TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Kat Meyer’ Category

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.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

Sad news from Quartet. In a blog post Kat Meyer announced that they will be disbanding. Here it is:

For a variety of reasons large and small, Quartet Press has decided to discontinue operations. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, a hard-working team, and the support of the community, things just don’t work out. This is one of those times. It’s disappointing to all of us, but it’s reality and we will all move on.

We are truly grateful to all of you who have wished us well.Your support and enthusiasm for our venture was humbling, and we hope you will not see our company’s disbanding as an indication that any of us doubt the viability of digital publishing. Far to the contrary — if nothing else, we have learned that the future of digital publishing, while overwhelmingly complex, will be bright indeed, and we will each be working toward that bright future via our individual efforts.

Update 1: See here for a Publishers Weekly interview with Kat Meyer about the closing.

Update 2: See here for an article by Kassia Krozser on her experience trying to start Quartet.

For previous coverage of Quartet see here, and you can also enter “quartet” into the search box at the top of the page.

By David Rothman

Hundreds of galleys go out just to promote a typical new book from a large publisher.

Bestsellers may require thousands. And expenses can add up. What’s more, consider the burden on small houses.

So I was happy to see—buried in a content-related announcement from Sony—word of an alliance with a little company called NetGalley. Book reviewers with Sony Readers will be able to download Reader-friendly PDFs from NetGalley.

DRM will be an option for NetGalley’s publisher clients. Because advance reading copies often reach reviewers months ahead of publication, publishers are often extra-security-minded. In time I’d love for ePub and perhaps social DRM to predominate, but the current arrangement is a start, since traditional DRM is just an option even now. NetGalley is to offer ePub in the fall with a similar choice.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Congrats to TeleRead contributor Kat Meyer and other e-savvy founders of Quartet Press. A news release follows. Notice how Quartet is avoiding DRM? A lesson for big publishers? Expect more DRM-hating book people to start houses with a built-in advantage—no reader-hostile “protection.” – D.R.

Quartet Press announces it is open for submissions. Quartet was founded on shared goal of the principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house. First titles will be available in Fall 2009.

PASADENA, California. June 25, 2009 — Quartet Press–a fledgling digital publisher formed recently by Kassia Krozser of Booksquare.com; Kirk Biglione of Medialoper.com; Kat Meyer, long-time book marketer for trade and academic presses; and an additional partner whose background includes book sales, distribution, and directing an independent publishing house–has announced it is now accepting manuscript submissions in anticipation of its Fall 2009 launch.

The Fall 2009 slate will kick off the house’s romance imprint, Quench!. Krozser notes, “I love the fact that we’re starting out with a line devoted to romance. Not only has the romance reader lead the way when it comes to adopting ebooks and new reading technology, it’s also the genre I choose first when it comes to my own reading. I’m excited about bringing great stories to this fantastic community of readers.”

(more…)

By Kat Meyer

Moderator’s note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. “A book tuner,” I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them.

Hadrien’s technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks’ collection of public domain classics and contemporary works. Stanza also lets you enjoy other collections, including, yes, Gutenberg’s. In another publishing area, Hadrien and colleagues are striving to greatly simply the publishing process for houses wanting ePub output. He is well qualified for such tasks, as the holder of a computer science engineering degree from Ecole supérieure d’Informatique, Electronique et Automatique.

Below is Kat Meyer’s Q&A with Hadrien, the latest in her Digitizers series for TeleRead—for which she also interviewed Neeland Choksi, COO at Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. Also see Mac Slocum’s Gardeur interview, done during O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. – D.R.

KM: Tell me about Feedbooks and its unique technology.

HG: First of all let’s describe Feedbooks as a technology rather than Feedbooks as a service. Usually, you’ll notice two kind of workflows for digital publishing:

1. Self-publishing services such as Amazon DTP or Smashwords use direct conversions, which are very easy to use from a user perspective but provide low-quality e-books and very limited possibilities.

2.  XML-based workflows let you create the source based on a certain DTD (TEI, DocBook, DTBook) and generate the different end-formats using XSL.

The second choice is much better if you’d like to create e-books in multiple formats and generate good-looking e-books, but it requires some specific technical skills.

‘Workflow everywhere’ philosophy

What we’re building with Feedbooks is a third way—we apply the main principles of an XML workflow but use standard Web technologies to potentially integrate our workflow anywhere.

Our goal is to create something completely seamless that any user can use to create and distribute high-quality e-books. Currently, publishing on Feedbooks is strictly limited to our Web publishing interface, but in the upcoming weeks we’ll open our workflow. Since we’re using standard Web publishing technology, a lot of tools will be directly compatible with our workflow from the start and any developer will be able to create new ways to interact with us.

