TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘epublishing’ Category

By David Rothman

What if a Kindle rival could display videos and do Facebook and Twitter while also offering a touch screen, text to speech, an SD memory slot and Internet capabilities? Those are among the features of the Creative Zii MediaBook—and get this: the company has just displayed a working model. Breaking the news, complete with the apparently Photoshopped image to the left, was EpiZENter.net, which also reports use of the Zii-System-on-a-Chip technology

Ten publishers are said to be in talks with Creative, whose new baby can display newspapers and magazines, as well as textbooks and, of course, educational multimedia. Significantly Creative is a partner in the Singapore government’s FutureBooks initiative. A bit of a TeleRead going on over there? Tech in Hiding says: “By teaming up with the Singapore government, it allows the company to fund much of the production. It’s similar to how the US defense industry works—the government gives money to Lockheed Martin (or similar) to build new fighter jets. The government will still end up paying for the jet, but the company can also sell to other partners- Canada, UK, Germany, etc.” See a Techmeme roundup for more details on the MediaBook.

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By Court Merrigan

Billing itself as “Reading That’s Bad For You,” Electric LIterature proclaims that its mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.” EL is tired of hearing about the death of literary fiction. It believes in the future. You certainly have to give EL credit for trying.

Case in point: Single Sentence Animation. An animated short is made based on a single sentence taken from a short story featured in the magazine. This cunning little multimedia term hasn’t been trademarked yet, as far as I could tell. Here’s hoping the EL folks keep it that way, or maybe throw on a Creative Commons license.

To get a grip on Single Sentence Animation, I read all the sentences in “Three-Legged Dog,” by Diana Wagman—captured in a Single Sentence Animation video (caution: sexually-tinged imagery). The story is about a man whose girlfriend has lost a breast to cancer. He is her first lover following the mastectomy. Rather than being repulsed, the narrator is strongly attracted to the young survivor, so fragile and strong. The closely observed details are all there, the feel of a grubby bachelor apartment, the ironic pillow talk, the stream of conscious associations:

“My blue sheets were cool. My laundry was all in the hamper. She would be a chilly breeze in my arms. My sweat would evaporate, my skin prickle with goose flesh. I could pretend it was snowing outside. Snowing in southern California. With her, anything could happen.”

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By David Rothman

Make e-books available legally and conveniently at fair prices. That’s the best single anti-piracy measure.

Now consider a new piracy study from France. Ninety-five percent of the pirated e-books discovered—perhaps 6,000 or so—are not online in authorized editions.

Granted, this isn’t proven cause-effect; the above percentage could simply reflect the slowness of French publishers in getting their wares online. Just eight percent of the top 50 bestsellers in France are legally buyable in E.

Cause-effect or not, I hope that French houses will still consider the wisdom of using attractive legal editions to preempt the pirated ones. Same for American publishers who fantasize that they can delay e-book editions in hopes of spiking up p-book sales. Readers will seek out the material when they want it and in the formats they want. Harry Potter books, not legally available in E, are among the favorite illegal titles in P2P. While the numbers are small compared to French publishers’ total output, you can bet the number will grow, as the price of e-book readers declines and the technology improves.

Here are some other findings from the study—by Mathias Duval (via Nicolas Gary and our other friends at ActuaLitte):

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By Kat Meyer

“Good design is invisible”—Peter Collingridge

Lucky me! After just a bit of Twitter pestering and email harassment, I had the good fortune of virtually meeting and chatting with Peter Collingridge.

Peter is the co-founder of Enhanced Editions—tailorers of feature-packed bookish iPhone apps. Peter’s varied background includes 12 years experience in trade publishing, web, film, and digital marketing, working at Canongate Books, Screenbase Media and Apt Studio—all of which turned out to be quite handy experience for the Enhanced Editions venture. He’s really smart and talented, and I’m not the only one who thinks so, as the London Evening Standard has named as one of the “50 Most Influential” in publishing, and he was shortlisted for the UK Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year. 

Enhanced Editions does a fabulous job of creating multi-media apps for books. They incorporate opt-in audio, video, and other features to lend a whole new dimension to the reading experience. My line of questioning for Peter focused around Enhanced Editions’ very cool, newly released iPhone app for Nick Cave’s latest novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (right photo). You can check the app out at iTunes (the first three chapters are available for free download). I highly recommend you do so. And, if there is something horribly wrong with you and Nick Cave (photo) is not your cup of tea, well do not despair. Enhanced Editions has many more bookish apps on the way, including Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and two titles from The Wire’s David Simon.

