How Apple’s Ebook Fiasco Affecting Amazon and Book Business?

As the Department of Justice officially probe the alleged price fixing conspiracy about ebooks between Apple and major publishing houses, we can see the real winners and losers coming. Amazon is the first winner as earlier this week they drop their prices on ebooks. Basically, the agreement is that Apple let publishers set the price and guarantee that iBookstore won’t be undersold. The deal led us to the second winner: consumers.

For the losers, the biggest one is of course the publishers. Amazon can now sell cheap ereaders and cheap ebooks. As Amazon could make money from many other ways, they can push down the price to almost indefinitely. These will lead to the downsizing of the book industry. In order to save money, publishers might cut down the lucrative advances for some authors. But the easier response is of course by printing less physical books.

Another big loser is Barnes & Noble as their stock price keep falling down after the lawsuit was announced. It’s hard to see the future of their book business, and their Nook seems to be the second choice to Amazon.

We are now witnessing a transformation from the conventional book selling strategy into the future of book selling.

Should Brand Put Their Price Tag on Pinterest?

According to a new study from analytics startup Pinreach and Joshua Yang, a MBA candidate from Harvard Business School, brands should be careful to attach their price tags in Pinterest. The two parties found that pins with price tags have the same possibility to be shared with the pins without price tags. On average, both types of pins were repinned about 5.4 to 5.5 times. However, pins with price have slightly more likes, 1.4 vs 1.1 per pin.

You can attach your product’s price tags by typing a “$” followed by one or more numbers on the description box. The price tag will not only appear on the description, but also at the lefthand corner of the pin’s thumbnail and image.

The study was conducted to 1 million pins, 1.2% of them uses “$” tags. An analysis of 2,588 pins on three major ecommerce sites showed that followers are less likely repin the images with price tags. The lessons here can be clearly seen: If you’re a brand and want your products to be shared, don’t use the price tag.

Make a Mobile App from Your Facebook Page

It is pretty hard to make your own mobile app from your brand. But now, a new product from app builder Cabana will help you to do the hard task by creating a mobile app with some information from your Facebook fan page. The facebook app called Fan Page Mobilizer will help you to reformat your Facebook fan page into a mobile web app.

In result, the web app will pull information from your fan page and use it in the mobile app for your brand. The app is also easy to use, as you only have to identify what page would you want to turn into mobile app and then choosing the title of the page, start-up screen, and icon image. You can put any information you want from the page into the mobile app including wall posts, events, and images.

More interestingly, you don’t have to be the owner of the fan page to make the mobile app. If you have a fan page to follow, simply create the app for it and you can enjoy the page from your mobile device. The app costs $5 and currently works only for iOS. The company claims that the Android version is on the way soon.

Amazon Should Learn from Apple About Ebooks Pricing

Apple and some other publishers stand accused for ebook price fixing. However, let’s consider the facts. Firstly, Apple never tried to keep what they are doing with ebooks in secret. Steve Jobs always wanted to keep his iPad and iBooks platform to compete. So, Jobs said how it will be going. Publishers set the price, Apple get 30% from their profits, and publishers forbid lower prices for other services. The result is the improvement of Apple, publishers, authors, and even Amazon.

The fact that publishers were willing to work with Jobs’ plan indicates how desperate they were to be free from Amazon on the ebook business. Amazon tried to make things better after the iPad launch by raising the royalties to publishers to 70% as long as publishers followed their rules for pricing.

Thankfully, Apple force Amazon to change their pricing model. If they didn’t do that, book publishers might need to stay afloat and deliver their product. Authors will see their publishing and sales decreasing as publishers won’t took any risk for unknown authors. And surely, Amazon will make less money than they are today.

Will this Anti-Poverty Campaign Reach G8?

ONE, an advocacy non-profit is hoping to fight extreme poverty by planting digital and physical seeds to represent their commitment to fight global poverty.  ONE has launched their new campaign called Thrive on Tuesday, starting with the online petition to G8 members to take action against the worldwide cycle of poverty.

Roxane Philson, ONE’s global creative director said, “We’re good at driving awareness at key moments but we wanted to do something more ambitious that will run until 2015.”

Collin Farrell called all ONE members to sign the G8 petition. After the signature, there are some learning opportunities on the campaign’s website. Thrive’s petition now has more than 55,000 signatures since its launch.

The idea behind the campaign is to plant seeds in the shape of the heads of G8 leaders, reflecting the need of agricultural reform. The campaign started only a moment after a report of commitment from world leaders to lift 50 million people from poverty and save 15 million children from starvation.