virtualDavis

To e-read or not to e-read, that is the question!

You could choose to buy no e-reader at all…  both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are rolling out applications that bring their e-book stores to phones and other gadgets… Amazon.com’s app selection is particularly bountiful: It has ones for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, Windows, and OS X. Barnes & Noble has ones for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows. They’re not comprehensive recreations… But all the apps are free, and they all work on one or more devices you already own… I do most of my e-reading on other devices. And my single most-used e-reading device is my iPhone, simply because I take it with me nearly everywhere and can dip into any e-book I own in seconds, often while I’m doing something else at the same time… Both companies also have synching technologies that keep track of where you are in a particular tome: I can read a few pages on an iPhone, pick up on my Mac, and then finish a book on an actual Kindle. And I do, frequently.(techland.com)

Sorry, economy, but Harry’s on to something. Something good. Something smart. Especially for newbies to the digital reading experience. Try it out on hardware you already own. Figure out if you like it. Or still miss books printed on trees. Get your feet wet. Buy nothing. Save your money for nachos. And an airplane ticket to lands exotic. Happy reading…

What exactly is transmedia storytelling? What are “rabbit holes”? Cheese holes? In Liz Thomson’s interview Alison Norrington, CEO of storycentralDIGITAL, tackles all three while considering the ongoing impact of transmedia storytelling on the publishing industry. “I would like to think… The book might not be the primary platform…” But she’s not optimistic. And she sees the future of transmedia storytelling as platform agnostic. Once again, I’m reminded that gaming is a driving force in this transition.

Publishing hasn’t seen this much change in its 800-year history. New technologies bring a wave of opportunities as they disrupt regular print cycles and business models. Books are consumed digitally on portable devices, a new opportunity for authors and publishers to produce multimedia content. Authors can self-publish without the support of a major publishing house and find an audience through social media. As major publishers shift their businesses, new upstarts launch ideas for sharing digital content on a variety of platforms. (eBook Summit)

In less than one month I’m off to the eBook Summit to tip-dip my toes into a new era of publishing. I’m planning to soak up as much as possible from this crackerjack lineup. Time to learn what publishing challenges, opportunities and tools away in the digital age! With luck, I’ll emerge better focused on how proceed with Rosslyn Redux.

Are Pokens the future of b-cards? (video via Bit Rebels)

Ready for a Poken? Not so quick? According to Diana Adams, CEO/owner of Adams Consulting Group (@adamsconsulting) in Atlanta, Georgia this is the future of b-cards!

I think http://www.viralavatar.com puts it best when they say to “Simply pull out your Poken and ‘high five’ it with your new best friend’s. Clever RF technology then zaps the info between the devices, so next time you log on to your favorite site, your profiles are linked. Genius!” It functions as a business card sender and receiver. (Bit Rebels)

Goofy gadget? Hint of the future?

While the e-book is an excellent entry into the digital world, it should not blind publishers so they miss the larger point. It is definitely not about focusing on specific formats, as their persistence (or rather brevity) in the market is impossible to predict. They may be called e-books or printed books, online publications or iPhone apps. A publisher should be able to serve all of these formats, without focusing exclusively on one… Particular attention must be paid to the quality of the content and its editing. XML, semantics and RDF emerge as main priorities.(Publishing Perspectives)

More:

• Why Publishers Need Agile Content: XML, Semantics and RDF

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are to be published in ebook form for the first time this week – but not by Penguin, Fleming’s print publisher. The 14 books, including Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and From Russia With Love, are being published independently by Ian Fleming Publications, the family company that owns and administers the author’s literary copyright. The Fleming ebooks would be priced “in line with the lowest-priced Bond paperback editions available on the market”, the company said. (via guardian.co.uk)

Corinne Turner, Managing Director, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, comments: “Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond novels to be read and enjoyed by everyone, and we are always looking for opportunities to introduce new audiences to Bond’s adventures. Fleming loved good, new technology, and I am sure he would have been thrilled by the idea of his books being available electronically.(via bookshed.eu)

The universally successful 007 brand has made the transition from print to digital. Feel a trend here?

Update:

What started with a couple of takes spawned a longer, broader curated artifact mashup on the same topic: Bond dumps Penguin, goes digital

To ISBN or not to ISBN… That is the question!

There are many reasons for using a unique identifier for an e-book. It helps with discoverability and allows you to separate out the different formats of the title, which in turn allows you as a publisher or writer to see how it is doing in various channels. The ability to measure the success rate of each e-book format for any given title is paramount to good marketing. The ISBN also gives you control over your title and your content. If you let someone else assign an identification number to your content, you lose that control, both in terms of quality and ownership…There are a variety of reasons to add the ISBN on your own as well, either as the author or publisher; one very important reason being that if you don’t assign an ISBN, the distributor could assign one for you, which could result in multiple ISBNs for the very same type of file (as sold through a wide variety of distribution channels). The bloat is likely to make collating and tracking sales data –- and thus looking at overall performance for a title — all the more complicated.Though, as discussed here, there is no universal answer as to whether or not each format requires individual ISBNs, one thing is indeed clear: take control of the process. The worse thing you can do is lose control of your content or let another entity (whether conversion house, distributor or retailer) control the metadata and, accordingly, the invisible ties that bind you to your customers. Ceding too much control takes you out of the picture and makes this already complex situation all the more challenging. (via publishingperspectives.com)

Erik Christopher’s article got me thinking… I know nothing about ISBN numbers. Onward march!

