The Reading Edge Podcast

Bill Jensen, Director of New Media at Village Voice Media Holdings, was a panelist today at South By Southwest.  The topic of the session, “iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators,” drew an overflow crowd to the Radisson Hotel 21 days before the iPad will be available in Apple stores and for delivery of pre-orders.

Jensen gave a fairly confident assessment of the digital future for his company’s string of 17 alternative weekly publications, including the mothership, The Village Voice, as well as Denver’s own Westword.

He described why the iPad is generating such interest among publishers like himself.  I left the session convinced that the hype about this device is not a mirage.  Time will tell, and pretty soon. Meanwhile, geeks at SXSW aren’t the only ones suffering from iPad Distortion Syndrome. Click here for video of Stephen Colbert’s Grammy’s gambit that got one into his hands, briefly.

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James McQuivey of Forrester Research

On the Monday after the weekend when Amazon and Macmillan faced off in a dramatic battle over eBook pricing, I turned to James McQuivey, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, for his perspective on who won, what the stakes are, and what might lie ahead.

James says his contacts at other publishers are disappointed that this turned into a mud fight, but he suggests there will be benefits from having the issue finally out in the open.  He also shares his thoughts on how Apple’s new iPad figures in to all this.

I’ll have the second half of this interview on The Kindle Chronicles episode 81, which will be uploaded as usual on Friday, February 5.  In that portion, James will discuss what he and his teammates at Forrester are calling “The Kindle Flame,” by which they mean the next generation of Kindle that might, if it gets certain things right, set the eBook market fully ablaze as opposed to merely kindled.

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This is the conclusion of my January 27, 2010, interview with New York Times technology reporter Brad Stone.  For the first part of the interview, please check out Episode 80 of my other podcast, The Kindle Chronicles.  We spoke the evening after Brad had attended Apple’s unveiling of the iPad.

In this segment, Brad looks ahead at Amazon’s next moves and comments.  He’s found 46 new jobs posted at Amazon’s Lab126, the group that makes and advances the Kindle. Brad says at one point, “The Kindle tablet may be right around the corner.”

Following the interview, I’ve included a fair-use excerpt of audio from Steve Jobs’s comments about the Kindle and the new iBooks app which will come on the iPad, setting up a high-stakes strategic battle between Apple and Amazon.  Does Steve sound as if he’s got his heart in this fight?  Listen, and decide.

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