Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 175
March 27, 2017
Destressing through coloring books and mandalas
Slow acoustic music plays out of a small speaker as campus junior Maithy Nguyen sits at her desk getting lost in the soothing sound of her colored pencil moving back and forth across the page. Maithy comes home from a stressful day of classes and has a mountain of homework ahead of her. But for just one hour, she lets herself get lost in giving life to the complicated black outlines on the pages of her coloring book. Coloring acts as a way to de-stress from the busy life she and most UC Berkeley students lead.
“I… love taking ’me’ time because I feel like being a college student and juggling a million different things, we don’t have a lot of time to just sit and reflect,” Nguyen wrote in a text message. “Coloring helps clear my head, I don’t do too much thinking when I’m coloring.”
Daxle Collier, a health educator for University Health Services, explained that while there may be a direct link between coloring and anxiety reduction, stress management is very personal and art may not work for all people in reducing stress.
“There are few early studies suggesting that coloring mandalas in particular can be useful for reducing anxiety,” Collier said. “But it’s very personal, so I think while coloring might be really useful for one person, it might not be quite as useful for another person.”
Nguyen, for whom coloring definitely works as a method of stress management, started coloring in high school but stopped when college started and she got too busy. She didn’t pick it up again until her sophomore year of college, after a series of stress-related breakdowns caused her to realize a lack of balance in her life.
“I realized I was not allowing myself any ’me’ time and being too stressed out would stress me out even more,” Nguyen wrote in her text message. “It was such an unhealthy cycle.”
Since then, she colors about once or twice a week for approximately an hour while she listens to music or watches TV to let herself escape from all stress.
UC Berkeley freshman Molly Tomlin, who also colors to relieve stress, prefers to do so in silence, although she will occasionally color while listening to music or when watching TV.
“I (color) alone and that’s a big part of it,” Tomlin said. “I’ve (listened to music) in the past, but I think the best way to go about it is just kind of doing it in silence.”
Tomlin has similar coloring patterns to Nguyen in that she has also been coloring since high school and continues to do so about once a week when she is feeling particularly stressed out.
“I’m constantly thinking,” Tomlin said. “So when I’m coloring, all I’m thinking about is what colors I’m using and staying inside the lines and how it’s going to end up looking, so my sole concentration is on that. It helps me clear my head.”
Tomlin may enjoy the constraints provided by the lines, but for others, the borders could be even more stress-inducing. Collier explained that while each individual has a specific type of art – ranging from coloring books to free-form – that benefits their mental health, art does not help at all for some people.
“While I think for some people coloring something in is less stress-inducing because they don’t have the pressure of, ‘What am I going to draw?’ or, ‘Is my drawing good enough?’ … for other people the opposite could be true,” she said. “They might feel constrained by coloring something in and would rather just do free-form art. Of course, for other people, neither would really be appealing, so I think it just depends.”
Both Tomlin and Nguyen agree that they prefer to color over doing free-form and particularly enjoy more complicated mandala patterns.
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Available on Amazon
Source:
http://www.dailycal.org/2017/03/19/destressing-coloring-books-mandalas/
The Fashion House Of Artificial Intelligence
Fashion subscription service Stitch Fix decided to try it last year, and the human-measured results are in: computers are really good designers.
Stitch Fix’s computers identified shirt cuts, patterns, and sleeve styles popular among the company’s subscribers, and mashed them together with some human help to create three brand new shirts. All three sold out.
(I don’t blame them, either. I feel like I’m falling into a stereotype with this, or that I’m officially too predictable, but I’d buy the shirt they came up with. Just look how summery this one is! So classy, so elegant, so cheery, so easy. It’s like an updated-yet-classic-garden-party-that-isn’t-even-stuffy turned into a shirt.)
So Stitch Fix decided to keep it going and design nine more computer-human “hybrid” items this year – this collection including dresses – with a plan to create another couple dozen by the end of the year. That adds up to a grand total of 40-odd original designs, which is comparable to those put out by famous, well-established couture fashion houses in a given season. The items make up less than 1% of the company’s stock, but so far so good.
Hybrid Creativity
The idea of artificial intelligence/human creativity hybrids aren’t original to Stitch Fix, but it’s the first time it’s been applied to fashion. Industries like music, graphic design, industrial design, videogames, and special effects have been using AI-human hybrid creativity for a while. Cars are on the “Eventually” list. But it’ll be a If anything, AI creativity will let human designers stay creative while the computers take care of the customer-demanded products.
while before computer creativity is really autonomous. However, as tech becomes more and more sophisticated, and as we better learn how to teach and train it, it’s capable of more and more. The tech goal of having true AI creativity gets closer and closer every day.
