discussion about the impact a large-form Kindle could have on newspapers and magazines. Large-form e-readers from Plastic Logic (due in 2010) and iRex (currently avaialble) are aimed at the same business/media-consumer market.

We'll know full details after tomorrow's Amazon press conference.