· How the internet is changing book marketing
· How to build a global online publishing business from New Zealand
· How to use social networking and online community-building to market books and ebooks
· Email list-building strategies: Why great lists can (still) be your best marketing asset
· What makes Amazon the world’s most successful bookseller and what you can learn from them
· How Search Engine Optimisation and web analytics help you attract visitors and measure success of campaigns
· Plus numerous case studies, examples and ideas to learn from and try in your own business

More details here.

According to Martin Taylor, who will be managing the new venture, one of the hopes is that by digitizing the books it will encourage Sony and Asus, among others, to enter the New Zealand market.

I wonder if these books will be available to readers outside New Zealand. I certainly would be interested in looking at the catalog.

Presenters will be Heather Sanderson, Manager, Digital Sales and Business Development at Random House of Canada, and Sean D’Souza, marketing columnist for the New Zealand Herald and radio commentator.

You can find the full details here.

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.

While commercial publishers work on their project to bring 1000 Great New Zealand ebooks to market, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has been quietly working to convert its collection to free downloadable ebooks — 1150 of them available right now.

The NZETC is afilliated to Victoria University in Wellington and has been busy digitising works of historical and literary interest for several years.

According to Project Manager Jason Darwin, they had been following the ebook market’s development closely and decided the time was right to jump in and help. They made the excellent decision to convert their collection to the ePub format.

NZETC had already been storing their texts in an XML format for online viewing so it was a relatively straightforward step to convert them to the ePub format using an automated system, says Darwin.

Like any automated system, they won’t have the finesse of a carefully hand-crafted book but they are perfectly fine and readable. I’ve just downloaded My Life by Jean Batten to my iPod Touch. It’s great to have such a wealth of New Zealand material now to enjoy.

Epub is the same format that commercial New Zealand publishers are planning to use so it greatly expands the available market here. And there are some real classic gems.

Papers Past contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1932 and includes 52 publications from all regions of New Zealand.

There are two main ways to find information in Papers Past: searching and browsing. Searching lets you enter a query term and retrieves articles that contain that term. Browsing lets you look at all the newspapers, starting with a year, a region, or a newspaper title. All the newspaper titles on the site can be searched and browsed.

The collection consists of:

* 52 newspaper titles
* 238,105 newspaper issues
* 1,286,519 pages
* 14,478,214 articles