“The focus is going to be on content creation and participation,” a technologist with close ties to Apple told Wired.com. “If the tablet is going to be an answer to things like the Kindle, which are purely about consumption, what you’re going to see is Apple is going to be full-blown about creation.”
Then, instead of deploying that content on a website and asking for donations or trying to sell ads, creators could deploy their web pages-cum-e-books to the iTunes store, where a built-in retail apparatus takes care of collecting payments as small as $1 while Apple holds on to what looks like a reasonably small 30-percent cut.
A recent Wall Street Journal story suggests that Apple is in last-minute negotiations with book publishers, urging them to adopt a model where most books are priced at $13 or $15, instead of the $10 that prevails on Amazon’s Kindle e-book store.
By distributing through iTunes, creators would have access to users on any of Apple’s platforms, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, MacBooks, desktop PCs, or possibly even the Apple TV. Even more significantly, iTunes users on Windows PCs would also be part of the available market.
And sure, that content will no doubt look good on a tablet, too. Our guess is the tablet will have exclusive functions for displaying iTunes book content in a special way, which will be one of the gadget’s main selling points (among other new, yet-to-be-known features, of course).
In one fell swoop, a move like this would give content creators easy-to-use and powerful tools for creating interactive content, and give them a way of making a living from it, too.
You don't see thousands of websites that get millions of hits and funnel billions of dollars centered around the Rom-Com. There's a huge audience for genre material (Scifi, Action, Horror and the blending of same) that's always hungry.
Feed them something good.
From PW: Although Amazon.com has published prose works exclusively on the Kindle before, in a first the online retailer has teamed with graphic novel publisher Archaia to publish Tumor, an original graphic novel by writer Joshua Fialkov and artist Noel Tuazon, initially in a digital edition formatted specifically for the Kindle;Tumor will be released serially on the Kindle before a hardcover print edition is published three to six months later. This is the first time Amazon has published a graphic novel specifically designed for the Kindle 2, and it will be followed by three additional Archaia books released on the Kindle that will be announced during the San Diego Comic-Con International this week.
The venture also offers a glimpse of a future model for serial/digital/print publication. The Kindle e-book will be sectioned into eight, 22-page chapters and, like most Kindle editions
--------------------------------------------"The new issue of McSweeney's, he adds, will be published in newspaper form, in an attempt to show that if the print model is changed, if it can offer "a clear and different experience" from the internet, then it can thrive. "We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space – if you really truly give readers an experience that can't be duplicated on the web – then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat," he writes.
Eggers ends with a rousing call for the future of print. "This is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page," he says. "Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they'll pay for it."
Over the summer you might have stumbled onto Robert Kirkman’s plea for comics creators to leave DC and Marvel behind for independent publishing (or to come to Image, if you read it with a cynical view). You may also have heard that Brian Bendis attempted to call BS on Kirkman’s plea and debated him on the topic.
and going to sleep so I can get over this Los Angeles Flu bug-virus- sign of the coming apocalypse.
