I came across a great interview in FT Weekend with Steven P. Murphy, the CEO of Christie's International. Murphy previously worked in publishing as CEO of Rodale, and in music as President of EMI Music. Here's the stand-out quote:

"I sat on a committee of seven people who had the responsibility of choosing the type of sticky tape to use when sealing the top of a CD case, to set an industry standard. It was so that no one could steal the music. Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, four guys were coming up with an algorithm . . . and the music went sideways . . . It is important to make sure you are solving the right problems."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7f18b92e-9cc0-11e0-bf57-00144feabdc0.html

There's a good editorial in today's FT on the rise of Cloud services:

"The battle between companies such as Apple and Google to draw mass digital audiences and suck as much of their users' personal data as they can into vast centralised repositories has the feeling of an endgame. Other digital platforms merely tended towards monopoly; the cloud operators could be unassailable. Even if users are not trapped by data lock-in, network effects, scale economics and other forces suggest a few will dominate . . . Active regulators helped to prevent Microsoft from using its PC monopoly to block the emergence of the internet as the next computing platform. They should now be equally ready to fight the consolidation of online power that looks likely to ensue."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa3b101a-952d-11e0-a648-00144feab49a.html

"The New York Times' digital paywall is not only helping the digital business develop a meaningful new revenue stream (without crippling the existing one — because the NYT has way more digital ad inventory than it can sell). It's helping to sustain the paper's core print business."

http://www.businessinsider.com/time-for-a-lot-of-people-to-eat-crow-the-new-y...

"Maybe those agents who have cut these sort of deals haven't really considered all the implications — I don't know. I certainly hope they have great liability insurance."

http://www.redhammer.info/news/agent-publisher/

I'm going to be speaking at Publishers Launch London: A Global Perspective on Digital Change on 21 June. However, the real reason to register is a stellar line-up of speakers for the rest of the day. At the risk of making an invidious selection, I'm particularly looking forward to contributions from Eoin Purcell and Rebecca Smart, two of the most consistently interesting people in the digital space. The programme and registration details are available here:

http://www.publisherslaunch.com/events/launch-london/program/

"The great misunderstanding of digitization is to believe that it is only the content and the appearance that matters. That, to reproduce the experience of the book, we needed to make a screen that looked like a page, that turned like a page, that contained words. And the reason that we've had difficulty for so long with the notion of eBooks is that that is not all that books are."

http://www.ireadwhereiam.com/

An interesting perspective from author @johnrickards:

"I'd certainly say the [book] is worth three bucks . . . By comparison, in the Starbucks in which I'm writing this, a tall latte will cost you £2.15. That's the exact exchange rate price of that $2.99 book. The same price for both a mass-produced commodity consumed by the tonne in minutes, and a thing I hand-carved over a period of a couple of months of blood, sweat and tears. Tell me I'm wildly over-pricing myself here. Go on. I'll wait. No? The thing's sure as fuck worth more than a dollar."

http://namelesshorror.com/post/5861326640/price-insanity-and-the-race-to-the-bottom

And more wise words in a follow-up post:

"The attractiveness of the 99c price . . . only exists because it's in comparison to more expensive books. As soon as everyone's at 99c, there is no advantage. The ebook market is a gold rush at the moment, and like any gold rush, most of us will chase it and come away with nothing while a few will become very successful indeed. Those of us who chase it too late will get nothing because the territory has been prospected out."

http://namelesshorror.com/post/5908335321/brief-further-ebooks-mosby-linkage