Mediaboss Marketing

A couple of years ago, with Amazon steadily pushing down the prices of e-books, the fortunes of the big book publishers were sinking fast. Then Apple (NSDQ:AAPL - News) came along and helped enable publishers to set their own prices for their e-books across platforms. That model, known as agency pricing, has helped keep big publishers afloat in a time of major transition. But its also sparked controversy and legal battles, including threats this week of a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against Apple and its publishing partners. So who should be able to set e-book pricesthe major publishing houses or retailers like Amazon? (NSDQ:AMZN - News)

Well, theres been some debate on that question this week at the our office, with two of our writers taking opposite sides. So we decided to let them thrash it out on the site! Below, Mathew Ingram and Laura Owen debate the merits of the agency-pricing model.

Mathew Ingram [MI]: To me, the debate boils down to whether agency pricing is a justifiable and/or sensible approach by publishers to what is happening in their industry. In a nutshell, I would argue that while it might be understandablein the sense that the Big Six are afraid of Amazons growing power in the book business, and want to protect their book margins as much as possibleit is neither justifiable nor (in the long term at least) sensible or advisable.

Theres no question that being a major player in a market that is in the process of being disrupted is not pleasant. Amazon is doing everything it can to not just drive down e-book prices but to disintermediate publishers in a number of other ways, including signing up authors to its own imprint. If you are a giant corporation that is used to controlling the marketplace to a large extentboth in terms of supply and in terms of pricingthen watching a new competitor wrest some of that control away from you is hard to do.

That said, I think agency pricing is unwiseand not just because it has attracted antitrust attention from the U.S. government and the European Union, among others, but because it isnt in the long-term interests of either readers or (I would argue) of publishers themselves. There is a growing body of evidence that lower prices can boost sales of books by orders of magnitudewhich suggests that publishers might actually be shooting themselves in the foot by trying to hang on to higher prices.

Laura Owen [LO]: I think agency pricing actually is in the interest of any reader who supports a vibrant book-buying marketplace that is not dominated by one companyi.e., Amazon.

You say that publishers are giant corporations, but Amazon is much, much larger than any single book publisheror any other book retailer. Because of that, it can undercut chains like Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS - News) on price. It does so consistently on print books and on e-books that are not regulated by agency pricing. In fact, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch has said that Barnes & Noble has been able to remain competitive in the e-book gamethe company currently has a 26 to 27 percent market share in the e-book marketbecause of agency pricing.

Some may say, So what? I dont feel any loyalty to Barnes & Noble. With the closing of Borders, though, Barnes & Noble is the only remaining bookstore in many communities. Then there are the independent bookstores, which are definitely struggling as well. Through the American Booksellers Associations partnership with the Google (NSDQ:GOOG - News) eBookstore, the indies can sell e-books through their websites. Because of agency pricing, theyre able to offer e-books from big-six publishers at the same price as Amazon. In this way, agency pricing can keep book spending within a community instead of sending it all to Amazon.

In addition, with the impending launch of sites like Bookish (which is quite delayed at the moment), book publishers are getting into selling direct to their customersa move that will be incredibly good for the business. But efforts like that wont go very far if Amazon is consistently undercutting them on price.

MI: Thats a great point, Laura. You are right that agency pricing does to some extent protect independent booksellers, or allow them to compete on more equal footing with Amazon, and I am as much in favor of a competitive bookselling marketplace as I think you are. I also recognize the fact that Amazon is a gigantic corporationand perhaps even one that is using books as a loss leader for other productsand there are risks of having a lot of market power concentrated in the hands of single entity.

Go here to read the rest:
E-Book Smackdown: Who Should Control Pricing—Publishers Or Amazon?

An avid theater goer and critic at Canada's Globe and Mail is proposing making the theater a more social place with Facebook and Linkedin. While using mobile devices with show-stopping LCD screens may be frowned upon, social networking may turn out to be a real experience enhancer.

[More from Mashable: Social Demographics: Whos Using Todays Biggest Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]]

The Guardian recently published a column by theater critic Kelly Nestruck who suggests play houses should contemplate developing an app similar to a social media profile-powered systems used by airlines.

"Your average modern theatre production, however, fails to tap into the possibilities of connecting audience members," he said in a blog post.

[More from Mashable: How to Approach International Online Search Marketing]

By displaying who will be in the audience before the night of the show, it's more likely you'll meet friends.

"Whenever I have chatted with strangers in the stalls, however, it's led to a much richer theatre experience," Nestruck said. "Some of my greatest play-going memories have involved bonding with fellow audience members standing in a queue trying to get tickets for a sold-out show, or comparing notes."

The seating program cited in the post as inspiration for social networking before showtime is the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Meet and Seat program. Meet and Seat lets passengers determine who they want to sit next to, laying out personal details about individuals on the same flight from social media.

Would you like to use your social networking profiles in tandem with going to the theater, booking flights or eating out at restaurants? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Thomas Hawk

See the article here:
Can Social Networking Enhance the Theater? [VIDEO]

A study has boosted the prospects of a cure for HIV. For the first time, results have shown that a drug can safely kick-start production of the dormant virus in patients, so that it might be detected and attacked more easily by the immune system.