Will this mean that jobs are taken away? Possibly a few. But, more than any other industry, creative ones are both the most adaptive and the largest. There is no limit to creativity, even when AI is introduced as a competitor. It’s one thing to automate a job like sewing, but you can’t automate the imagination. Human artists aren’t going anywhere. If anything, it’ll let human designers stay creative while the computers take care of the customer-demanded clothing items. Why design for the trend-followers when a computer can do that while you focus on setting the trends?
The Artificial Intelligence Fashion Future
Hopefully the next stop will be fashion pieces along the lines of a pipe dream I read about as a kid, published in National Geographic Kids about 10 years ago (I wasn’t kidding when I said I was a kid), that sounded so great I still haven’t forgotten it: someday, we could have fabric that mends itself, is truly stain-proof, and adjusts itself according to the temperature of the air around it to regulate body heat.
I’m all for robots contributing to New York Fashion Week, but I’m more than willing to put that off a few years if it means shortening the time between now and when I can have t-shirts that fix those annoying little holes they get down at the hem (you know what I mean), jeans that keep up with me as I fly from the Deep South to the Far North and back (because I’m insane), and socks that mend themselves when I snip the fabric as I cut off the sales tag (please tell me I’m not the only one).
Until then, I’ll be content with garden party shirts that don’t make me look like a doily, dresses that leave human designers time to exercise their creative power without necessarily pandering to the masses, and watching AI computers dramatically compete with each other for spots in New York Fashion Week. Let the games begin.
Source:
http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/03/fashion-house-artificial-intelligence/
10 Ways to Future-Proof Your Ecommerce Fashion Store
Selling fashion is easy. Selling fashion online is another beast entirely.
The trouble with ecommerce fashion is the same trouble any highly experiential good faces when it goes digital: Nobody wants to buy it until they try it. While the total US fashion and apparel sector sits at $359 billion, a mere 17% of that — $63 billion — belongs to ecommerce.
Sadly, even after you manage to overcome the try-then-buy divide, making sure those purchases stay purchases is even more daunting. According to Shopify’s recently published report on the future of ecommerce fashion and apparel, “The inability to physically interact with ecommerce items has resulted in an online return rate as high as 50% in some cases.”
However, having an online store isn’t an excuse to shy away from creating rich and deeply personalized customer experiences. Here are 10 tips to get ahead of ecommerce and future-proof your online store.
1. Virtual fittings
First and foremost, would-be customers want to know that your clothing isn’t tight in all the wrong places. Old-school size guides are a confusing maze of measurements that most visitors simply ignore. Virtual fittings change all that. For instance, Fits Me, an online fitting room, allows shoppers to enter simple information about their body type — height, age, weight, and body shape — and then Fits Me selects not just the size, but even specific products just for them.
2. Augmented reality
Right after fit, shoppers want to know, “How will it look?” And models aren’t enough.
They want to know, “How will it look on me?” Enter augmented reality. Outside of initial forays by the likes of XBox Kinect, full-scale AR is still a ways off.
However, for accessories, the future is now. Take Glasses.com. Its app gives users the ability to upload a photo of themselves and preview the entire inventory on their very own face. This creates a sense of ownership common in in-store buying but often lost in online.
3. Social approval
We all want approval, especially when it comes to fashion. In fact, social approval is often more powerful than self approval. In other words, it’s comforting to think you’ll look good in something. But hearing someone else say it? That’s ecommerce gold.
Stylinity leverages this social drive. Whenever someone uploads a photo, other community members can “Like” or “Favorite” their outfit and — get this — can then buy those socially approved looks … piece by piece.
4. Crowdsourced design
If you could find a way to predict what buyers like before you even start production, would you pass it up? Of course not. And that’s why you need to start crowdsourcing your designs. Betabrand, an online clothing store, even goes a step further by asking its customers to vote with their wallets and fund the new products they want most. Not only does this meet the predictive requirement as well as raise funds, it’s also amazing content for social media campaigns. It’s a win win . . . win.
5. Gamification
Want to really engage your customers? Make it a game. Covet Fashion created a free app where users compete to dress up an avatar in real clothes. The outfits are then posted and other users can vote on the best of the best on a leaderboard. Covet awards prizes — i.e., clothes — to top picks and uses its combinations on product-description pages. It’s fun and engaging, and — naturally — the more your visitors engage, the more they’ll buy.
