Sony releases two new ebook readers, which I’m unnaturally enthusiastic about (if you live in the Americas – where the streets flow with milk and honey – I’d appreciate one of these) and in the article over at New York times one of the publishers is brooding about the (reduced!) costs of doing business in the digital age.
Their plan is to wait with digital copies of books so that fans can spend money on buying the hardcover version first. See, because the strategy to delay DVD sales until the cinema screenings have milked the marked has really worked out swell for the movie industry. How come these people still have a job to go to? They must have heard of OCR and rabid fans typing up new books, right?
In response to the $9.99 list price, some publishers are thinking about postponing the release of the digital versions of their most popular books, lengthening the period in which only the higher-priced hardcover versions are available. This is similar to the approach taken by Hollywood studios, which allow DVD sales and rentals only after a film has left theaters.
→ New York Times, Brad Stone: Sony to Cut E-Book Prices and Offer New Readers
To help budding entrepreneurs avoid these traps, I also identified the three key elements that go into a successful business plan: a logical statement of a problem and its solution; a battery of cold, hard evidence; and candor about the risks, gaps and other assumptions that might be proved wrong.
→ Wall Street Journal, John W. Mullins: Why business plans don’t deliver