Been away for a few days from the blog, and got a lot of things to talk about.

First of all, an interesting piece by Joe Wikert

As Joe points out talking about Logos, much can be accomplished by stopping thinking to individual e-books and starting thinking much bigger.

It seems that content is no more king, or at least that it’s not the only king in town. The context is gaining more and more importance. Not that this is anything new, but examples are more and more under the eyes of everyone, and Logos is just a first one. This is an interesting declination of the network – not only as a network of people, but as a network of texts. The revenge of the bibliographer, sort of (and I’m convinced that getting back to reading some Gerard Genette or Donald McKenzie will turn out to be very useful in a short while)

This may also be a passage towards what might be called the gadgetization of books – the traditional book opens itself to its para- and peri-text, and to other media as well, and becomes something different, at the same moment in which it explores all its possibilities.
What may be sold is not only the book itself, but a cloud of ideas, references, inspirations that were cristallized in the book.

And this half-book-half-gadget may also gain enough value in the eyes of the consumer so that a higher price would be justified. What strikes me in The death of Bunny Munro e-book is not its success, its high-selling price or whatever. It’s the fact that it’s a big chunk of work by Nick Cave, beautifully crafted and put together – it’s not an e-book, not a soundtrack, it’s more than that, and than the sum of its parts.
It’s no surprise, actually, that it can be sold at a high price – also thanks to the lack of high quality e-books and the rudimentary phase of the market we are in (but we already talked about that).

On this same path, an impressive video was the one by Penguin CEO John Makinson that showed what Penguin is working on for some of their titles.
This is certainly not the only way to go, but it definitely is one way to go.