Feedbooks built as a Web service rather than a Web site

The other important technical component is the fact that Feedbooks was built from scratch as a Web service rather than as a Web site. That’s the reason why we were the first service to distribute e-books through Stanza on the iPhone; and that’s also why we’re also distributing content through Goodreads or FBReader.

Lexcycle did a tremendous job with Stanza to create a standard way of distributing e-books, using Atom as their catalog format. But if we want to create a real market for e-books on mobile devices, and compete with Amazon (the Kindle is a “cloud retailer,” unlike other traditional e-book retailers and that’s why Amazon can provide such a great shopping experience), we need to constantly innovate in this field.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Kat Meyer, Q&A ace of Digitizers fame, has cooked up a list of independent book review blogs, such as Maud Newton’s, and you can even get a widget. Below is how the widget  looks with a little tweaking (normally it’s probably a narrow column). Congrats, Kat! Via your widget, we’ve added a review aggregator page to TeleRead.

Indie Book Bloggers

	Wanna be a manga editor? And more book news Mar 16, 2009 | Jacket Copy
	Cities without Palms by Tarek Eltayeb Mar 16, 2009 | Complete Review – Welcome to the Complete Review
	Syfy, anyone? Mar 16, 2009 | Ask Nicola
	$86,000-Worth of Irishmen Mar 16, 2009 | Readerville
	What is Julie A. Mertus reading? Mar 16, 2009 | Campaign for the American Reader
	Upcoming events at Housing Works: April 15 and May 1 Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	March 17, 2009 Links and Plugs Mar 16, 2009 | Bibliophile Stalker
	Books by Southwest (or “more news from nowhere”) Mar 16, 2009 | Baby Got Books
	Interview: Jacob Weisman (Tachyon Publications) Mar 16, 2009 | Bibliophile Stalker
	All the Lit That’s Fit to Listen To Mar 16, 2009 | Readerville
	We’ve done four already but now we’re steady. Mar 16, 2009 | Condalmo.
	Reading Group Mar 16, 2009 | Book Reviews | Paperback Frenzy
	The world “was always on the verge of total collapse” Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	In the (teetering) to-be-read stack Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	Spiegelman prefers comics Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	A fan’s guide to favorite movies Mar 16, 2009 | Jacket Copy
	Huxley’s due Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	The Death of Hanno Mar 16, 2009 | Golden Rule Jones
	On not being Elfriede Jelinek’s Ideal Reader Mar 16, 2009 | Maud Newton: Blog
	Stuff. Mar 16, 2009 | bookshelves of doom

By Kat Meyer

Travis Alber, Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group—a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from the inside. People around the world can connect and chat about books inside the books themselves. The Unbound Reader is built entirely on open Web standards, is free to use and allows both shared comments and real-time chatting on a chapter-by-chapter basis. BookGlutton’s upload feature allows writers to share their own work.

KM: BookGlutton is gorgeous—both the site, and the design/layout of the books in the Unbound Reader. And from what I’ve read, the idea of well-designed e-books was a big part of your motivation for creating BookGlutton. You wanted to offer users an experience that rivals the “prettiness” of print books. Do you feel BookGlutton has been successful so far in accomplishing this goal, and do you have plans to add more design and usability features to BookGlutton?

TA: We’ve put a lot of effort into how the books look, and that comes from a real appreciation for well-designed print books. BookGlutton’s books have brought the industry forward in terms of reading experience. It’s not just about the information, it’s about how it feels to read it. We’re pretty happy with what we’ve done so far, particularly how we treat the text, which has dynamically styled drop caps at the beginning of chapters and flourishes for chapter titles. Since these are generated, we can change them easily, and we have a lot of design options moving forward. It also helps that we’re Web-based, so we’re not limited like hardware readers—we can have full color images and working hyperlinks embedded in the books.

This is an old video and isn’t necessarily 100 percent up to date

Later this year we’ll be adding the ability for people to customize their books. Customization is important, and people expect to do it online. However, total customization can harm the integrity of the design, so we’ll be giving people some options. We see a lot of potential in the ePub format because of its alignment with Web design.

It’s an interesting challenge to think about where the book ends and the e-book reader begins. Most of the industry tends toward readers that look like software applications—they’re cold, technical, and uninviting. But a paper book, and a good Web site for that matter, is unintimidating. We want to strike a balance between something approachable and something technically savvy. We’ll be adding some functionality to the Unbound Reader in the coming months, but we’re working to keep it simple and clean, so people don’t feel like they’re working through an application, but instead feel like they’re browsing a book.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Check out our long post on the above if you haven’t seen it already.

Exhibit One is Kat Meyer, the Q&A whiz and TeleBlog regular, who is a professional book marketer. Kat has more than 1,500 followers on Twitter, not a bad start for someone building a new business.

