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Amazon.com has announced it will capitulate to the demands of publisher Macmillan’s demands on pricing of e-books. No doubt it means far more to Amazon.com to have Macmillan books on its “shelves” than it does to continue to fight over e-book pricing.

According to reports, and confirmed by Macmillan, the dust-up occurred over e-book pricing. Amazon.com has been setting prices for Kindle books itself, sticking to a one-size fits all model of $9.99. However, Macmillan wanted to set its own pricing, at around $15 for new publications, and a sliding model as the book ages.

Does it sound familiar? It sounds a lot like the tiered model Apple now has in the iTunes store, which it fought so hard against for so long.

Here’s what Amazon.com said on their Kindle Community page:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

Of course, one has to ask: since when does an e-book (or an iBook) cost $15 to produce? “Needlessly high,” is what Amazon.com said, and that’s true. Let’s be clear, also. It’s already known that Amazon.com pays whatever the publisher wants, and sells the book at $9.99. It, like Apple previously, is trying to foster consumer demand by keeping the price low.

Does Proctor & Gamble tell Target how much to sell their products for? No, it doesn’t. So this really makes little sense. However, since Macmillan will withhold its publications unless Amazon.com capitulates, Amazon.com has little choice.http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/01/amazoncom-caves-in-to-macmillan.html

A new study notes that hands-free cell phone bans will not significantly reduce auto accidents. Rather, what the study says is that distracted driving is the problem. However, before wireless carriers and cell phone manufacturers start (or continue) lobbying against such bans, they need to remember that cell phones are one of those distractions.

The study was conducted by the Highway Loss Data Institute, an insurance industry group. It examined accident rates before and after hand-held cell phone bans went into effect in New York, the District of Columbia, Connecticut and California.

“The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” says Adrian Lund, president of both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and HLDI. For example, an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study that relies on driver phone records found a 4-fold increase in the risk of injury crashes. A study in Canada found a 4-fold increase in the risk of crashes involving property damage. Separate surveys of driver behavior before and after hand-held phone use bans show reductions in the use of such phones while driving.

So why aren’t the results better? The HLDI is gathering further data to try to make that determination. The answer, however, may be simply common sense: it’s not the use of hand-held phones that is the issue; it’s the use of cell phones will driving, period. In fact, some studies have already posited that cell phone conversation while driving alone is a distraction that needs banning. This isn’t the first such study to note that hands-free setups don’t reduce accidents, either.

Let’s not forget, also, that even before starting to talk on a cell phone, and even with a Bluetooth headset, a driver must dial a number (unless it’s one he can redial from the headset). That’s a major distraction, as well.

There’s also a conundrum, as well, with car manufacturers beginning to stuff more and more technology into cars, which simply add to the distraction. It was bad enough before the advent of cell phones, with complex stereo systems and eating, but now manufacturers are adding wi-fi hotspots to cars. While common-sense would say that drivers should be smart enough to know better than to turn to the laptop sitting on their passenger seat to Google something, it seems pretty obvious that there will be some who do.

Those who rail against legislation need to recall what good seat-belt laws did. They also need to remember, that we wouldn’t need to legislate such matters, if people were smart enough or had enough common sense on their own.
http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/01/hand-held-cell-phones-bans-alone-dont.html

Google is about to show Internet Explorer 6 the door, which is probably what end users should have done long ago. The Internet giant announced on Friday that as of March 1st, it will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs or Google Sites services.

At the same time, in a blog post, Google outlined minimum browser requirements for other browsers as well. These requirements will all go into effect on March 1st. The requirements, in total, are:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0+
• Google Chrome 4.0+
• Safari 3.0+

It is indeed time to retire IE6.  It’s ridiculous to expect not just Google, but anyone to continue to support such archaic software.  Besides, how can you IE6 users survive without tabs?
http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-to-drop-ie6-support.html

In the wake of Apple’s announcement of the iPad, comes the first salvo in what is probably going to be a drawn out battle. Amazon.com has pulled books published by Macmillan, electronic or not, from its site.

Search for authors available from Macmillan, and with the exception, it seems, of library-bound or “bargain books,” you won’t find Amazon.com pricing for them. You’ll find them at “other sellers,” but not Amazon.com. Click the above image for Robert Jordan’s “Knife of Dreams” to enlarge.

Why would Amazon.com do this? It would seem this is hardly in the best interest of customers, and definitely not in the best interest of the site. Well, according to the New York Times, it’s all about e-book pricing.

According to their report, Macmillan, like other publishers wants Amazon.com to raise its price for e-books from $9.99 to about $15.

Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.

It appears the iPad has already made waves in the e-book market, without even being released. Currently Amazon.com is the big player in e-book sellers, but it’s clear that analysts as well as publishers feel that might change once the iPad arrives. This was obviously an attempt by Macmillan to leverage the iPad’s and iBooks’ upcoming arrivals.

Since Amazon.com currently owns the lion’s share of e-books, this just feels like an iTunes-like battle, similar to when music and other content providers tried to get Apple to change its pricing as well.

It the source is correct, Macmillan and other publishers want Amazon.com to raise the price on its e-books from $9.99 to $15. With Apple’s iBook store coming, Amazon.com will have some solid competition. However, $15 for an electronic version seems, to be honest, highway robbery. How much, after all, does it cost to print an e-book?

On the other hand, since Apple announced that one of the price points for iBooks would be $15, one can see how much nicer it would be for Apple if Amazon.com’s price advantage vanished. Although Amazon MP3 had a price advantage for a while over iTunes, as well as DRM-free music, $5 resonates much more with consumers.

This isn’t over, by a long shot.
http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/01/amazoncom-pulls-macmillan-books-from.html

AT&T, during its Thursday earnings call after it released its Q4 2009 results, basically said that it knows it needs to add more blue dots to its 3G coverage map (see above, from one of the Verizon commercials mocking AT&T’s coverage), and that it was planning to spend $2 billion on that, this year. Problem is, an analyst recently evaluated AT&T’s network, and said the carrier needed to spend $5 billion to catch up to Verizon.

Townhall Investment Research said this in a research paper released earlier this month (.PDF). The paper, released Jan. 19th and titled “AT&T Wireless:
Competition, Capital, and Cure$,” said that Verizon’s 3G coverage is about 5x AT&T’s when measuring by landmass, and that “We estimate AT&T needs to spend about $5.0B on its mobile network to catch Verizon.”

So, AT&T, that $2 billion is nice, but you’re still short $3 billion.

Verizon’s “There’s a Map For That” ad campaign has done a great job of pointing out the negatives in AT&T’s wireless network. Of course, that’s been pretty obvious to AT&T’s iPhone users.

The iPhone’s exclusivity has been great for AT&T’s bottom line, but as it ends, as it will, most likely later this year, there are some who look to jumping ship to whatever network gets the device (Verizon, T-Mobile). Those who don’t plan on moving, will probably get relief simply from the jumpers leaving the network.

However, as more app phones appear, such as Android and Palm webOS phones, the respite may be short-lived.