A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool

Peter Thiel Talks About the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo’s $1 Billion

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that’s very different from the present–and that’s not fully valued.

The Desperate Mood Swings Of John Sargent, Part Two

December 19, 2012: A Message from John Sargent

There are two reasons we decided not to settle. First, it is hard to settle when you have done nothing wrong.

February 8, 2013: A Message from John Sargent

Today we agreed to settle our case with the DOJ. We settled because the potential penalties became too high to risk even the possibility of an unfavorable outcome.

Yeah.

Who didn’t see this coming?

Next up, A Message from Tim Cook.

Remember, kids: Being innocent Crime Collusion doesn’t pay.

Previously here:

The Desperate Mood Swings Of John Sargent

Angry Birds Overturn The Book Publishing Cart

Rovio announces Angry Birds book app: Live from Frankfurt Book Fair

Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company whose “Angry Birds” app has now been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, an iOS cookbook app called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.79 in the iTunes Store and includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Why is this such a frikkin big deal?

The Nine Hundred Million Dollar Book

Click = big

Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics, Volume 135

It’s those battling price bots at it again…

The Ad-Filled Vision Of Jeff Bezos

New Kindle Fires to Come With Ads

We all discovered that yesterday after the big Bezos pitch. What we find out this morning is something even worse:

What’s more, according to the product page for the Kindle Fire HD there will also be ads on the lower left hand corner of the home screen. So the entire time you use this tablet you will be bombarded with ads.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Everyone has been thinking, “Oh, we can just remove the ads” by some technical method.

I wouldn’t count on that.

Kill Agency Pricing Dead, Ms. Pozen!

Trust Buster Takes Hard Line As E-Book Probe Continues

Without mentioning Apple Inc. or the five publishers that are the target of the investigation, Sharis Pozen says she won’t hesitate to act against “collusive behavior at the highest levels of companies.”

“Competitors can’t join together and make agreements on price,” she says in an interview. “We’re going to stop that.”

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

She has a good record. She stopped the AT&T-T-Mobile merger that worked against the interest of customers and she stopped the “gentlemen’s agreement” among tech companies that worked against the interest of employees.

If she keeps the focus on Agency Pricing being against the interest of readers, Agency Pricing will be dead.

Good riddance to a price-fixing scheme that should have never, ever been enacted.

1915: How Price Fixing Really Works

Another bit from the 1915 The Square Deal:

Juveniles and those who see themselves as “entitled” have a warped understanding of how prices come about and what pricing means.

In book publishing, the cartel of Agency Model pricing has done more damage to the eBook business, to publishing itself, and to the proper view of pricing, than probably anything else in the past.

Some naifs believe that $9.99 or $12.99 reflects what it “costs” to create one copy of an eBook.

They are wrong.

And those who won’t pay $9.99 or $12.99 are right.

Barnes & Noble: We Don’t Want Ninety-Nine Cent eBooks!

My Questions for Barnes & Noble

1) There’s a rumor going around that Barnes and Noble won’t include a self-published eBook priced at under $3 on its Nook top 100 bestseller list, even if the book’s sales merit this inclusion. …

2) I checked, and 20 of the top 100 Amazon Kindle books are 99¢, but 0 of the Nook top 100 books are priced at under $3.

That’s very interesting.

When I listened to the Barnes & Noble conference call earlier this week, William Lynch mentioned how PubIt! was doing very well for them.

But the implication was ominous: Sure B&N was selling a lot more books, but they were also cheaper books, and that meant less money per-book, which even in volume would not make up for what was being lost by not selling price-fixed higher-priced Big Six Agency books.

So, basically, Barnes & Noble could sell jillions of PubIt! books but wind up making a hell of a lot less money than they ever have.

Lynch tried to hide it, but his sweat could be felt!

So I’m not at all surprised that B&N would want to point people to books that cost more than ninety-nine cents.

All you writers devaluing your work down to ninety-nine cents, you’re cutting your own throats. You will never, ever be able to raise your prices without begging like hell.

And who wants to be a beggar?

The Road To 2015

Forget About 99 Cents, What If You Could Rent Mobile Games for 25 Cents?

In this post, iWork In 2011 Is Just So 2007 To Me, I wrote about what we’ll see in 2015:

Every digital good — software, video, audio, books — is cheap. Everyone can make a living doing digital goods because they are cheap and people will buy them just to try them out. A purchase is no longer a decision. All purchases are impulsive. All sales depend on attracting attention.

I didn’t figure rentals into it, but rentals are a step down that road.

And who’s to say that rental price won’t eventually be the full retail price?

Think of the numbers right now, just for iOS: Over 200 million devices.

Tech produces monstrous, unprecedented numbers like that — and they will continue to inflate.

Attract the attention of a million people worldwide in a week — which has already happened even in these early days — and even at twenty-five cents a pop, that’s a living right there.

All devices will have frictionless purchasing. Everything will just work and seem like magic.

And the money will flow daily.

eBooks today are priced like cars were before Henry Ford introduced the Model T. That will change.

The Ninety-Nine Cents Of Doom

Dirt-Cheap E-Readers: How Low Can They Go?

“We’ll see $99 e-readers from the major players by the holidays, if not sooner,” Mainelli said.

Weiner concurs on the $99 price-point: “Definitely by the holiday shopping season,” he says. In a recent blog post on the e-reader market, the Gartner analyst predicted that prices will fall even lower.

“Two things make sense: one is that the price drops to around the $50 mark and is marketed to those whose only aim is to read trade fiction and the like (perhaps an older demographic). Second, is (e-readers) are given away by book publishers to customers who sign up for book clubs that carry a monthly purchase commitment,” Weiner writes.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Just go read this: Would A US$50 eBook Reader Be A Disaster?