http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ratcliffe/rss en-us I’ve been writing for Ziff-Davis, ZD Net and their many facets for almost two decades. It is just a few months short of 19th anniversary of the first time my byline appeared in MacWEEK, in fact, as I write this last posting at Rational Rants. As the trade press morphed, ZD Net graciously continued to [...]

]]> Based on the ever-vague guidance provided by Amazon.com in the form of obscure comments from CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos and fluffy PR releases, such as today’s holiday sales update, I’m continuing to update my educated guesswork on the number of Kindles sold.
Two interesting factoids emerge from the marketing verbiage: First, Kindle books outsold paper [...]

]]> I recently had the pleasure of presenting a vision for the future of publishing to a group of publishing professionals in New York. Can’t say where it was, yet, but suffice to say it was worth saying and that the message was well received by the thoughtful, albeit skeptical, audience.
Despite the increasingly rapid changes in [...]

]]> Last week, Mike Arrington announced the death of CrunchPad, his mythical $250 tablet for surfing the Web. This week, Arrington’s former partner in the project, Fusion Garage, announced it will sell the device starting this Friday for $499, calling the product “JooJoo.”. I agree with Sam Diaz that it is doomed, but believe JooJoo is [...]

]]> Mike Arrington has announced his CrunchPad web tablet, covered here, is “dead”, blaming his manufacturing partner for cutting him out of the deal. In the frothy market that is media tablets, just as in other frothy markets Arrington has stirred up, this is a story suspiciously full of holes that make CrunchPad sound like a [...]

]]> The market knows best, right? Markets are bloody paths to progress. At this writing there are approximately 52 e-reader devices coming to market in the next 12 months. Fifty-two different devices coming to market (Here’s what I wrote about Steve Jobs’ approach to reader devices when there were just 45 e-readers on the horizon). Creative, [...]

]]> Based on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ comments on the third quarter results for the company, Kindle sales are accelerating. Bezos is quoted: “Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.com. It’s also the most wished for [...]

]]> Platform expansion is the logical counter to new competition at the device level. Amazon, facing the introduction of BN.com’s Nook and other e-readers this week, has announced it will support reading of Kindle books on Windows 7, Vista and XP Service Pack 2 PCs in November.
The application offers a few enhancements compared to the Kindle [...]

]]> Yesterday, I posted a long analysis of what I thought was right and strangely wrong about the Barnes & Noble Nook. Matt Miller today got a clarification about my main concern, which was that Barnes & Noble seemed to have said, according to several published reports, that Wi-Fi would work only in its stores at [...]

]]> In addition to this posting, please visit this clarifications posting to get the whole picture.
It would be nice to say, as Matt Miller has, that the e-book and e-reader market was revolutionized today. It simply got more interesting. A careful reading of the $259 Nook’s features, and the comparison offered by B&N to the [...]

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