Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their...

Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek...

Economist on "Mobile Marvels" in Emerging Markets

Though here when we talk about mobile it's usually in the context of mobile reading and media, that's just a small piece of what's happening as we move to...

Mobile as New Medium

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation...

O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks

As Andrew has discussed in some detail recently on this blog, O'Reilly has started publishing many books as iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Over the past couple of months, we've received a...

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. Our success got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.

Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap. The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a "Kindle killer" that will upset Amazon's apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It's understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it's doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an "ereader" any more than it sees the iPhone as "a GPS device."

Long Tail Evidence from The App Store

Last week we released 16 of our books as iPhone Apps (and on Saturday added The Twitter Book), and there's some interesting Long Tail data coming in. We've seen Long...

CrunchPad Tablet Prototype Coming Together

The low-cost tablet project ("CrunchPad") from TechCrunch is nearing the working-prototype stage: This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with...

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market: Beginning this fall, some students...

Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon: We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of...

Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific

Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices: For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For...

O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog

Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?). To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15.

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times: The move comes a...

The "O'Reilly Bump" and Bookworm

During his TOC Keynote, Tim O'Reilly talked about how the status he confers through "retweets" on Twitter are really just another form of publishing, not much different from the status...