Follow-Ups: Private Label and E-books

The increasing quality of private label products was the subject of an item here a few weeks ago, and tests in San Francisco confirm that store brands are often equal to or better than comparable branded products:

Our five experienced panelists - local chefs, cookbook authors and food professionals - test products blind, concentrating solely on texture, appearance and, most importantly, taste. Time and again, they find that grocery store brands come out on top. In fact, in the 44 tastings from 2009, more than one-third of the winners were grocery store brands.

A steady stream of articles like this will begin to put greater pressure on brand name marketers to find ways to justify their price differential.

We also discussed, just before Christmas, the growing popularity of e-readers and the concerns they are raising among publishers, who are looking for a way to battle the downward pressure e-books will put on prices for ‘real’ books. We suggested that this might be the year when e-readers reach critical mass. Looks like we may have been right:

Amazon's Kindle hit an important and startling milestone yesterday: On Christmas, the company sold more Kindle books than physical books. Yes, this is obviously the result of everyone who got a Kindle for Christmas (lots of folks) firing it up and ordering a bunch of eBooks on a day in which most physical-book readers weren't shopping. But it's still important and impressive.

I’m waiting to see if publishers will have a strategy for digital books that works better than the record labels’ response to digital music.