Blog Notes: Ads By WordPress, Not Me

This is a portion of a screensnap just sent to me by @doctorlaura:

Click = big

I do not pay to use WordPress. So they make their money by sometimes inserting ads into blogs. She just caught one of the times this has happened.

I never see any ads on my end nor am I ever told if any have been or will be inserted.

And I don’t make a cent off them. Not that I’d want to: I hate intrusive ads! And really, given some of the things I write, I think most advertisers would rather not be here. OK, make that all advertisers.

Face Meets Wall: The Collapse Of eInk Devices

Suddenly, there were a load of earthquakes in the eBook device world today:

*SMASH* B&N drops Nook price to $199!! Confirms a $149 Nook coming too! Sony weeps.Mon Jun 21 12:06:29 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

How long will Sony remain in eBooks? How long will Steve Haber remain in charge of eBooks? B&N just knifed Sony.Mon Jun 21 12:48:00 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

And… hello Borders! What MORON wants a $149 Kobo reader compared to a $149 Nook that has built-in WiFi?! Mon Jun 21 12:49:35 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

To cap off Sony dropping the Pocket Edition to $169 and the Touch Edition to $199, in comes Barnes & Noble with a new WiFi Nook for $149 and the original 3G Nook reduced to $199 — and then Amazon spits on all of them by dropping the Kindle to $189!

Suddenly, Sony has no place left to go in eBooks. Will Sony still be around in that business by the end of this year? I doubt it! Add that as another FAIL in the strutting Howard Stringer’s Reign of FAIL.

And then there’s this, my first tweet of the day:

In a society where people are measured by the THINGS they own, what happens when THINGNESS disappears for music, video, books, mags?Mon Jun 21 11:55:56 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

— which gets confirmation:

TATTOO THIS ON YOUR BRAIN: “The desktop PC isn’t the center of anyone’s universe anymore. The Internet is.”Mon Jun 21 20:01:41 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

See: Don’t Mean To Be Alarmist, But The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft’s Business Will Just Completely Collapse.

With eInk devices scrambling for any little bit of market share in a field absolutely dominated by the iPad, what should Apple’s next move be?

An iPad mini with a 6″-screen for $299 by Christmas. That would address the size issue, most of the weight issue, and by coming it at the price point of what eInk devices used to be, show them to be the transient duct-tape-triage technology they always were.

And with all that being said, all of the Big Six print publishers better start preparing for a world in which no electronic/digital book has a price higher than $4.99 for fiction and $9.99 for non-fiction.

With that price further collapsing a year later — as books move from being things as files to destinations on the Internet.