6. Big-data analytics
Analytics is as critical to online sales as stitching is to spotting knockoffs. Could you go without it? Sure. But you might regret it. Unfortunately, most small-to-midsize fashion stores don’t have access to the kind of big-data analytics that Amazon does. StyleSage — where “fashion meets big data” — is changing that. StyleSage’s database combines over 1,000 retailers, 53,000 brands and 64 million products. Oh, and they’ll even keep an eye out for retail-partnership opportunities.
7. Machine learning
Unfortunately, simply having data isn’t enough. You have to know what to do with that data to put it to work. Or do you? Google Cloud Platform leverages machine learning on your store’s behalf. Its product recommendations engine analyzes past purchases, related searches, popular images and even text to deliver — with near artificial intelligence clairvoyance — exactly what each customer wants.
8. Deep personalization
As a subcategory of machine learning, let me just say: It’s easier for you if people buy from robots, but people don’t want to feel like they’re buying from robots. The answer? Dynamic Yield offers customer personalization using flexible algorithms that create messages in accordance with the user and how they’ve interacted with your store in the past.
It’s still a robot, but I won’t tell if you don’t.
9. Wearable tech
As if you haven’t picked up on the dominant trend here, technology and fashion have officially merged. The Apple Watch and Fitbit Blaze revolutionized why we buy technology. And that was just the start. New entries like Ringly — a “smart” ring that syncs with any mobile devices and alerts you when you’ve missed a call, message or email — and Top Shop’s line of bPay Wearables (shown below) that contain Barclaycard payments chips are continuing to push the two closer and closer.
10. Visual search
Most of us are used to the search bar, but pictures are way more fun. Not to mention, far more relevant to fashion. Imagine your customers starting their search with a series of images. When they find something they like, they click on a specific piece of clothing. That product enlarges, along with a host of similar offerings. This is exactly the dream Wide Eyes has made into reality.
Source:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/286769
When wood becomes lace: Innovative fabrics on spotlight at Tokyo Fashion
Wood fashioned into lace and sculpted into evening dresses: the Hanae Mori Manuscrit label led the way this Tokyo Fashion Week in showing the world the original craftsmanship that helps set Japan apart from the crowd.
Dresses of persimmon wood lace paired with soft falling black fabric were the star of the show at designer Yu Amatsu’s autumn-winter 2017 collection for the brand that left fashionistas giddy with excitement.
Discs of chestnut and walnut were used on a dress of interlocking triangular panels, an homage to Issey Miyake’s iconic Bao Bao bag, while wood was fashioned into sleeve ties and delicate butterfly hair pieces.
Japan is famous for high-tech and specialty fabrics, which not only supply the likes of Chanel and other celebrated couture houses, but also provide constantly shifting inspiration for homegrown designers.
Misha Janette, a Tokyo-based stylist, creative director and blogger who has lived in Japan since 2004, said Japanese fashion was often less about entertainment and more thoughtful with “amazing” material.
“They’re really, really keen on working with young designers to create new fabrics… that sets them apart,” she told AFP. “Each little village has its own special kind of fabric.”
Amatsu said the theme of his collection was “combine,” which translates to combining fabrics to create something that was both different and more beautiful.
3-D silhouette
The persimmon was originally very hard. “Even the sewing machine needle couldn’t go through it,” he explained. So he striped it down to 0.14 millimeters wide and bonded it with fabric to make it stronger.
He then stitched it into a lace butterfly pattern. “It’s quite heavy so when you move with the dress it makes a 3-D silhouette,” he told AFP.
Throughout, he was careful to preserve the color of the wood, making it look almost like pencil shavings or delicately processed tree bark, and there were belts and statement bags in the same material.
Inspiration comes from the world at large. “I’m always looking around to find something interesting which can be key for new designs, like the movies, music, architecture and so on,” he said.
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But wood was far from the only inn ovative fabric on the runway this Tokyo Fashion Week, which showcased the works of 52 designers.
Husband-and-wife label ROGGYKEI, known best for dressing American superstar Lady Gaga a handful of times, bases itself in Japan’s second city of Osaka to be close to specialist fabric factories.
The pair has no plans to relocate, recognizing their “made in Japan” heritage was a big boon when they exhibited in Paris in 2012.
Good technique
The fabric is 50 percent polyester, 50 percent wool, which designers Hitoshi and Keiko Korogi said makes it more supple. They also use some processed fabrics which they dye and wash.
