Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses
In the future, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own.
In the future, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own.
Subscribers to print newspapers have gone missing, as everyone knows. Book publishers are also wondering where readers have disappeared to.
And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research.
A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate. It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich. But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do:
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.