Amazon asking for 70% of newspaper subscription revenue?

/ Media

From an interview with Jim Moroney, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, with Brooke Gladstone at On the Media:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you testified about your negotiations with Amazon regarding the Kindle electronic reader. Could you tell us about that?

JIM MORONEY: Somebody was bringing up the Kindle as the solution we should all be focused on. And I love the Kindle. I read books on it all the time. My problem is that after negotiating and negotiating and negotiating, the very best deal we could get from Amazon was to split revenues for whatever price we decided to charge. We could get 30 percent of that money. They get 70 percent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.

JIM MORONEY: I could have probably lived with that, but there was another clause in there that they would not give me relief on, and that said that they have the right to relicense my content to any portable device, not just an Amazon-owned device, any portable device. In essence, I was giving them a complete licensing agreement for nothing for all of my content, period.

I’m sort of – that’s – give away my future, you know.

If Amazon came back – I thought maybe they’d call today – and said, do you know what, we’ll give up on that little clause about the relicensing of your IP, I would have said, okay, you know what – I’ll try this thing at 70/30 and see if it works. But nobody called today, as far as I can tell.

Compare that to Apple, who keeps about 35% to 40% of the price of the 99-cent purchase price for a song sold on iTunes. Of course, Apple’s main business model is selling iPods while Amazon’s main business model is selling content, but even so I’m surprised Amazon is demanding such a high percentage for what still amounts to an untested market. Maybe they figure (probably correctly) that newspapers are desperate enough to go for it?

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Video killed the MP3 download?

/ Media Technology

I missed Obama’s press conference on Wednesday and wanted to listen to it on my long commute home yesterday. To my surprise, it was easy to find full video and typically a full-text transcript of the conference from sites like The Huffington Post and NPR.org as well as YouTube and directly from the White House Blog, but no audio-only sources. Eventually I had to use Farkie, a free online video-converter to download the Youtube video and convert it to MP3.

Am I missing some obvious source source, or has video made such headway now that nobody even bothers making audio-only versions available anymore?

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Frankie Manning swings out

/ Culture

Frankie Manning, one of the founding fathers of Lindy Hop and originator of the air step (aerial), died peacefully in his sleep this morning just a month before his 95th birthday. Since he came out of retirement in 1987 Frankie toured the world teaching Lindy, the original swing dance, to a whole new generation of dancers.

I had the pleasure of meeting Frankie at several of the dance workshops, camps and talks that he taught over the years. He had an incredibly infectious energy and sense of humor about life and the dancing and music he loved, which I think did much to make the swing dance community such a welcoming place to be. He will be missed.

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Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019

/ Media Technology

Microsoft Office Labs has come out with a very nice “vision of the future video” called “2019” — Long Zheng over at iStartedSomething has posted both a short montage and longer 5 minute version (I recommend the longer).

I’ve always loved these sort of concept videos from corporate reserach labs, and as the medium goes I’d rate this one pretty high. The production value is top-knotch (as are most other such videos from Microsoft). As you’d expect, there are many kernels of ideas that have been around — I was especially reminded of Hiroshi Ishi’s ClearBoard, Jun Rekimoto’s Pick-and-Drop and various aspects from Bruce Tognazzini’s Starfire concept video — but there were still many concepts that were new to me. And unlike so many concept videos out there they seem to have mostly avoided the trap of assuming that devices will have a combination of strong AI and psychic powers.

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