There was a stole made out of a special cashmere woven from Mongolian yarn in Japan’s Nara and coated to make it washable and yet prevent pilling. They presented tie-dyed and indigo-dyed stoles too.
ROGGYKEI also used discarded pieces of cloth that would otherwise have been thrown out, and mixed natural materials and chemical fiber.
But at least one Japanese designer with an emphasis on cutting edge fabrics admitted to shopping elsewhere.
Takuya Morikawa offered a high-energy, Americana-inspired collection of silk dresses, fur and a maroon velvet jumpsuit for label TAAKK, which he set up in 2012 after working for Issey Miyake.
“All the fabrics are originals,” he told reporters. “The jacquards were made in Japan, but I had the embroidery made in China and India as it would have cost a lot to do in such good quality here.”
“Of course Japan has good technique, but I am not too hung up on it,” he explained. “I’d rather use good things from everywhere in the world.” JB
Read more: http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/258397/when-wood-becomes-lace-innovative-fabrics-on-spotlight-at-tokyo-fashion-week/#ixzz4cXG8WV1r
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Check out the first excerpt from Anne Rice’s upcoming sequel to The Mummy
Anne Rice has been on a roll lately when it comes to revisiting her classic supernatural series and reviving them for a new generation of readers. First she resumed her ever-popular The Vampire Chronicles series with two new Lestat novels (complete with a strange new origin for the vampires) and counting, a Vampire Chronicles TV series is developing, and now she’s finally continuing her mummy story after a nearly 30-year wait.
Earlier this month, Rice announced that the long-promised sequel to her novel The Mummy, or Ramses The Damned will arrive this fall. Titled Ramses The Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, the novel is a collaboration between Rice and her son and fellow novelist Christopher, and returns us to the tale of the Egyptian immortal Ramses as his adventures in 1914 London continue.
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At the end of he last novel (spoilers for a book that came out in 1989), Ramses believes that the imortal Cleopatra was killed in an explosion, leaving the world free of her madness-infused wrath. But Cleopatra is still very much alive, licking her wounds and swearing revenge against Ramses. As The Passion of Cleopatra picks up, both immortals are still searching for the ecret behind the magical elixir that made them both immortal, but another ancient being has arrived in the story. Like Cleopatra, she’s a queen, but she is much, much older, and she holds secrets to magical potions that go far beyond the Elixir of Life. The excerpt from the novel, released Thursday by Entertainment Weekly, follows this queen in ancient Jericho, when she’s already hundreds of years old, and reveals an old betrayal that helped make her the wanderer that she’s become. Check out a snippet:
“We are being followed, my queen.”
She had not been a queen for centuries, but her two loyal servants still referred to her as such. Both men flanked her now as they approached the great stone city of Jericho on foot.
They were the only members of her royal guard who had refused to take part in an insurrection against her. Now, thousands of years after freeing her from the tomb in which she’d been placed by her traitorous prime minister, these former warriors for a lost kingdom remained her constant companions and protectors.
No one does immortals quite like Rice, and this novel seems to be taking the already epic scope of the first Mummy novel and multiplying it, taking us back millenia and potentially opening up a whole new universe of secrets for future stories. Check out the cover below, and head over to EW to read the rest of the excerpt. Ramses The Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra arrives Nov. 21.
Source:
http://www.blastr.com/2017-3-16/check-out-first-excerpt-anne-rices-upcoming-sequel-mummy
The Little Book That Changed Everything For Matthew McConaughey
What with his recent Academy Award win the other night, he’s the toast of Hollywood. But Matthew McConaughey is hardly an overnight success.
If you recall, we first saw him on-screen in a small, but memorable role in the critically acclaimed Dazed and Confused (Alright, Alright, Alright! )
After that however, he drifted through a series of forgettable films including Texas Chainsaw Massacre-The Next Generation, Angels In The Outfield and ‘the male lead” in a Trisha Yearwood music video!
And yet, this wouldn’t be the first time his career appeared stalled.
His big break came in 1996 when he was cast in the lead for the John Grisham film, A Time To Kill. This, everyone said, would be the film which would catapult him into Hollywood A+ status. He was on his way.
Well, not quite. Who knows, maybe he had a bad agent. Maybe he chose to chase the money by starring in bombs like EDtv, The Newton Boys and the laughably bad, Contact with Jodie Foster.
Or maybe that “bongo incident” was a sign of another sort of problem.
Everyone agreed he had something, a presence on the screen, but it wasn’t being maximized by co-starring with Kate Hudson in a series or horrifically bad romantic comedies, which as anyone knows, are the worst kind of comedies known to man.
