A few hours after Steve Case tweeted that Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) CEO Don Graham told a hometown crowd Tuesday the paper wouldn’t charge for online news, the company told paidContent it was launching its first paid iPhone app today. With that, the Washington Post joins a small but…

As the race to be be ebook format of choice hots up, Penguin is making some bold, experimental bets. These first-look demos of forthcoming books from iPad’s iBook Store, presented by Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson in London on Tuesday, give an idea how publishers might approach Apple’s tablet…

At our first paidContent2010 conference, Elinor Hirschhorn, Simon & Schuster’s EVP & chief digital officer, spoke about the potential for book-online video hybrids such as Vook. “Is there a return?” she asked. “The real question is about distribution. It needs a larger channel or distribution relationship for the browser experience…

Social publishing site Scribd is hoping to capitalize on the hype over apps and e-readers with a slew of products aimed at portable devices in the coming weeks. The San Francisco company’s founder Trip Adler tells the WSJ   Scribd will unveil a “send to mobile” feature this month that…

When Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announced its Nook e-reader in October, the ability to pursue a dual in-store and online sales strategy appeared to be one of the clear advantages it might have over Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). But, as we first reported then, the chain didn’t plan to sell…

Someone at Macmillan has a sense of humor. When I landed on the site Saturday night to check on e-book pricing and availability following Amazon’s one-week banishment, the book being promoted at the top of the front page was Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage…

That’s according to updated estimates from Doug Anmuth, analyst at Barclays Capital, in light of Amazon’s Q4 results and recent accounting change. Anmuth says he estimates 3.1 million Kindles will be sold this year (62 percent growth Y/Y) and Kindle-related revenue will be $1.6 billion, or 5 percent of AMZN’s…

Does Apple’s iBooks ambition mean a new DRM regime for existing e-book app makers? Less than a week after the new iBooks store was announced alongside the iPad, the Amazon-owned Stanza iPhone e-books app has released an upgrade, the version notes for which read: “Removed ability to share books via…

Five major publishers were highlighted by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) at Wednesday’s unveiling of the iPad and the iBookstore. Two days later, one of them was starring in a different e-reader drama when reports emerged that Macmillan titles were no longer being sold directly by Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN). Macmillan wants to…

When we did the first version of this chart heading into the 2009 holiday sales season, four contenders—including the unexpected Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) Nook—were set to crowd the instant-download e-reader field that Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) had to itself for the last two years. Within weeks it already had…

For some critics, the lack of participation from content companies at yesterday’s iPad launch threw some cold water on predictions for how the new device could help the media business regain revenues lost to the web. But if you looked hard enough, publishers were there and, more importantly, some have…

Only if you were flying transatlantic the whole day, could you have missed the brilliant lights of reality distortion field hovering over the privileged earth yesterday. Oh wait, I was. Someone who tried to avoid it while being on terra firma—an admirable task—was Douglas Anmuth, analyst at Barclays Capital. In…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) unveiled the widely anticipated tablet today, which the company is hoping will create a whole new category of devices that fall somewhere between the laptop and the iPhone. Following the formal ceremonies, analysts and members of the press were ushered into a crowded room to get their…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has officially announced the iPad, a device that is similar to the iPhone and iPod Touch, but bigger. So, what’s it for? Apple invited a few developers and publishers on stage to show off some of the features. While they say all 140,00 iPhone apps will work…

The Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) Tablet will save the newspaper industry, put Amazon’s Kindle out of business and change the way students read textbooks. It’s what technology CEOs write poems about, and it’s what Doonesbury considers fodder for a comic strip. All of the fun ends tomorrow as reality sets in…

Arnon Mishkin is a partner with Mitchell Madison Group, where he consults for media companies on improving legacy businesses as well as making the internet profitable. Prior to MMG, he was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, where he did some of the firm’s earliest work on the web.…

One of the biggest knocks toward Amazon’s Kindle has been the closed nature of the Internet-capable device. That starts to dissipate today with word from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) that “later this year” the Kindle Store will start featuring “active content” produced by developers who can suggest their own prices and…

When Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) launched its larger Kindle, the DX, in Europe two weeks ago, the promotion around the product was noticeable for being pretty US-centric. Even on sites in countries like France, if you wanted to buy the device, you were redirected to Amazon.com, where you were given product…

—Vodafone’s mobile bookstore: Vodafone is launching its own branded eBook and audiobook store on its Live portal, in partnership with GoSpoken. The store will stock around 10,000 titles. Mobcast, which powers the GoSpoken service, says it will launch similar projects with T-Mobile and Orange by the end of January. [Release…