Amazon scores another college textbook publisher for Kindle DX

07 Aug

Posted by erikbowman as Uncategorized

Amazon is making progress getting the major college textbook publishers on board with its Kindle electronic reader. Today, McGraw-Hill Education said it will begin offering 100 higher education titles on the Kindle. McGraw-Hill joins the other major textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, which are already selling Kindle editions. Amazon is positioning its new large-screen Kindle DX reader as a replacement for physical textbooks — and needs to get as many titles as possible into electronic form.

When Amazon announced the Kindle DX in May, it said Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley were all part of the project, but McGraw-Hill’s name was conspicuously absent. Now, with McGraw-Hill in the lineup, the Kindle DX can offer titles from the four biggest textbook publishers. According to Subtext, a monthly newsletter covering the book publishing industry, the top four college publishers by 2008 annual sales were Cengage ($1.7 billion), Pearson ($1.6 billion), McGraw-Hill ($610 million), and Wiley ($230 million).

McGraw-Hill said the textbook titles will be used in on-campus pilot programs with the Kindle DX this fall. Amazon and a handful of universities (including the University of Washington) are providing Kindle DXs to some students to test as a textbook replacement.

"The modern student body increasingly requires digital access and capabilities, and we are pleased to be strengthening our partnership with Amazon to help meet these critical needs," said Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, in a statement.

Will students take to the Kindle DX? The devices would be certainly easier to lug around than a pile of books. Students spend a lot of money on textbooks today, though the Kindle DX, currently priced at $489, isn’t cheap either.

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and T-Mobile adds subscribers at a slower pace as revenues fall

T-Mobile USA, the fourth largest wireless carrier in the U.S., said that it netted 325,000 new customers during the second quarter as revenues fell slightly to $5.34 billion.

T-Mobile also has been struggling to hang onto customers, with a contract churn rate that increased to 2.2 percent from 1.9 percent for the same period last year. The number of new subscribers also has slowed, with 415,000 net additions in the first quarter and 668,000 in the second quarter of last year.

T-Mobile, with 33.5 million subscribers, boosted its operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) to $1.6 billion. That was up 16 percent over the first quarter and up 1 percent over the same period last year. Full press release here.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile plans to introduce its new myTouch 3G — built on Google’s Android operating system — today in by having 100 skydivers form a "T" as they fall from the sky above San Francisco. (Cnet has a photo gallery of the extravagant launch ceremonies here).

and John L. Scott Real Estate unveils new mobile site for the iPhone

Zillow.com grabbed some buzz — not to mention users — when it introduced a slick iPhone application in April that allowed home buyers to pull up information while on the go. Not to be outdone, John L. Scott Real Estate today unveiled a new mobile service that’s optimized for the iPhone and other smartphones.

Instead of creating an iPhone app that is downloaded, the Seattle real estate firm opted to create a service that automatically detects the device and provides enhanced features. Those include the ability to pull up nearby for-sale listings based on the phone’s GPS capabilities. It also creates easy shortcuts to contact a John L. Scott agents and nearby offices.

“There’s no assembly required; just switch on your iPhone and our website will do the rest,” said CEO J. Lennox Scott in a release.

Of course, there’s one big difference between John L. Scott’s new service and Zillow’s app — other than the fact that it doesn’t require a download. While you can search for nearby sale listings on the new service, it doesn’t show every home in the neighborhood as Zillow’s offering does.

That’s especially helpful for home buyers — not to mention real estate professionals — since they can conduct research on nearby properties as they look at homes for sale in a specific neighborhood.

John L. Scott has been trying to push the envelope when it comes to new technologies, working with Microsoft to create a new social network called JLSconnect and incorporating enhanced online mapping technologies on its Web site.

Report: Publicis heads the pack to buy Microsoft’s Razorfish

Microsoft has been looking for some time to unload Razorfish, the digital ad agency that it acquired as part of its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive two years ago. Now the pack of potential suitors appears to be narrowing down.

French ad agency Publicis is currently in the lead to buy Razorfish, and has bid between $500 million and $600 million for the agency, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft wants the buyer of Razorfish to commit to purchasing "hundreds of millions of dollars" in ads across its various web properties, an issue that’s now being "hammered out" by Microsoft and Publicis, the Journal reports.

That kind of ad commitment — if Microsoft can nail it down — could boost Microsoft’s newly minted partnership with Yahoo as it takes on Google in the internet search market. According to the Journal, Japanese ad giant Dentsu also made a bid for Razorfish, and Omnicom Group and WPP expressed early interest in the agency.

Many observers believe Microsoft was primarily interested in aQuantive’s technology units, the online advertising platform Atlas and website ad network DRIVEpm, and picked up Razorfish as part of the deal. Razorfish, which has been hit hard by the economic downturn as clients cut back on ad budgets, has undergone several rounds of layoffs over the past year.