Friday, September 30, 2011

The Kindle: the Changing Publishing World

For my topic I would like to look at how new technology is impacting the publishing world and specifically how the Kindle has impacted it. The analysis would begin with a discussion on how selling books worked before the Kindle. This would mean looking at the forerunners of book selling such as Borders, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and others. I would specifically look at how Amazon prepared for the Kindle and how they first became a leader in book selling. The next would be to show the Kindle and the explosion that occurred with Amazon. With this new technological change came a whole new idea on how to read/buy/publish books. I would focus on the creation of ebooks and how this started to change the publishing world. The next step would be to look at how this impacted the industry. I would look at competitors and see their reactions to the Kindle. My major focus would be on how Borders failed to change with Barnes and Noble changed in time to possibly compete with Amazon and the Kindle. Finally, the last point would be to look at how having ebooks is changing the way things are done and the impact the Kindle will have in the future, especially in terms of content. This revolution will impact publishers and consumers but also authors, and not always for the better.

5 comments:

  1. Kate, this looks really great! I'm excited to see where this goes since ours will overlap a little! I'm also really interested to see what went wrong at Borders vs. Barnes and Noble. Nice work,

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  2. Yea I think this is a great point and idea. The way that we read books these days has gone from hard copies to kindles and ipads I feel like, and its not going to go back to hard copies. I'm interested in how you're going to suggest the future of our book reading, and I think you have a good start to a great project. Good work

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  3. I like the idea a lot. Does Kindle have any rivals? Maybe the iPad? I don't really know because I don't have either one. I like the approach of how it affects B&N and Borders but maybe just for fun you can look at the competitors of Kindle just to see where it might be going in the coming years or if it needs to be concerned about anything at all.

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  4. Cool Idea. You touched on it a bit in your proposal, but maybe you could also look into not just how the kindle is affecting the retailers, but how it is affecting the consumption and use of books by consumers, especially in the educational realm. There have also a good deal of lawsuits aimed at Amazon and the Kindle, so you could look into that as well.

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  5. Kate, I actually didn't know much about this so I did a little bit of basic research and found a few interesting articles. Hopefully these are a little helpful.

    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=239

    http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/09/how-to-check-out-library-books-for-kindle/

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/get-library-books-on-your-kindle/2011/09/21/gIQA9wfalK_story.html

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/31/us-staples-kindle-idUSTRE67U23V20100831

    http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=ba93965f-e6d8-461b-a4ef-bfdc8dbddd4c

    I am really interested to see what you end up finding, do you think there is anything books can do to appeal to people? Is there something they can offer that digitalized products simply cannot offer?

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