Link round-up: Amazon acquisition of Lexcycle #Stanza
Stanza has been my reader of choice since I made the switch from Sony Reader to iPhone. It provided a great experience and acted, in a small way, as counterbalance to Amazon as a viable reading platform. No longer. The odd thing was that my e-reading allegiance was already split by default: Stanza for reading app, but Fictionwise for non-free titles. Then my content ended up with B&N by acquisition. And now it's even stranger: content via B&N and reader via Amazon. Does this sound like a stable long-term proposition? Neelan & co's choice to exit made sense: with the majority of Stanza users reading free content, revenue/user was very low. Likelihood of growing beyond a 3-person operation was going to be constrained by a model that relied on affiliate revenue. Then add Fictionwise being purchased by Barnes & Noble and access to non-free content was going to get trickier. So the time was right and the only question was which suitor made the best pitch. The longer-term implications of this are more interesting (and serious). I've included some links below - the first day of thinking from the blogosphere on this. My top 3:
* Consolidation - Not that Stanza was ever an Amazon "competitor", but acquisitions like this are going to continue to concentrate bargaining power in the hands of a few key players. Publishers need to be thinking now about what their "lines in the sand" look like. And they need to look at throwing support behind Shortcovers and B&N/Fictionwise as alternatives and sources of competition.
* Content ownership - I've purchased a fairly large selection of Fictionwise titles. Will Stanza continue to support that access? (I know they say that they will for now, but that really ends up as an Amazon decision in the long term.)
* ePub support - Consolidation is going to make the standards landscape more difficult. Just as Amazon supports a "subset" of ONIX that publishers must generate as a separate file, there will be an increasing temptation to torque ePUB as needed. Hopefully, this can be done in a cross-industry fashion via the IDPF. The Release:
http://www.lexcycle.com/lexcycle_acquired_by_amazon The NY Times: Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-Book Application for the iPhone
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/amazon-acquires-stanza-an-e-book-app... PersonaNonData - Amazon Stanza: This Changes Nothing
http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-stanza-this-changes-nothing... The E-Book Test (Implications on the Lexcycle/Stanza acquisition)
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-buys-lexcyclestanza-reader.html
* Consolidation - Not that Stanza was ever an Amazon "competitor", but acquisitions like this are going to continue to concentrate bargaining power in the hands of a few key players. Publishers need to be thinking now about what their "lines in the sand" look like. And they need to look at throwing support behind Shortcovers and B&N/Fictionwise as alternatives and sources of competition.
* Content ownership - I've purchased a fairly large selection of Fictionwise titles. Will Stanza continue to support that access? (I know they say that they will for now, but that really ends up as an Amazon decision in the long term.)
* ePub support - Consolidation is going to make the standards landscape more difficult. Just as Amazon supports a "subset" of ONIX that publishers must generate as a separate file, there will be an increasing temptation to torque ePUB as needed. Hopefully, this can be done in a cross-industry fashion via the IDPF. The Release:
http://www.lexcycle.com/lexcycle_acquired_by_amazon The NY Times: Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-Book Application for the iPhone
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/amazon-acquires-stanza-an-e-book-app... PersonaNonData - Amazon Stanza: This Changes Nothing
http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-stanza-this-changes-nothing... The E-Book Test (Implications on the Lexcycle/Stanza acquisition)
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-buys-lexcyclestanza-reader.html