KM: How did the project originate/what motivated you to create the Enhanced Editions app in the first place?

PC: I’ve spent the last 12 years working between publishing and tech, mainly building websites for publishers, and undertaking creative marketing for books, publishers, and trying to use tech to encourage people to read more. So I’m always thinking about how to translate things from one medium to another.

That’s the background. With Enhanced Editions, two things—actually three—happened.

First – I blogged on the launch of the app store and then (second) a publisher got back to me saying, "we’re publishing houses, not software houses" which opened a certain part of my brain. At the same time, other friends in the business gave me huge support for it saying – you must do this!

And the third part was when Steve Jobs said that people don’t read, which opened another bit. There was definitely an opportunity and no-one seemed to be taking it.  That was all the motivation I needed.

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By David Rothman

Is Barnes & Noble high-pressuring writers to link their sites to its online store?

Our friends at GalleyCat have the story, following up on SmartBitches, Trashy Books.

Somebody at one publisher is even said to have emailed writers: “I’m not exaggerating when I say they WILL NOT ORDER the book unless their site is listed.” Ouch!

Now here’s a special e-book angle. When happens when interbook linking is common? Will B&N—and Amazon!—seek special favors? And do some very nasty things to avoid disintermediation?

In fairness to B&N: GalleyCat reports: “One editor writes in to say the message she’s seen from B&N hasn’t been quite so stark: ‘What I’ve heard is B&N requesting that if you are linking to Amazon to please link to them as well.’”

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By Paul Biba

It’s rare that I’ll make a full article out of a comment, but this comment raises issues that need to be looked at. It is unusual that we get the perspective of a small country. Martin Taylor is the Director of the New Zealand Digital Publishing Forum and publisher and Managing Director of Addenda Publishing. In response to criticism of territorial restrictions which has been published here, Martin responds:

Territorial rights are important to preserve. They allow countries to develop their own economically sustainable publishing industries and to reflect the specific dynamics of each market. The profits from country-specific international editions help sustain the infrastucture needed for local book publishing that is important both economically and culturally. Local pricing, and the ability to profit from locally generated sales and marketing initiatives are also important parts of this.

Language/translation rights can be a useful alternative to achieve this but only if you have a unique language. If, for instance, you’re a small English language market like New Zealand, it’s no barrier. The only way to have a chance of developing a local market is to have territorial rights.

It’s too easy to be swamped by large foreign players with their massive scale economies so that the local industry has no chance to get effectively established. It’s especially irksome when those overseas sites evade local sales taxes, too, giving a further opportunity to stymie a local industry.

We’re trying to grow a sustainable industry here in New Zealand and the last thing we need to see is the rapid arrival of large US sites taking the publishing profits from international bestsellers out of this small market through global rights deals. If this happens, we’ll be relegated to a tiny, weak cottage industry. Give us a break.

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s note: Here is Part Four of Luke Bergeron’s series from his blog mispeled. The final part will be published tomorrow– Paul Biba

Today we’ll hear from someone inside the traditional publishing world. This was emailed to me from a member of an established New York publishing house. Aside from working in publishing, he’s also been conventionally published himself. I know it’s unfortunate, but I’ve been asked to conceal his name. He doesn’t want to anger the publishing company that employs him. That’s fine, I understand. I’m just glad to have a viewpoint from inside the machine.

Anyhow, here is his insight, after being presented with my questions:

I totally agree with what you say about a self-pubbed work reaching critical mass via word of mouth, blogging, etc, and, most important, actual sales figures. If a self-pubbed author approaches a publisher and says I’ve hoofed my ass from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu to sell 100,000 copies of a book that explains everything about life, the publisher will sit up and take note.

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By Paul Biba

Eric Engleman sent me the following email:

I’m a reporter covering Amazon.com/Kindle for TechFlash, a technology news website in Seattle. We just put together a cool graphic mapping all the players in the expanding electronic book market. I wanted to pass it along to you in case it is of interest. We did it as a resource for ourselves to track all that’s going on in the space, and realized it might be useful for others interested in e-books as well … .