The finding was announced today at the 19th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington. But other studies released at the same event suggest that merely flushing the virus out of hiding is not enough to kill infected cells and that a cure is some way off.

HIV integrates itself into cell genomes, causing the cells to make new copies of the virus when they transcribe their own DNA. But in some cells, HIV survives for decades in a resting, or latent, state without transcribing its genes to make new viruses. This renders the infected cells in the 'latent reservoir' invisible to the bodys immune defences and to antiretroviral treatment.

Suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid seems to force HIV to make copies of itself, potentially making infected cells more visible to the body's immune system.

NIBSC/SPL

Studies had suggested that a drug called suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) could push the virus out of its slumber, but the approach had not been tested in people. So researchers led by David Margolis, a molecular virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treated six people with a single dose of SAHA and tested its effect on CD4+ T cells immune cells that are targeted for infection by HIV. The study found that SAHA did kick-start transcription of HIV in latently infected CD4+ T cells: researchers detected nearly 5 times as many HIV transcripts in the patients resting CD4+ T cells after treatment as before. There were no serious side effects.

This study provides the first proof-of-concept demonstration of disruption of latency, which is a significant step towards eradication of HIV from the body, says Margolis.

But Margolis and other researchers are cautious about what the study means in the quest for an HIV cure. Sharon Lewin, an infectious-disease doctor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is also studying SAHA in patients; so far, 10 have taken the drug for two weeks without experiencing serious side effects. But, she says, no study has yet demonstrated that activating latent HIV leads to destruction of infected cells.

Margolis's study, says Lewin, looked at a small number of patients, and although it is an important step to show that the drug has caused some alteration in viral production, we dont yet know how that translates into getting rid of latent infected cells.

At the Seattle conference, Liang Shan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, presented the results of a study, published today in Immunity1, in which CD4+ T cells were taken from people with HIV and treated with SAHA in vitro. The cells did not die, even when combined with the patients' own 'killer' T cells, which are specialized to destroy virus-infected cells. However, when the killer T cells were first exposed to pieces of HIV, they did destroy the infected cells.

Read more here:
Drug brings HIV out of hiding

Stocks closed modestly higher Friday after the governments monthly report on employment bolstered hopes that the economic recovery is on track. The gains were tempered by news that a big debt write-down by Greece could cause big losses for banks.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 60 points Friday morning, but lost ground in the afternoon after the trade group that oversees financial derivatives said Greeces bond-swap deal will trigger payouts on bond insurance.

Later Friday, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said it had determined that a massive bond-swap by Greece constituted a credit event, meaning that holders of credit-default swaps on their Greek bonds will be able to claim insurance payments. Traders sold stocks on the news, fearing big losses for banks that had sold the insurance.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. plunged 16 percent after its larger rival, Starbucks Corp., said it will start selling single-cup coffee machines. That could deflate demand for Green Mountains Keurig machines. Starbucks rose 3 percent.

Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. leaped 23 percent after the maker of guns and security systems beat analysts expectations for third-quarter earnings and raised its full-year guidance. The Associated Press

See the original post here:
Word from Greece deflates stocks

Summary: Now, most of us use Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer, but once upon a time word processors were new, exotic programs.

Once upon a time, and it wasnt that long ago, instead of word processors like todays favorites such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs or OpenOffice and its brother LibreOffice, we had to use typewriters. Some of us, dare I admit it, wrote by hand on paper. The horror! The horror! But, then along came word processors and the world changed.

In my case, I made the change-over in 1980. I went from using my prized IBM Selectric II to using two word processors at almost the same time. Ive always been a glutton for punishment.

The first, and the one that counts as a real word processor, was WordStar. I first used it on an Osborne 1 luggable computer. This was a portable computer only in the sense that if you absolutely had to move it, you could lug its 24-pounds from one place to another. Of course, you had to have a power outlet where-ever you went, we were a long, long way from having batteries that could power something like the new iPad for ten hours.

WordStar, which was Gods gift to touch-typists, made it possible to use the control key-at the time the only alternative key most PC keyboards hadto copy, cut, and paste text. While there were earlier word processors, Electric Pencil, WordStar was for many of us the first word processor we could use on a general purpose PC.

It was also the first popular What You See is What You Get (WYSWWYG) word processor. So long as you didnt want, oh say, fonts. Fonts were pretty much beyond us in these days of daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printers.

At the same time, I was also learning vi. This text-processing program still lives on in every Linux and Unix system ever made. To this day, both WordStar and vis control sequences are locked into my fingers. Indeed, I still use vi for editing Linux configuration files and some light word processing.

As for graphical user interfaces? What are you talking about? Oh sure, there were mini-computers like the Xerox Alto, but in the early days of the PC world we used character-based interfaces and we liked it. Steve Jobs would, of course, look in on the Alto and see the mouse-based, bit-mapped graphics future that lead to the Macintosh. But, at the time we were just happy to have any kind of word processing.

Im not the only one who felt that way. I asked some of my fellow technology writers in the Internet Press Guild, a non-profit organization promoting excellence in technology journalism. Most of us were there in the early days of word processing and are still fond of our first word processors.

Some of us, like Mac McCarthy, actually used dedicated word processors before they used word processing software.

Excerpt from:
In the beginning, there was the word processor