Antonio Tombolini's Library tagged capitalism → View Popular, Search in Google

Jun

2008

Idea #6: Free Electronic Books Platform | Max Niederhofer | Venture Capital

Se a dirlo è un venture capitalist... magari è ora di muoversi!

www.maxniederhofer.com/...free-electronic-books-platform

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ebook capitalism

95% and more of music on iPods isn’t bought through iTunes. It’s downloaded, shared, ripped, bootlegged, remixed, reformatted, torrented and then some. I’m not truly concerned with the ethics of it all - I care about the realities of the marketplace.
what has held the digital book back are essentially two issues: the backlit display, which makes it hard to read long documents on the computer for entertainment (at least for mainstream folks who don’t sleep with their MacBook), and the inability of e-ink device manufacturers to allow internet access and open/standard dispaly formats on their devices, since those threatened the publishing crowd.
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- a potentially huge opportunity for someone to start serious free distribution of e-books for the Kindle (something pretty close to what Songbird* is vs iTunes today). Be the part of iTunes that’s always been about free - whether it’s ripping, sharing or organizing legal as well as pirated content.
- Essentially the idea is to take all the libraries of text content out there and reformat them for easy access on the Kindle.
  - Antonio Tombolini on 2008-06-16
    And not just the Kindle, but the Sony, Cybook and the iLiad, and all coming e-ink readers and whatever device you - as the actual reading person - want and fell comfortable with!
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- Become the Napster of the book world - the LimeWire for text. Let young authors come to you to publish free and gain distribution, i.e. MP3.com. Let old authors pale in shame at the download numbers of classics on your platform compared to their latest and greatest “bestseller”, i.e. open access scientific publishing model. Let the social decide what rises to the top over time (instead of the book publishing world casting couches - believe me, they do exist, pasty skin, flush cheeks, nerdy glasses and all!), i.e. Aime Street. Of course, I wouldn’t implement the whole thing as a client app but rather make it a free online service, accessible and readable from any device, with upload/download API and a serious developer platform strategy.
- I firmly believe the Kindle in its second and third gen will make the e-book as mainstream as MP3s are now.
- Free books can be as big as free music given proliferation of readers.