If you go to the TechFlash site you will find not only a link to a larger version of the graphic, but also to a PDF version that has embedded links to news stories and other information about each of the companies listed. They alos ask for your feedback about anything they’ve missed.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebook readers, ebooks, ereaders, Google, Kindle, Paul Biba, publishing, Sony Reader, TeleRead, Sony, Fictionwise, Barnes & Noble, Irex

By Paul Biba

This is an important piece of software, presuming it works well. However, DNAML of Australia is a publishing expert so I think the presumption is that it will. They sent me an email alerting me to Pdf to ePub’s release and here is the link to their site. It costs $99 (I presume Australian dollars) and they don’t, unfortunately, have a trial version available. If anyone uses it please let us know. Here are the specs:

Quick conversion (2 to 5 minutes for an average trade title)

100 % text accuracy

Auto paragraph joining algorithm that works automatically across multiple pages

Correctly splits final HTML into multiple segments, improving performance and lowering memory requirements for ePub readers and eBook devices

Handles images and image positioning based on the PDF positioning

Provides the PDF to ePub user the option to overwrite glyphs (character images) utilised within the PDF, with custom characters using a simple interface which requires no programming knowledge

Converted ePub will be automatically validated to ensure 100% compatibility
with ePub check

Can convert from PDF to HTML allowing for web pages creation from the PDF text

Customise PDF area to extract from thus avoiding common problems with other conversion tools like headers and footers of pages being treated as body text

Provides the PDF to ePub user a pre-set option using PDF to ePub preset rules or to employ custom rules to the ePub conversion process

For Advanced users – PDF to ePub uses a powerful scripting language (.lua) to allow the PDF to ePub user to fully customise how text and images are extracted from the PDF files

Provides the end user the ability to set DPI (resolution) for images and glyph (character images)

Technorati Tags:
e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, EPUB, Paul Biba, publishing, PDF, Australia

By David Rothman

Kapan is publishing Stanza e-books for law and nursing students. But these “wrapped” ePub editions are just for iPhones and Touches. After a Kaplan news release—edited—I’ll discuss this. Your thoughts? – D.R.

Five titles from Kaplan Publishing for law and nursing students will be available at the iTunes store via the Stanza e-reader.

More titles will appear for students with access to iPhones or iPod Touches. Medicine will be among the fields included.

This will happen through arrangements between Kaplan Publishing, LibreDigital (digital publishing service provider) and Amazon’s Lexcycle subsidiary (developer of Stanza).

Kaplan Test Prep is offering the Stanza option after a survey showed nearly 45 percent of its students next year will have access to iPhones and iPod Touches.

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By David Rothman

Time Inc. wants to offer e-readers with some subscriptions.

E Ink is among the options considered. But can you really enjoy Sports Illustrated in monochrome? In Time’s place I’d go for iPhone apps and investigate color hardware only.

I do think it’s cool that Time would like to bypass Amazon, given the degree of corporate rapacity at the latter company (not that Time is Francis of Assisi).

The scuttlebutt is that Time is talking to a bunch of possible hardware partners—as well as other magazine publishers—and would like to launch in just a few months.

Meanwhile here’s another idea to improve Time Inc.’s cashflow: sell off the palatial headquarters building (shown in CC-licensed photo from Jason Kuffer/Digiart2001).

By David Rothman

An e-book focused conference, organized by O’Reilly Media, will take place Oct. 8 from noon to 3:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time, and the cost is $149, though Tools of Change alumni qualify for a discount. Among the topics: pricing, reader wishes and the future of E.

Speakers include Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd (photo); Matthew Bernius, co-director of the Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Angela James, editorial director of Quartet Press; Kasia Krozer of the Booksquare blog; and Neelan Choksi, CEO of Lexcycle.

By David Rothman

Four-hundred U.S. bookstores will close this year—a 500-percent increase over 2008—if a study from Grant Thornton LLP is on target. Some publishers, moreover, fret over the possible end of the hardback. And you already know about the threat which large educational publishers are facing from California’s move toward free textbooks.

Which digital strategies should publishers use to cope?

Can the right technologies help keep customers, through such wrinkles as e-books and customized books?

Random House, McGraw-Hill, Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Harlequin and Ingram Digital are among the heavy-hitters whose digital strategies are discussed in a 142-page report from the Gilbane Group. The study also highlights some innovative small-fry such as Lulu, Daily Lit and Curriki.

Several themes emerge in “Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementation Beyond ‘eBook,’” which you can download for free in PDF after you register at the Gilbane site.

