Content and Markets for E-Readers - Europeans start thinking

[beachwanderer]

Yes, we are lagging behind a bit over here but without Kindle-hype and with the Sony PRS-505 just about to make an entrance to the german market media here start to discuss just now ...

The german Spiegel-Online today features an article by
Konrad Lischka entitled "Welche Geschichten das (sic) Kindle braucht" (Which kind of Stories the Kindle needs).

The article (that will be online free of charge today and then wander to the vaults of the pay per view Spiegel-archive as all of them do) largely deals with the general question of E-Reader-Content and asks if the Kindle or devices like it could "break the tyranny of long texts - a relic of the time of printed books".

Authors like Gogol, Maupassant, Poe or Tschechow are, we are reminded, noted for their short stories and novelles and there is the tradition of authors responding to the then modern ways of text distribution like Dickens, Fontane, Gaskell and many many others in publishing whole books in regular newspaper-installments.

So Mr Lischka brings up the "99-Cent-Shortstory-Download" as a possible way of content-marketing that we may see in due time and that possibly also responds to a shorter attention span that some see in younger readers today.



Well, IMHO

- this is, as it seems just a "softener" for the public, and not really a new idea,

- he could have said something on the present content market in the US and pricing there

Just to show that this Fischerverlag-CEO thread of last week isn't the whole story from here ...