Warner Music to sell DRM-free through AmazonWarner’s the latest label to lose the DRM entanglements on its music, as Amazon attempts to compete with Apple by supplying Josh Groban tracks. However, the New York Times reports that Warner’s deal with Amazon is not exclusive and they are negotiating with Apple to sell DRM-free music there as well.
As a Tastebook CustomerI fell for Tastebook. I uploaded all my recipes. I organized them into breads/brunch dishes, appetizers, fish, poultry, meat, pasta/rice/grains, soups and salads, desserts, and of course the ever-necessary "other stuff". I chose a cover image, a title, and placed the order: three copies shipped to me, three to my brother (Uncle Pete, of the House of Technological Wonders).
A week later, the order had weirdly cancelled itself. I placed a re-order. Suddenly, the order doubled itself. I called the helpdesk. They’d mistakenly cancelled the order, then un-did it themselves, then my re-order doubled the order. They cancelled the second order.
Two weeks later, Uncle Pete received six cookbooks and had not the foggiest idea what that was about.
Three weeks later, in several deliveries, I received six cookbooks. My account was only charged for one order.
The books themselves were gorgeous. The exact cover I’d selected. Delectable illustrations. Awesome layout. Nice paper stock, tab dividers between sections. Inside, however, were 12 pages of advertisements (masquerading as recipes from Bertolli olive oil), which I removed from each book.
Would I do it again? Probably. As a gift item to friends and family. Would I use Tastebook as a POD? No. At $35/pop, it’s tough to recoup cost plus profit. But as a vanity project, a gift of my kitchen to my friends and Uncle Pete, it’s a great idea.
Larry Kirshbaum Joins Overdrive BoardFormer CEO of Time Warner Larry Kirshbaum (now a literary agent) has joined the board of Overdrive, according to a press release I got around noon today. The obligatory quote:
"During my career, I’ve seen the publishing industry evolve with the adoption of new book formats, business models, and sales channels," said Kirshbaum. "Today, eBooks, audio books, and digital media markets are exploding, and OverDrive is uniquely positioned as a global leader in the value-added distribution of digital books and other content."
News Slows To A Crawl: We Got Nothin’Scholastic is launching a multi-platform series called 39 Clues, which will have components in print, gaming, and collector cards.
Laura Huxley, second wife of Aldous and his biographer, has died.
LA-ist wonders if the Kindle is the Segway for books, not the iPod for books.
Times Discovers Blogging-to-Books TrendMove along, people – nothing to see here.
Credo Reference Expands Customer BaseCredo Reference announced that it has added the Wisconsin Library Services to its roster of clients. WiLS consists of over 500 libraries throughout the state of Wisconsin. Additionally, CEO John Dove emailed me that they’ve also added Brooklyn Public Library to their client list – so you can log onto the library’s website and use Credo’s service with your library card.
Overdrive’s .epub is ready for downloadOverdrive announced late yesterday that it is ready to deliver content in the new .epub format, starting in early 2008. According to the press release:
The new "epub" standard for eBooks and other digital publications was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.IDPF.org), a non-profit standards and trade association, and unanimously approved by IDPF member companies. Publishers benefit from "epub" as it allows them to produce a single digital publication for all distribution channels rather than producing multiple formats for competing reader applications. OverDrive, an IDPF member, joins Hachette Book Group USA, Adobe Systems, Sony, and others in actively supporting the new format.
Hacking the KindleWired reports this morning:
Hacker Igor Skochinsky has reversed engineered the DRM of the Kindle to allow Mobipocket books to be read on Amazon’e eBook device. It works by actually changing the DRM of the files to be compatible with the Kindle.
More MuzingDon Henderson left me a comment yesterday (my comments indicator isn’t working properly for some reason, so it looks like there are 0 comments for that post, when in fact if you click on "comments" you’ll see his post). He very justly corrects me – it’s LEE Ho who’s the VP of marketing over at Muze…JEFF Ho works in marketing at McGraw-Hill and I got them confused.
At any rate, Don goes on to say "There are plenty of Muze personnel left". Indeed! But my question is…how much experience do they have in the particular market Muze addresses? How much institutional knowledge is left when so many of the folks who have been with the company for years have now left? What’s to prevent Muze from making the same mistakes over and over again when that institutional knowledge is no longer there?
Since I left in November 2006, the company has been gutted. I’m sure many wonderful people have come in to replace those who have left or been laid off, but that kind of turnover has a profound effect on a place. It’s not a question of moving bodies and minds around – when turnover is that high, there’s a sacrifice in the organic growth and cohesion of a company. And I wonder if Muze can make up for that.
Muze has amazed me before. It began in 1990 (or thereabouts) in a warehouse in Williamsburg. I came on board in 1995, at the tail end of the warehouse phase – wires and cables draped from ceiling to floor; running the copy machine too long would blow a fuse that would take out the entire video department; it was a bizarre combination of old and new that was right out of a Terry Gilliam movie. In that environment, we played and learned and developed amazing applications. Moving to Soho in 1996, the Skunkworks mindset continued. It was a place of extraordinary inventiveness.
And yet…it wasn’t sustainable. Through massive mismanagement, Muze lost several dozen people, many of whom flocked to Barnes & Noble.com. (I was one of them – I went in 1998.) The mismanagement continued – we’d hear things about one disasterous CEO after another. When I returned in 2006, it seemed that things had stabilized…but this was deceptive, obviously.
No one running the company has ever known quite what to do with it. It is such a promising enterprise – and it attracts extremely gifted people – but every single CEO it’s had has wanted to turn it into something it isn’t. This last round…turning it into a company that distributes actual content instead of simply catalog metadata and sound samples…was particularly ill-thought-out. Acquiring the Loudeye assets was a mistake. It diverted the company from its core business. Muze, I think, is not a company to be transformed. It’s a company that needs to make the best of what it’s got – and it’s got quite a lot.
I’m interested in what Peter Krause and Paul Parreira at Tactic Company are going to do - I believe they have taken the best in what Muze has to offer (editorial and data creation) and are making a business of it.
How Can They Have A Layoff If There’s No One Left At The Company?Just in time for Christmas, Muze has laid off an undisclosed number of staffers from its Seattle office. John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer apparently got a tip that 75% of the Seattle contingent was let go, but the new VP of marketing, Jeff Ho, disputes this:
"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company….Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.
Ho added (rather ominously) that in terms of severance packages, the laid-off employees were "taken care of". When Muze laid me off (at Thanksgiving of last year), I was taken care of, too – with a whole two weeks’ severance.
Predicting that Muze strips the company of its assets and sells them off, and folds like a Japanese fan.
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