The narrative of this story is very similar to the narrative of the Apple stories.
If the customer and the business have a third-party involved, (call him the provider, the platform-owner, whatever), then there is an inherent conflict of interest. The provider only cares about his walled garden, whereas the business has to care first about the customer but secondly about having the resources to make something the customer wants. The walled-garden guy could care less about that. Now he can say that he only has the best interests of the customer in mind -- that's why his walls are so high. But in practice all he really cares about is constructing the rules such that the trade-off in general works most of the time for most people. That's a far cry from a free, open and informed market.
What's it mean? It means no pictures for Kindle periodicals, that's what it means. And it's unlikely to change any time soon. What a lame situation.
But part of this story has me perplexed. I helped my wife publish her first ebook last weekend and we didn't get any grief at all from Amazon about pictures. So e-books can be as big as you like?
I understand the issue is bandwidth, but publishing 12 ebooks for $3 bucks a year to the same guy is just the same as the guy having a yearly subscription for $36. Wonder why the difference between periodicals and regular ebooks, and I wonder at what point Amazon would start complaining about file sizes?
If the customer and the business have a third-party involved, (call him the provider, the platform-owner, whatever), then there is an inherent conflict of interest. The provider only cares about his walled garden, whereas the business has to care first about the customer but secondly about having the resources to make something the customer wants. The walled-garden guy could care less about that. Now he can say that he only has the best interests of the customer in mind -- that's why his walls are so high. But in practice all he really cares about is constructing the rules such that the trade-off in general works most of the time for most people. That's a far cry from a free, open and informed market.
What's it mean? It means no pictures for Kindle periodicals, that's what it means. And it's unlikely to change any time soon. What a lame situation.
But part of this story has me perplexed. I helped my wife publish her first ebook last weekend and we didn't get any grief at all from Amazon about pictures. So e-books can be as big as you like?
I understand the issue is bandwidth, but publishing 12 ebooks for $3 bucks a year to the same guy is just the same as the guy having a yearly subscription for $36. Wonder why the difference between periodicals and regular ebooks, and I wonder at what point Amazon would start complaining about file sizes?