He was in danger of becoming an afterthought within the industry. A well paid afterthought, but an afterthought nevertheless.
So what kept him plugging away?
As a college student in Texas, at some point along the way he picked up a copy of the book, “The Greatest Salesman In The World” by Og Mandino.
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He credits this short, 1968 self-help book with keeping him grounded and on-track throughout his life, even during the lean years.
“The book’s a kind of philosophy on life. I started reading it right before I was due to take my exams for law school and I got so engrossed in it that I was almost late for my exam! But it was well worth it because that book changed my outlook on life and gave me the courage I needed to chase my dream of applying to film school.”
I too went through my own self-help book stage a few years back. (Yes, those are actually my books!) I never quite finished “The Greatest Salesman…” though.
I know….I’m still working on that procrastination thing. We’re all a work in progress, right? Maybe it’s time to take another crack at it.
Source:
The Little Book That Changed Everything For Matthew McConaughey
Google to fix diversity problem with outpost for black colleges
Four years ago, Google began sending engineers to historically black colleges such as Howard University for its Google in Residence program, an attempt to improve its recruiting from these campuses, prepare students for Google’s peculiar hiring practices and inject their computer science courses with more of the up-to-date skills that Silicon Valley needs.
Now, it is trying the reverse, starting an on-campus outpost known as “Howard West” that brings students from Washington to Mountain View, Calif., for three months of computer science classes, one-on-one mentorships with black Google tech employees, and even the Googleplex’s famous free food and shuttles. Faculty will come with them, spending an “externship” teaching and learning alongside Google engineers.
The new program, announced Thursday, is the search giant’s latest effort to try to boost its stubbornly low numbers of black employees, which account for just 1 percent of its technology employees — the same number as in 2014 — and only 2 percent of its employees overall, according to the company’s most recent diversity report. Besides its Google in Residence program, the company has expanded its recruiting to a broader range of schools, trains its workers on “implicit biases” and re-examines resumes to make sure recruiters don’t overlook diverse talent.
“We’d been focused on narrowing or, really, eliminating the digital divide,” said Bonita Stewart, vice president of partnerships for Google, in an interview. “Now we’re seeing there’s an opportunity to look at the geographical divide. By having this immersive program, we will have the opportunity to focus on the hard technical skills, but more important are some of the softer skills, in terms of working and understanding the Valley culture.”
As part of the new program, rising juniors and seniors will spend three months in classes at a dedicated space on Google’s campus. Tuition will be paid for by Howard and private donors; funding will also cover their housing and a summer stipend. The program is likely to include events such as networking sessions with Howard alumni throughout the Valley, opportunities to shadow Google employees, and formal and informal conversations about their experiences. It launches this summer with 25 students from Howard University, but the aim is to expand it next year to other historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
Howard University President Wayne Frederick said he hopes the program will help retain students in computer science programs who might not have the financial means to remain. “A large number of our students are Pell Grant-eligible, and support is a real concern,” Frederick said. “This also helps address their ability to matriculate more quickly.”
Exposure, experience
The idea began after Frederick made some visits to Silicon Valley companies in 2014 and recognized the gulf between the two cultures. “Until you actually walk around and see it in action, I don’t think you really get it,” he said. A medical doctor, he recognized the value of more clinical experience earlier in medical students’ education, something that could be applied to computer science majors, too. At an event, he met Stewart, a Howard alumna who herself had seen the opportunity for HBCUs to get an outpost at the Googleplex after her office in New York provided space for the Cornell Tech program and the nonprofit Black Girls Code.
“We thought by moving it out west and creating this more immersive environment, we could perhaps accelerate our diversity effort in a new and interesting way,” Stewart said.
The new program could also help fix some concerns about the company’s Google in Residence program. In a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story early last year, a former Google engineer cited the difficulty of luring Google employees to Howard’s campus in Washington, which took them out of the regular promotion and evaluation cycles back on campus. The new program would allow engineers to remain local as they got involved in the program.
It could also help expose students earlier to the culture shock that awaits some of them when they come to Silicon Valley. One black student said she was startled by how homogeneous the area was on a visit and noted the playground-style perks at tech campuses armed with ping-pong tables didn’t interest her. “Slides are not really appealing,” she told Bloomberg. “There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley — and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming.”
