From Business Insider:

Barnes & Noble got a lot of buzz a few days ago when it released a big new software update for its Nook HD tablet.

The software update adds the Google Play store, which is the online shop for Android phones where Google sells apps, music, movies, magazines, etc. That makes the Nook update a great deal for Nook owners. They now have access to much more content than they did through Barnes & Noble’s own limited app and content store.

. . . .

But it’s also a bad sign for Barnes & Noble, which is still working through the uneasy transition from physical bookstore to hardware manufacturer and seller of online goods and services.

. . . .

[At first], instead of using Google’s services and apps, Barnes & Noble tried to create its own Nook-branded ecosystem.

It didn’t really work. The first Nook tablet didn’t have an online store for buying music, movies, TV shows, etc. You could load content from other sources using a SD card or plugging the Nook into your computer, but that was hardly as convenient as directly downloading stuff like you could with the Kindle Fire. The Nook HD, which launched last fall, was Barnes & Noble’s first device to finally include a way to directly download some of that content, but the selection wasn’t nearly as good as Amazon’s.

. . . .

Barnes & Noble’s Nook division continued to collapse, with digital content and device sales down 26%, according to the company’s last earnings report.
Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s strategy was to sell its devices for super cheap –– the Nook HD now starts at $149 –– and lock users into an app and content ecosystem. The new Nook update essentially turns the Nook into just another bargain Android tablet packed with Google’s services and content, and that’s really bad news for Barnes & Noble if it wants to continue selling its own digital content on its own hardware.

Barnes & Noble won’t make a penny off stuff people buy through Google Play; all that revenue goes through Google instead.

. . . .

It’s a major Catch 22 for the Nook business. Either offer the best stuff through Google Play and miss out on revenue from digital content, or risk losing customers to Amazon because the Kindle Fire offers more content and apps for about the same price.

Link to the rest at Business Insider

PG recently read another article about Nook which stated Nook has about 25% of the ebook market. As PG recalls, this is a number that Barnes & Noble puts out. He believes this vastly overstates Nook’s real market share.

From TechRadar.Tablets:

The iPad’s share of the UK tablet market has fallen from 73 per cent to 63 per cent in the last twelve months, according to figures published by YouGov.

The Tablet Tracker show a leap in the ownership of Android tablets, mainly through the cheaper Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, while Samsung also made significant gains at the end of Q1 2013.

The Google Nexus 7, which went on sale for just £159 last year, has amassed 8 per cent of the total UK market, while Amazon’s cheap Android tablets accounted for 5 per cent of all sales.

Meanwhile, Samsung jumped from a 4 per cent to a 10 per cent share.

. . . .

The YouGov report says the fall of Apple’s tablet overlordship comes despite the launch of the iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad at the back end of last year.

Link to the rest at TechRadar.Tablets

From Paid Content:

Mystery solved. Many were scratching their heads over why Google sold Frommer’s Travel Guides this month — less than a year after buying the brand for $22 million. The answer is the same as for why Google does nearly anything: data.

As Skift reported Tuesday, Google handed over the company to founder Arthur Frommer sans social media accounts. In other words, Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. These thousands — or more likely millions — of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.

While Google will not keep the Frommer’s name, it’s able to keep the followers by simply changing the name on the account; in the case of Twitter, all of the @FrommersTravel followers are now following Google-owned @ZagatTravel.

. . . .

In response to a question about the social media accounts and the price of the sale, Google provided this response:

We’re focused on providing high-quality local information to help people quickly discover and share great places, like a nearby restaurant or the perfect vacation destination. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months integrating the travel content we acquired from Wiley into Google+ Local and our other Google services. We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.

Link to the rest at Paid Content

PG thinks this is a data point about how much value Google discovered in the traditional publishing side of Frommer’s — very little. The customers were worth more than the content even though Frommer guides are published in hard copy and ebook forms.

Google finds value in places that others do not. However, if PG is right, this raises an interesting question about where the true value of an author resides. Are the author’s readers, Twitter followers, blog visitors, etc., worth more than the author’s books, especially if the author’s readers represent a huge collection of serious enthusiasts about some subject?

PG has often said the best parts of this blog are the comments. If PG thinks about the value of The Passive Voice (no, it’s not for sale nor does PG think it ever will be), he believes the most valuable part of TPV is the people who come here, particularly those who share their opinions.

Just sayin’.

From the mouth of Nathan Bransford:

The Apple Dilemma:  Marketshare or Margins

“Steve Jobs famously got Apple back on track by reducing the number of products Apple had down to a reasonable number in order to create product excellence.

“Focus, focus, focus.

“Excellence, excellence, excellence.

“That’s why it’s was a huge, huge deal when Apple finally — after Steve Jobs fought against it — launched the iPad Mini. The press and consumers went crazy for this product when Amazon had had the Kindle Fire out for 13 months and Google had had the Nexus 7 out for five. It was a big deal not because of the product itself, but because the app ecosystem was finally freed to embrace a new footprint.

“Steve was right about focus while simultaneously wrong about the smaller tablet footprint — long live cognitive dissonance and a tolerance for ambiguity!”

*****

“This week someone handed me a BlackBerry 10. It’s basically as good as the iPhone 5, in fact some would argue the finish feels better in your hand.

“Anyone who has used the Microsoft Surface will tell you that while the Microsoft app store is far behind Apple’s, the interface and the hardware are as good or better.

“Finally, a bunch of dorky friends of mine have been praising the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, an absurdly large smartphone (or tiny version of the iPad mini). After lunch with David Eun of Samsung at CES I said screw it, I’ll buy that really dorky looking phone.

“Now I love it.

“When reaching for my iPad Mini, iPhone or Note, I most frequently reach for the Note.”

Read the rest here at:  Launch

I actually love my Android.  Julia

I’m a big one for visual aids.

From Social Media and the History of Sales Technology:

“Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, exchange and comment contents among themselves in virtual communities and networks. Furthermore, social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities and individuals.

“Did you know that a recent study revealed that 44 percent of U.S. companies have acquired a customer through Twitter?

“Sales professionals have been using technology to both open doors and close deals with consumers for a lot longer than you probably think. The invention of the printing press back in 1440 revolutionised the world, and the telephone (1870), computer (1960s), widespread adoption of email and the internet (1990s), Google (1996) and social media (2000s) have each played a massively important role in how brands market their products.”

You can read the rest and view the Infograph here:  WordPress Hosting SEO

From guest host, author Julia Barrett.

From Paid Content:

Google has so far spent more than $180 million on book scanning and, at the outset of the project, one of its stated goals was to keep web searchers away from Amazon.

These are among the details set out in a new court filing by the Authors Guild, which is locked in a long-running case over the search giant’s decision to digitize libraries.

The filing points to internal Google documents in an attempt to show that the scanning was an overtly commercial project, and that the scanning was not a fair use as Google is claiming.

In a 2003 internal Google presentation described in the filing, the company stated “[we want web searchers interested in book content to come to Google not Amazon.”

As annotated by the Authors’ Guild, the 2003 Google presentation also said “[e]verything else is secondary … but make money.” (The presentation was filed under seal so the context of the remark is unclear).

Link to the rest at Paid Content

First, the Price-Fix Six, then Google. What is it about Amazon that causes temporary insanity among its competitors?

From Bloomberg:

Authors suing Google Inc. over the digitizing of books asked a judge to order the company to pay $750 a book for illegal copying and distribution of their works, according to a court filing today.

Google is being sued over its plan, announced in 2004, to scan millions of books from public and university libraries to provide snippets of text to people who use its Internet search engine. A Manhattan federal judge in May rejected Google’s argument that lawsuits by the Authors Guild and the American Society of Media Photographers should be dismissed because the groups lacked standing to sue for copyright infringement.

The Authors Guild today asked the judge for a ruling in its favor on three legal issues, one of which is a claim for damages of $750 a book. The guild also says it wants a ruling that copying books isn’t a “fair use” under copyright law, as Google has said it will argue.

Link to the rest at Bloomberg and thanks to Abel for the tip.

From Reason.com:

Google filed a motion for summary judgment today in its battle against the Authors Guild, which wants the court to levy heavy fines on the company for the copyright infringements allegedly committed by the Google Books service. Speaking as an author myself, my sympathy here is entirely with Google.

This isn’t just a matter of principle. It’s self-interest. As a writer, I gain far more from Google Books than I could conceivably lose from it.

If you write the sort of books that require you to consult other books, then Google Books is a wonderful tool. I use it to search for phrases in books I already own, a task in which it outperforms virtually every volume’s index. I use it as a general search engine when exploring a new topic or looking for different perspectives on a contentious issue, and it often points me to useful material that I previously was unaware of.

Link to the rest at Reason and thanks to Lily for the tip.

Hi all,

Looks interesting.  Unfortunately I can only post the link, not the video:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/7443946-google-unveils-new-tablet-at-sf-io-conference/#.T-tmvMUIvME.email

–  Julia Barrett