Kat’s latest interview, by the way, is with Travis Albers of Book Glutton. The BG interview will run later today or tomorrow.

By David Rothman

TeleRead’s Twitter Champ just might be Kat Meyer, in Tucson, Arizona, who’s done those incisive Q&A’s with Smashwords’ Mark Coker, Stanza’s Neelan Choksi and others.

Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, now up to 54,807 followers, still a fraction of Barack Obama’s 379,716 before the First Keyboarder apparently abandoned Twitter for more conventional media. Unlike Obama, Kat can’t hold White House news conferences.

Thanks to Twitter, however, more people will know about Kat and maybe do business with her. She is author of The Bookish Dilettane Blog, as well as a book sales and marketing professional with past experience at Harcourt, the University of Arizona Press and elsewhere. I’d be shocked if Kat did not write a book at some point. Check out her Tweets—her Twitter entries—to see a pro at work.

A virtual coffeehouse

Whether she goes on to a book or not, Kat knows how to draw a crowd in a book-related context and could well serve as a good example for many other writers and publishers who prefer a low-key approach.

Kat avoids obnoxious personal ballyhoo, using Twitter as a coffeehouse, where she chit-chats and talks up friends. Followers are tempted to to click on her Twitter profile and blog-link there—and perhaps go on to Google her work samples, including, I’d hope, the TeleRead Q&A’s. Twitter lets her choose between sending a message to one friend, a group or all 1,500. In effect it’s a mix between a one-to-one instant message and mailing list without many of the usual list hassles. Twitter users can post and read from the Web or via programs for a number of devices, everything from iPhones and iPod Touches (try the Tweetie app) to desktops (Twhirl and Tweetdeck, for example).

But how to get the world to notice your own e-books or p-books after signing up for Twitter or another social network? Social nets can involve more than just messages back and forth, but in the message area, I’ll pass on a few tips to use when communicating with friends, clients and people potentially in both categories. The current recession makes networking all the more useful. There are even job-related networks such as Linked-In, and Facebook is after the same career-related business even though it began life as a social network for college students and still is largely for personal users.

Book-specific tips

For book-specific advice for Twitter and other social networks, check out Bring Sexy Back to the Book Party in the Digital Age,  Laurel Touby’s excellent presentation from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last month. Chris Brogan offered his own share of good tips on blogging and social media, a session now viewable on the Web, where he discussed the new currencies of attention and trust, his terms. With Twitter, the goals are similar.

Laurel herself founded MediaBistro, a media professional site, which, yes, is on Twitter just like her. She sees online "book parties" as especially valuable because "your message is spread  by word of mouth" and the results are measurable. What’s more, the conversion can remain online for years. And you’re building a community. "The audience wants to interact with the author," Laurel said at TOC, "but they also want to interact with like-minded souls, just as they would at a traditional book party. And those relationships people have reflect back in positive ways onto the author, onto the book, onto the publisher who brought them together. It’s a beautiful and virtuous circle."

To find useful people in your book’s area of interest, you can try Twitter’s search engine—also good for topics—or Twellow.com. Go ahead; guess and check out names. The right trendies just may be on Twitter. None other than Daniel Schorr, the 92-year-old NPR news analyst, who at time has succeeded by sticking to his beliefs and not being a trendy, recently started Twittering and is a convert with 4,128 followers.

Some Twitter wisdom from Publishing Trends

Meanwhile my diligent friends at Publishing Trends (subscription information) have compiled a handy list of Twitter-oriented tips, and I suspect that Laurel and Kat would agree with most everything in PT’s detailed Twitter guide. Ahead are highlights, just a sample of what you’ll find in the actual newsletter from March 2009.

1. "Developing your Twitter presence." "The number-one tip from people we talked to: Publishers shouldn’t be afraid to get personal on Twitter, and their tweets shouldn’t sound like marketing." Chris Brogan, the social media expert, told PT: "The best people using Twitter are the ones who talk back to people, not just the people who are talking about their dumb stuff." Look for companies whose Tweets please you, then think about similar tactics and strategies, Chris says. Ron Hogan, who started the Beatrice.com literary blog and now blogs for MediaBistro’s Galley Cat and produces workshops and conferences for writers, says publishers should "let the person running the account put a personal spin on their posts, not just announcing every press clipping or YouTube clip that comes down the pike." Same advice would apply to others. Twitter’s length limit is too short anyway for extended ballyhoo in one place—just 140 characters or perhaps 20 words or so. Use Twitter for chat and informal pointers to other Web pages. The percentage of business conversation depends on whom you’re in touch with. Just don’t overdo it. Blog headlines are okay if people expect ‘em.

