His experience extended back to the early 1980s with GRID (early laptop maker) and early tablet development in 1989.
Doug Klein from Barnes & Noble
In Jan 1998 he spent some time with Jeff Bezos discussing a possible partnership
over ebooks. It didn't work out but eventually led to the Kindle.
B&N nook started Spring 2009. Done as a skunk-works product in Silicon Valley. Made up of ex Apple, HP, folks. 0-30% marketshare in 18 months.
1971 Project Gutenberg
1998 Rocket ebook
2007 Kindle
2009 nook
2010 nook color (beat Bezos to the color world)
2010 mass market awareness switches to mass market consumption.
2011 market splits to ereaders (long form text only) & Magazines, Movies & Web moving to mobile. Now B&N says 20% of their traffic now mobile. Prediction - 2012 Christmas we will see web traffic ruled by mobiles at approx 80%!
Content? How to increase the value of reading in the digital world? Social books, interactive books, etc.
Bits are heavy. Ebooks - tiny, magazines - Bigger, interactive applications - HUGE.
Rights? Intellectual property rights. Business has been built on goods. Now it is the ideas, mental content. The physical goods decay. What about digital? The idea of bit-rot comes to mind.
Experience. Discovery... Reading... Content Management... SOCIAL - talking, sharing, book clubs.
Ebooks now can do all of those things that took place in physical space.
The future: seamless blending of content discovery, consumption, management and social interaction. WOW!
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Sent from my Pocket eDGe.
