 Monday, December 08, 2003
CD Pricing Study
"From Ipsos-Insight’s TEMPO (cited last week in some circles) : Consumers Expect Substantial Savings On Digitally Distributed Albums
'Regardless of downloading experience, American Internet users aged 12 and older stated an acceptable price range of $9.99 to $14.99 for a new, full-length physical CD release. In contrast, the acceptable price range for a digitally distributed, full-length album download is only between $5.00 and $9.99 – roughly $5.00 less than for a physical CD. These findings are based on recent interviews conducted with a representative U.S. sample of 488 Internet users aged 12 and over.
'A roughly $5.00 decrease in the range of acceptable prices for a new, full length album distributed digitally versus in a physical format represents a significant decrease in perceived value for this product based solely on format or distribution method,' stated Matt Kleinschmit, a director of research at Ipsos-Insight, and the study’s author.' " [Furdlog]
Buying a CD from a store: $18.99
Buying an album online: $9.99
Listening to an album you downloaded from your library's web site: Priceless
Now if we could just make that happen....
Some recent links from library mailing lists:
- HKUST New Acquistions List - brought to you by RSS! Look in the upper right-hand corner of the page and you'll see a thing of beauty, XML buttons for lists of new books and media. Suh-weet! Oh, and SWAN people - that there is an Innovative catalog!!!! "Things that make you go 'hmmmmmmm....' "
- LibData: Library Web Management System
"The University of Minnesota Libraries (Twin Cities) announces the open source software release of LibData: Library Web Management System. LibData is a library-oriented web-based application consisting of an integrated database architecture and authoring environment for the publication of subject pathfinders, course-related pages, and all purpose web pages. This application was designed for, but is not limited to, academic and public libraries. LibData was built with open source components (Apache, mySQL, and PHP) and is being offered as open source to the library community under the GNU Public License. The software and its extensive documentation can be downloaded from Plato, a test foundry for the Libraries' Digital Library Development Laboratory (http://plato.lib.umn.edu/) and soon on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdata/). For more information, please contact John Butler (jbutl@umn.edu), Director, University Libraries Digital Library Development Lab, or Paul Bramscher (brams006@umn.edu), LibData Lead Developer."
- Karen Coyle on DRM and on Amazon "search inside book" feature
"The talk that I gave at Library of Congress on DRM is available as streaming video from their site. I have also produced a written version of that talk, both in a portable and a read-online version. All are
linked from my home page: http://www.kcoyle.net. Think of this as a beginner's approach to Digital Rights Management, notan exhaustive (or exhausting!) treatment."
"The OpeneBook Forum has a library 'special interest group' which is not much more than some librarians, some publishers, and some ebook producers getting together once a week for a conference call. Sometimes the calls are so-so and other times they are extremely interesting. (For more info, see http://www.openebook.org/oebf_groups/library.htm)....
One of the more fascinating tidbits (which didn't make it into the minutes) was a publisher's rep who stated that they had excluded cookbooks from the scanned titles on the assumption that once someone found a recipe they'd not need to buy the book. By error, some of their cookbooks were included in the scanned group and before they could pull them from the search service the sales of those books had exceeded the sales of other scanned books. But they pulled them anyway, probably because they didn't have the proper agreement with the authors." To which Jenny says, "Oy! Publishers shooting selves in foot...." Read the rest of Karen's comments in the WEB4LIB archive.
Cell Phones Sales Skyrocket
"The worldwide market for cell phones is outstripping even the most enthusiastic predictions from the beginning of the year, as consumers continue to snap up handsets at a dizzying rate, according to research released Monday by Gartner.
Handset vendors sold 132.8 million units in the third quarter of this year, up 22 percent from last year's third-quarter shipments of 108.8 million units, says Ben Wood, an analyst with Gartner based in London. Gartner calculated the figures using the number of units sold to end users, rather than units shipped into the channel.
'The total market is on fire,' he says. 'We had predicted about 470 million units for the year, but it's going to be about 500 million this year.'
Mature cell phone markets such as western Europe and the U.S. are going through a replacement cycle, as consumers with older black-and-white phones are trading them in for new models with color screens and cameras, Wood says.
'We're getting to a point where a mobile phone is as much about fashion as anything,' he says." [PCWorld.com]
It won't be much longer before purchasing a mobile phone will be as much about utility (staying connected to the internet) as anything.
Hey, Aaron - did you know that Cook County Illinois court doesn't allow camera phones?
"Robert Grosshandler, the founder and CEO of iGive.com, wasn't allowed into the Cook County (Illinois) courthouse because he was carrying a camera phone -- a Handspring/palmOne Treo 600.
Robert writes me that he was only 'partially surprised' that camera phones were banned, but he was "very surprised" that a sheriff's deputy recognized the Treo as a camera phone. The deputy wanted Robert to take the handset back to his (Robert's) car, but the deputy agreed to check it, instead...." [Reiter's Camera Phone Report]
Shhhh... don't tell anyone I'm inside the Illinois State Library....
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