(more…)

By Kat Meyer

With the right e-book designer, your Kindle books can stand out from typical homebrewed jobs. Joshua Tallent, with eBook Architects and KindleFormatting.com, excels at making this happen. Kat Meyer interviewed him recently for her Digitizers series for TeleRead. Josh works not just with self-published writers but also with some major players in e-publishing such as LibreDigital. – D.R.

KM: As a self-professed geek and a technophile, what about the Kindle and formatting ebooks for it do you most dig?

JT: I love that the Kindle has the e-book buying experience wrapped up. Wireless book downloads and an easy-to-navigate store are two of the key features that have made the Kindle such a big success. The device does not require a degree in computer science to use, and even the most non-techie person can successfully get the content they want in just a couple of clicks, even without owning a computer.

The format does leave a bit to be desired—there are some pretty glaring options missing. However, I have always liked a challenge, and making books look amazing on the Kindle is definitely that.

KM: Given that Amazon and the Kindle have been very successful at taking e-books mainstream, do you find that most of your clients are looking to publish for the Kindle specifically, or are they open to all e-book formats/devices? (In other words, what  motivates your typical client to publish to Kindle as opposed to other formats, and are they also publishing print versions of their books? if so, how?)

JT: Most of my clients have heard about the Kindle but not about other e-book devices or formats. As a matter of fact, some have never seen a Kindle—they just know they need to put their content on it. The majority have tried to publish on Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) themselves and run into issues, or saw the difficulties others were having formatting books and just decided to sidestep those problems by coming to me.

(more…)

By David Rothman

TeleBlog contributor Kat Meyer—see her interviews with Stanza COO Neelan Choksi and Bookworm ceator Liza Daly—cleverly captured the essence of the Tools of Change Conference on book technology. Details here.

By Kat Meyer

Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O’Reilly Media.  She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. – K.M.

KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!)

LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals:

• Provide a place for users to store ePub-format books, read them online and download them to other devices.  iPhone users can transfer their books directly to Stanza’s software for the iPhone, for example.
• Demonstrate advanced features of the ePub format itself. When I launched Bookworm in July 2008, there were no other readers that fully supported e-book stylesheets,

And I wanted to show off some of the design possibilities available in electronic books.

KM: As a developer, you are committed to utilizing OpenSource software. Why?

LD: Although I’ve been involved in digital publishing since 2004, my background is really in general Web development.  I’ve been writing Web applications since 1995—about as far back as the industry goes—and the history of the Web as a whole has always been a push-pull between open source and commercial interests.

(more…)

By Kat Meyer

For her new TeleRead series, The Digitizers, Kat Meyer will talk to developers and designers who are forging the future of e-reading. Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza e-reader for iPhones and Touches, is her first interviewee. He handles Lexcycle’s marketing, business development and strategic management. Kat is a book marketing professional who, in her spare time, blogs at The Bookish Dilettante. Welcome to the ranks of TeleContributors, Kat!

KM: It seems that there is a certain amount of resistance among book publishers to going full speed ahead with e-books and other digital publishing options. While some of the opposition is just human nature and the tendency to resist change, it’s also true that publishers face some very real obstacles in going from a purely print-based production and distribution model to incorporating digital into the mix. Would you agree?

NC: Totally. Often the very thing that has made you successful for so long often is the thing that makes it hard to handle chaos and change. I think it is one of the hardest things to do especially when the formula has worked for so long. Heck, in Austin where I am based, the exact thing that took Dell from nothing to what I think is now $60B dollar business is the thing that is stifling its growth. And that’s not even a company that has reached its 15th birthday. So it should not be a surprise that incumbent publishers are struggling a bit with the changes that are taking place.

And then publishers have to face upstarts like Smashwords who are completely putting the traditional model on its head. Eighty-five percent of what Smashwords receives go to the authors.

KM: What strategies would you recommend to publishers for proceeding into the digital age—what questions do they need to ask themselves to determine where they should start?

NC: I think the first place any publisher should look is to do an honest assessment of their ability and comfort level to change. Establishing those parameters for some span of time is very important to provide a framework and bounds to work within.

KM: Is there any one thing that all publishers should be doing, or is each and every publisher’s situation going to be different enough that they need to do it all from scratch?

NC: I fundamentally believe the one thing every publisher needs to do is to figure out their overall strategy and see how digital publishing fits into it.  Right now, the sense I get is that each digital group is not really part of the overall picture but more of a skunkworks, or side project.

I think a major publisher should go hire a McKinsey & Company or an Accenture or some other strategic change agent that the publisher CEO will listen to. Examining their traditional business for cost savings and determining how much to invest in growth areas like Digital Publishing is exactly in the sweet spot of most strategy consulting shops and the bottom line is it is human nature that the CEO will be more apt to listen to an outside consultant than internal employees.

(more…)