Publishers, for example, are moving toward XML, digital asset management systems and related tech. The idea is to be able to use text and pictures and multimedia in many forms, some of which may differ radically from traditional e-books or not even be books, period. The new technology will also make it easier for publishing houses to sell directly to customers online, or pitch their wares through widgets for partner sites—allowing shoppers to browse from afar with the publishers still in control.

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By Paul Biba

From EDUCAUSE comes a web seminar that looks worth checking out, especially for those who are textbook oriented:

This seminar will initially address the current state of e-reader devices and their functionality as platforms for the delivery of e-textbooks, as experienced by Northwest Missouri State University in its 2008–2009 pilot study.

In this free August 26 EDUCAUSE Live! Web Seminar, E-Readers and E-Textbooks: Current Reality and Future Possibilities, presenters Jon T. Rickman, Vice President of Information Systems, and Roger Von Holzen, Director, Center for Information Technology in Education, Northwest Missouri State University, will also explore the full capabilities of e-textbooks for online, blended, and face-to-face classes, along with key practical considerations with respect to costs, infrastructure, and academic issues.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

By Kat Meyer

Hugh McGuire, co-founder of Book Oven, is Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series. Book Oven is a Web space for making, collaborating on, and selling books. Hugh is also the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project that creates free public domain audiobooks, now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, and several other Webby projects. McGuire photo by C.C. Chapman.

KM: For those readers who don’t know about it yet, can you give us the elevator speech version of what Book Oven is, and what it does?

HM: We’re calling it "cloud-publishing," an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books and e-books.

Most of these tools exist, of course, in various forms already. You can collaborate with editors and proofreaders on a wiki or Google Docs, you can find other writers or editors on various writers’ forums. You can generate an ePub ebook using various tools, and you can make a PDF and send it to Lulu, or CreateSpace, and sell your book print-on-demand through your own site, or through online book retailers; you can sell your e-books on Smashwords, or Amazon’s Kindle store, or at Shortcovers.

But, we want to put all that together so that writers, editors, and designers can focus on the really important stuff: the content. So we’re building a set of Web tools, and a community, that will allow writers, editors, proofreaders and designers to work on a book, and get it into the hands (or devices) of readers.

How people organize themselves in Book Oven is up to them: small private groups of colleagues; open groups of strangers; people who work together out of interest in a particular book or topic, or people who find each other through a marketplace for services.

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By Paul Biba

From Publishers Lunch. Great news!

Planeta, Random House Mondadori and Santillana–which comprise 70 percent of the Spanish trade book market–have joined forces to set up an ebook distribution company. And apparently the three hope that together they can impose an economic model on the market–intending to sell ebooks at 80 percent of the print list price, paying royalty of 25 percent, and selling to booksellers at a 50 percent discount. But publishers intend to hold these terms only for two years, through 2011.

Publishing Perspectives (the recently-launched newsletter from the Frankfurt Book Fair covering one issue of international interest daily, led by Ed Nawotka) reports: “This initiative will go hand in hand with a major marketing effort starting with a splashy launch of e-books and e-readers this holiday season through at least one major retailer. They have set a goal of having every frontlist title able to be published simultaneously in both print and ebook form by mid 2011.” The new distribution company will not sell directly to consumers, and has “invited other publishers to participate as well, either as partners or as distribution clients. …

By Paul Biba

Thanks to ResourceShelf for a lot of information about this conference which took place in Milan, Italy at the beginning of June, 2009. The blog has a listing of some of the papers and links for access. One of the ones pointed out to me was the one entitled Understanding how Students and Faculty REALLY use E-Books: The UK National E-Books Observatory. Here is the abstract:

The E-Books Observatory project of the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) aims to provide higher-education students throughout the UK with access to a number of popular textbooks in digital form free at the point of use, and then measure their usage of them. Subject areas covered were business studies, media studies, engineering and medicine. Surveys of users were conducted in January 2008 and in January 2009, to measure changes in usage as a consequence of the availability of the e-books. Focus groups of users have also been held. The usage of these e-books has also been monitored by deep weblog analysis, which will continue until Summer 2009. It is believed that this is the largest study of E-book usage yet mounted. Both the questionnaire surveys attracted over 20,000 respondents. Preliminary conclusions are given here, and they suggest among other things that electronic availability of textbooks will not impact sales of the printed books because print and electronic versions are used in different ways.

You can link to the full paper and the presentation from the abstract page.