Thinking about media change (and iPads)

It hasn’t been a productive day today.  My main interest has been following all the news about the new iPad 2 announced over the lunch hour. I’m impressed by it, and absolutely certain I did the right thing in waiting a year for the version 2.0 of the iPad to come out.  But in the mean time, there has been some interesting media “think pieces”  out there worth taking a look at:

• GQ – The Day The Movies Died
  Mark Harris takes a look at what’s wrong with the movies today, and with a single paragraph nails it:
  
  [L]et’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.
  
  He prefaces this with a lengthy introduction on how Hollywood couldn’t believe that Christopher Nolan’s Inception would be a success.  I mean, it had bankable stars, the director of the decade, and was a sci-fi action movie.  What was wrong with it?  It was original….
• Daring Fireball – Dealing With Apple’s 30 Percent Commission
  DF’s John Gruber gives us an exhaustive, if not exhausting, analysis of Apple’s controversial policy of charging a 30 percent commission on all subscriptions sold through iTunes or in-app purchases.  If you really are interested in new-media economics, you need to read his take on it.  Great followup to what we were looking at a couple of weeks ago.

  Also, some additional analysis of Gruber’s arguments by the Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

• USA Today – Growth of “Indie” Writers
  With the success of Amazon’s Kindle as both a hardware platform and as software that runs on almost any type of computer or mobile device, there is actually now a market for e-books.  And authors like Amanda Hocking are making good money selling their books at a low cost without the involvement of a traditional publisher.  Hocking writes paranormal books for young adults, and she reportedly sold 450,000 copies on Amazon.com in January.  Her big advantage?  She gets to keep 70 percent of the cover price of all her books sold, rather than the more typical 15-30 percent offered by publishers.