By Paul Biba
* Driver for the Irex DR 800
* Driver for the Booq e-book reader
* Allow automatic series increment algorithm to be tweaked by editing the config file tweaks.py
* Various improvements to the catalog generation. Larger thumbnails in EPUB output and better series sorting. Better handling of html markup in the comments.
* MOBI Output: Make font used for generated masthead images user customizable.
By Paul Biba
Wattpad has teamed up with Lulu and will open the Wattpad Marketplace on Lulu.com. The marketplace will sell POD editions and offer free and for sale ebooks as well.
Additionally, Wattpad has connected with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India with over 100 million mobile subscribers. The Wattpad mobile ebook app will now be available in the Bharti Airtel application store.
By Paul Biba
It seems like every post is about value. Low-quality books have low price values. We all agree on that. The question unanswered, however, is what value does a book have regardless of its form? That is one tough question!
What brought this to mind was an article in The Economist titled “The Lowdown on Teardowns” (January 23, 2010, pp. 62-63), which was subtitled “Ripping apart smart-phones reveals their true cost.” I tried to rip apart a book to find its true cost but didn’t have any success. Unlike the smartphone, a book is primarily intangibles.
But the article is intriguing. Not because I haven’t read similar items before, but because it hadn’t dawned on me before how differently consumers value smartphones and books and clamor for pricing closer to cost in books but not in smartphones. [Read rest of post]
By Paul Biba
Editor’s Note: I received the following email from publisher Linda Houle and I thought it should be shared with all our readers. PB
I recently noticed there seems to be a trend toward “blaming” publishers for poor ebook quality. As a publisher I wanted to bring something interesting to your attention, with the idea you might want to explore it as a possible blog topic.
I mentioned “apps” and formatting in my subject line because I found out something about our L&L Dreamspell ebooks. An ebook that I had formatted perfectly in Mobipocket .prc came out either beautiful, or awful, depending on which “app” that was being used to view it on a smart phone.
My experience is only with my son’s “Droid” phone from Verizon. I’m not sure if this same thing happens with the IPhone and other smart phones. When I asked my son to download one of our books into his Droid phone so I could look at it, first he had to find an application. He found two apps and downloaded them. One of them held all the formatting, and even showed the black and white illustrations in the ebook as crisp and clear. The other application totally stripped out all the formatting, including headers and indents (no indents makes it a bad reading experience!) and it also stripped out all the illustrations. Anyone trying to read this particular ebook with the “second” app he used would have said L&L Dreamspell’s ebooks are crap, and would have put us on someone’s “Hall of Shame” list.
[Read rest of post]
By Paul Biba
Since the Wall Street Journal is subscription only I can’t get at the article, but the Bookseller has a good summary of this interview with the CEO of Penguin, John Makinson.
He calls the ebook the direct descendent of the paperback, an idea which Penguin invented.
Makinson also argued that there was limited scope to play with e-book prices and royalties, saying: “The small cost of producing ebooks is viewed by authors as an opportunity for higher royalties and by consumers as an opportunity for lower prices. Fair enough. Yet the physical cost of a book – manufacturing, transportation and warehousing – is just under 10% of its retail price. Ten per cent is also, as it happens, roughly the average margin of the consumer book publishing industry and what’s needed to keep investing in new writing and new ideas. So there’s some room for discussion but not much.”
By Paul Biba
A Paris court previously fined Google €300,000 in damages and €10,000/day for its breach of French copyright law in digitizing La Martinière books.
Now, Google has appealed the verdict on copyright infringement and is claiming that their use of short excerpts in their index is fair use under French law. There is no indication in the article about how long it will take to decide the appeal.
The ereader is changing the way we read books, but it has yet to enhance the way we discover titles. I am in the middle of shaking down my new Kindle. The Kindle store only has about 300,000 titles, precious few considering that three times that number of new titles appear annually (Bowker’s, 2003, 2007). I could not find Nabokov’s Lolita, though I credit Amazon’s preparation for the Canadian Kindle release, stocking Giller prize winners such as MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. Once I found a potential purchase, the online reviews were useful, as was the free first chapter sent to my device. Traditional bookstores might find it worrisome that I almost purchased a book off their shelves, till I remembered I had a Kindle and purchased the ebook for half the price.
By Paul Biba
John Wiley & Sons has partnered with Baker & Taylor to provide highly formatted content on the Blio platform, according to a news release.
Wiley books to be offered will be educational and consumer titles, including cookbooks and travel books. Blio is a software platform developed by Ray Kurzweil that is platform neutral. I saw a demo at Digital Book World and it was very impressive. You could easily integrate “how to” videos into cookbooks or interactive maps into travel books. Blio will also provide print-to-speech if it is enabled by the publisher.
The full press release is here.
By Paul Biba
Came across this because of a review on Macworld which gives it 4.5 mice out of 5. McSweeney’s is an independent publishing house in San Francisco which publishes the Quarterly (mostly short fiction), the Believer (monthly interviews, reviews, columns and essays), books and DVDs of short films.
The iPhone app consists of the “Internet Tendency” section which pulls content from McSweeney’s Website (which offers daily pieces of short, humorous fiction), while “Small Chair” contains a larger, weekly feature pulled from the McSweeney’s network.
The app costs $6. Anyone use it? Let us know.
By Paul Biba
Carly Z at Geardiary has a review of this unit with the latest firmware update.
All-in-all she thinks that the price is high for what you get and, while loving the hardware, can find no compelling reason to pay the asking price.
By Paul Biba
According to an Amazon press release, de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear and Just 2 Seconds has signed on with Amazon exclusively for Kindle editions for one year.
From the release:
“Over the years, there have been about 25 different editions of ‘The Gift of Fear,’ and I am very excited that Kindle can free my books from the bonds of paper and glue and warehousing and shipping,” said de Becker. “These special Kindle editions of my books can efficiently and instantly be available to readers around the world, and offer many benefits unavailable in conventional paper books. For example, while readers of the physical edition may or may not have had access to a nearby dictionary, Kindle readers can now see the definition of a word at the moment it’s encountered. Now readers can also easily search for any reference, name, passage, topic or even individual word throughout the entire text.”
I’m a little late noticing this, but on January 31st TidBITS posted a detailed head-to-head comparison of the Kindle versus the iPad as e-book reading platforms. There is also some discussion of the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, though the outcome was unknown at that point.
TidBITS‘s Glenn Fleishman concludes:
In the end, Amazon is a bookseller, and its foray into hardware shows that it’s better at moving media than making machines. The Kindle has evolved into a nice piece of hardware that gets great reviews from those who keep it.
But, put bluntly, the Kindle DX just doesn’t compare favorably with the iPad in any way other than battery life and screen visibility in sunlight; the Kindle 2 benefits from being smaller and cheaper. And the Kindle ebook library may offer titles at a lower price, though Amazon may be forced to capitulate on that.
The article includes plenty of comparison photos and charts, and makes very interesting reading. As Fleishman, like me, has no difficulty reading from a lit LCD screen, his conclusions may not be valid for everyone, but I think he makes some very good points.