Diversity experts briefed on general details about the program said that while the concept is intriguing, there are also important questions to consider about how to prepare students for the experience. “I don’t know how many of the cultural nuances everybody has thought through,” said Freada Kapor Klein, who co-chairs the Kapor Center for Social Impact and founded a summer math and science program for low-income, underrepresented high school students of color. “Students are coming from … a predominantly people-of-color campus and being parachuted into a an overwhelmingly white, Asian and male environment.”
Others agreed that the program’s success will lie in its details — as well as in how well it translates to hires. Data shows there are proportionally more students of color graduating from computer science programs than are being hired by big firms, making the real problem not the pipeline, but a lack of hiring, said Ellie Tumbuan, a principal at Vaya Consulting, which assists clients with diversity issues in the Bay Area. “Everyone is understanding that it’s more important to build long-term relationships,” she said. “The real commitment comes with what are you actually going to do about hiring.”
Source:
With Audiobooks Hot, Publishers Should Look to Bundle Them With E-Books
I grew up in a rural area with not much to offer an imaginative kid who’d much rather live in London—and, though my parents were very educated, the town I lived in couldn’t support a bookstore. Fortunately, our house was close to the public library, where I basically lived until I was 15, at which point they hired me as a page after school and on weekends.
Holding a new and different book in my room or at the base of the willow tree where I liked to read in summer was a nearly sacred feeling for me. Books were views into worlds I wanted to partake in—worlds where people spoke other languages, had other ways of living, and didn’t have to put up with boys stealing their calculators before chem class and dismantling them. Decades later, I moved from physical books to e-books, which I adopted enthusiastically to cut down on the sheer mass of books in my apartment and avoid lugging around the heavy sagas I love to lose myself in while traveling.
Recently, though, I’ve been part of the return-to-print trend demonstrated by the 3.3% rise of print unit sales in 2016, reported earlier this year by NPD BookScan. The feeling of holding the book, which mattered so much to me as a kid, was just too powerful to let go. I also need to curl up before bed with a long, immersive story—and screen glare tends to affect my sleep thereafter. The soft yellowish invitation of a page, as opposed to the harsh blue glare of a screen, seems more welcoming and soothing.
But I’ve just started a new consulting gig that has me commuting from Staten Island to Manhattan. And I’m not as young as I was—I don’t want to throw my back out carrying Bleak House around, and I’d alike to be able to adjust print size.
In addition, I spend my lunchtime walking around the city, shaking off sedentary desk life. So I’m thinking about different ways of reading, and one possible option was to combine print and digital books. Unfortunately, as Bill Rosenblatt mentions in his blog post, “The Failure of Print and eBook Bundling,” publishers are not exactly leaping to bundle e-books with print titles. And that has to do with Amazon.
Since the inception of the Kindle, publishers have agonized over e-book pricing. When e-book prices from the major publishers reverted back to the agency model, Amazon retaliated by heavily discounting the paperback versions. Thanks to the first-sale doctrine, which applies to physical products, Amazon has the right to set any price it likes on titles it’s purchased from publishers. By positioning print books as a sort of loss leader—the very way they positioned e-books to gain adoption in 2007—Amazon made it more likely that consumers choose physical over digital books.
If book publishers offered their e-books as “sidecar” products to the print versions, they would have to price the e-books at a far lower price than they are now, which would cannibalize their standalone e-book sales. With little financial incentive, publishers have not pushed bundling. With their lower costs, e-books give publishers margin in ways that physical products can’t, and publishers are enormously reluctant to cede ground on that margin—especially given that retailers in the past have instituted processes such as returns and heavy distribution discounts on inventory.
The agency model was a line in the sand; publishers informed trading partners that the days of chipping into their margins were over—which is, in itself, laudable. But in any skirmish between trading partners, it’s the consumer who pays the price. And the consumer is Amazon’s ruthless focus.
What the consumer seems to want, in terms of bundling, is an e-book–audio package. Almost since Amazon bought Audible in 2008, it has been exploring ways to pair Audible files with Kindle books. By 2013 the technology was in place, and Amazon began offering consumers the option of a Kindle-Audible bundle. Because it’s Amazon, we can’t get sales figures on these packages, but because Audible has an enormous catalogue and solid relationships with the Big Five publishers, the bundle offering is fairly widespread on the site.
This seems to be logical. You’re already reading your book on your device. If you’re driving or walking around, you obviously can’t hold text in front of your face, so just connect the device with an audio outlet (Bluetooth speaker, headphones), and pick up where you left off.
Perhaps, then, the answer for me is to curl up in bed with an audiobook.
Source:
