I came across some interesting remarks by Corbis CEO Gary Shenk. The remarks were made this week at a Reuters New Media Conference in New York City.

What is good for Corbis is good for Jupiterimages. Also, we have an excellent working relationship with Corbis unlike our publicly aired problems that we have had and continue to have with Getty Images.

Therefore I certainly hope Gary Shenk is on the mark!

Lots has been written about the new Kindle ebook reader from Amazon. This post will not critique Kindle other than to say I think it is a brilliant device and strategy from Amazon.

This post is rather about Kindle's historcal place in the evolution of ebooks. My career in publishing took root back in 1971. Microfilm had been around for a long time. Microfiche was new back then. Instead of a roll of film printed materials were reproduced on "film cards" that reproduced 96 pages of printed material. In 1971 "ultrafiche" were invented. Ultrafiche were microfiche that contained aout 3500 pages of printed material in a microformat. The invention of ultrafiche was reported on the front page of The New York Times. Predictions abounded about how the New York Public Library would one day fit into a few shoeboxes full of ultrafiche. Portable devices were also created in the 1970s that would allow a user to read an ultrafiche on a portable reader. My work at the time was as founder and publisher of a journal called "Microform Review" which reviewed microfilm and microfiche collections for research libraries. I became an expert on micropublishing. I might also add that my doctoral dissertation was entitled "Scholarly Micropublishing in America: 1900-1980" which was later published by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut.

This background started me on the road to observing and reporting on different forms of the "delivery of information." In the 1980s I was reporting and running tradeshows on the videodisc, optical disk and revolutionary CD-ROM. In the early 1990s I ran a tradeshow called "Electronic Books." The star of this show was then new Apple "Newton" which was a first attempt at electronic book delivery. Over the years we have observed other attempts from Sony and others.

And now the Kindle. The Kindle to me is a prototype of what will spur many more versions until Amazon gets it absolutely right.

I just returned from visiting offices in Budapest, Munich, Berlin, London and Braintree, England. I would have included Paris, but a transport workers strike in France prevented a visit.

I ran into snow in Budapest and Munich. Great weather in London! I packed a lot into four days. I try to chat with as many or my colleagues as possible on these visits. I came away with a feeling of terrific morale and pride in what we are producing at Jupitermedia.

Jupitermedia's stock took a further tumble in the early part of the week but rallied a bit toward the end. It was a good opportunity for me to start buying stock. A member of our Board of Directors was a significant purchaser as well. I plan on buying more. I have done well over the years buying the stock of public companies that I have run on price declines. In the 1990s I did quite well doing this at Mecklermedia. In this decade I was a purchaser when JUPM got to $0.97 in 2001 (at other lows) when nobody believed in the company (it rose to $24 three years later). I cannot guarantee that our stock will rise again, but I believe that our content and related assets are worth significantly more than our present market capitalization of about $140 million. I am a long term believer and player. Good content always wins the day. Jupitermedia is loaded with great content.

I am about to embark on a visit to several of our European and UK operations this coming week. It will be interesting to speak with colleagues abroad where so much good work is developed both for our online media division and our image division.

I might even get a question or two about our financials. Last Friday we published our quarterly financial results for the third quarter. We had several good pieces of news. The stock market was not impressed. Combined with a terrible time for USA financial markets, Jupitermedia's stock price has been beaten down.

I think the price is now ridiculous. Our assets are worth many times our market capitalization. We are making good progress on turning around our operations. We have a confident group of professionals worldwide who feel we have great products and a solid company.

Let's see how we are doing by year end? I feel good about all of our businesses and look forward to the coming months.

My posts rarely deal with anything other than doings at Jupitermedia or comments on the Internet and media. Every once in a while I feel compelled to comment on some aspect of my life away from business and the Internet.

So this is one of those rare posts. Last night I saw a fabulous play called The Farnsworth Invention. The playwright is Aaron Sorkin. Many readers know Sorkin from the television series The West Wing. Many years ago he had a play on Broadway called A Few Good Men (later a movie featuring Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore).

Farnsworth refers to Philo Farnsworth who was the real father of the television. He conceived of "television" as a teen in 1912. Later he lost out in getting the patent to television technology to David Sarnoff (founder of RCA and the National Broadcasting Company).

The play is fascinating. The dialogue superb. The history gripping. Particularly fascinating to me are the similarities to business people trying to grasp the possibilities of television back in the 1920s and 1930s to these same types trying to grasp the Internet in the period 1995-1999.

Needless to say I cannot say enough about this play.

I am sure most readers are aware of the stike in the USA by the Writers Guild of America.

Once again the Internet is changing business as usual. The strikers main point of contention is that they do not get a cut from clips viewed on YouTube, podcasts and other forms of video publication on the Internet.

Check out Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live fame and now the head writer of 30 Rock and her feelings about the strike and the Internet.

Previous posts have mentioned that through our Jupitermedia network, Mediabistro, we are now very much in the business of offering online training in a host of areas.

Mediabistro just listed a whole bunch of new online courses that some readers might be interested in "attending." At the sametime this post serves to show the strength of a building business for Jupitermedia.

I am very excited that we have this new line of business on top of the rapidly growing online job board from Mediabistro as well as our new Just Tech Jobs.

It was interesting to listen to the Getty Images financial conference call yesterday. CEO Jonathan Klein emphasized quite a few initiatives in his 30 minute plus "monologue" about Getty's future direction.

Subscriptions and the use of images on the Web were strongly endorsed. Of course this is good news for Jupitermedia because it is an endorsement of our theories and emphasis for several years. So I congratulate Jonathan for joining the bandwagon.

We have our own new initiatives coming to continue our postion as the leader in the business of selling subscriptions for images and other digital content. And of course we have long advocated that images for the Web is where the future growth of the image industry is headed.

Another emphasis was music. Getty has followed Jupitermedia into the music side of things. Our endeavors here are very different from Getty's. Jonathan mentioned that music is very fragmented. I doubt anyone can consolidate the fragmentation, but one can certainly become a force in a number of the "fragments." I cannot guarantee it but I believe we are already the leader in the area of royalty free music online.

Next week we present our numbers. I will have more comments at that time.