Related articles

• BISG releases policy statement on assigning ISBNs to digital products (teleread.com)

Have you been debating the best e-reader to buy? Wondering if this is just a bizarre fad or the future or reading? iPad, Nook, Kindle? Here are a few choice samplings from Ars Technica’s review of the Amazon Kindle 3.

During a stint in California, I once wandered into a ramshackle San Diego bookstore and began browsing the back shelves in search of dusty treasures. After some time, the owner—who appeared to be an aging hippie—popped up at my side like an apparition, giving me a terrific start. He talked at me about his store. “I don’t sell books,” he said, leaning uncomfortably close. “I smell books.” To prove his point, he took a volume off the shelf, pulled it to his nostrils, and inhaled deeply, lovingly, bibliophilically—the book as bong hit.

It’s not all good news. The Kindle interface still feels like something that escaped from 1985 and time-traveled into the future. Text-based interface with no mouse or touchscreen? Black-and-white screen? Small delays between issuing commands and seeing their results? Check, check, and check—and if you try to do much with the Kindle beyond straight, front-to-back reading, these limitations will feel… limiting.

All the same words were there, but the experience was strangely sterile. My California booksmeller would have understood. Whatever e-books are and however useful they may be, they aren’t “books.” Instead, we get the content with little to no attention to form and to design. Everything about a book is distilled into odorless words; all else is waste to be thrown away.

Perhaps the reader of the future won’t look like a Kindle, but more like a multifunction tablet (think iPad or even the new Barnes & Noble Nook). In either case, both classes of devices are now good enough, and the content is finally varied enough, that it’s possible to envision the wholesale shift to digital texts. Plenty will be lost—including the smell—but so much will be gained… Book lovers will mourn the change and carp endlessly about typography, design, cover art, and the facing page format, but music and movies have already showed us that people will make the switch to digital convenience even at the expense of quality.

via Ars Technica

The New York Times has a great online brand and business… [but the print newspaper business] is imploding and dragging down the rest of the company.

Sounds like a familiar problem these days, right? All too familiar. But here’s the interesting twist. The New York Times is a social media rockstar! This morning, for example, the New York Times Twitter acount (@nytimes) has almost 2.7 million followers! You read that right. That’s the big leagues. Idon’t play in the big leagues. The farm leagues, perhaps! In relative terms, @nytimes has approximately 831 times more followers than I do… And I’m one of those 2.7 million followers because I value the real-time information soundbites, article leads, etc.

To put this into perspective, that’s more than twice as large as the New York Times’ print circulation, which is slightly under a million copies for the daily copy of the paper.

And, let’s face it. The disparity between these two circulation figures will only grow as time goes on. So what’s the point? I tend to agree with [most of] the following:

we think those two numbers are such a symbol of the NYT’s current, bittersweet situation:

• Print is dying;
• The NYT is going to have to restructure and reorient its business in a major way;
• But the NYT is actually hugely successful online and has all the assets it needs to build a huge, lasting online brand instead of letting itself be disrupted by nimbler outfits like the Huffington Post.

(Business Insider)

I’m not ready to foretell the death of print. Not totally. Not yet. Books, in particular, will keep print alive, but (as I’ve said before) print books will become an increasingly niche subset of publishing. However, newspapers alre already stepping away from print. The businees model simply isn’t sustainable. I read virtually all of my news on the web at this point. Living oversees made me an early adopter. Universal access. Instantaneous access. And nothing to throw away. Nothing to smudge all over my fingers. Easy to search. In my opinion, digital journalism has already discplaced print, and we’ll continue to see print newspapers shuttered in the days ahead. Twitter won’t replace nytimes.com but the website will replace the print paper. Etc.

The publishing industry’s changing landscape (engadget.com)

Not to be outdone by Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble have entered the publishing racket.

Earlier this month Barnes & Noble launched a self-publishing platform called PubIt! that will compete directly with Amazon CreateSpace and indirectly with Apple’s iBookstore.

In an attempt to do for indie writers what InstantAction has done for indie game developers,… the world’s largest bookseller is hoping to expand its importance in the digital realm by giving wannabe authors the ability to upload and sell their material through B&N’s website and eBookstore… the real kicker here is this won’t be limited to the Nook; pretty much any e-reader, tablet or PC will be able to tap in and make purchases, so the potential audience is quite large. (engadget)

Of course, Kindle too ensured that their electronic books are universally accessible by developing apps that work across devices and platforms, but B&N’s open publishing model is smart. Sure, Nook has been a bit of a sleeper next to the Kindle, and B&N doesn’t want to limit the potential market (or perception) by being number two in the reader market. Or number three when the iPad is thrown into the mix? Whatever the logic guiding this policy, it’s welcome and overdue. Limiting media to Kindle or iPad, though lucrative in the short run, is a major turnoff for the consumer. It’s like saying, “Here, buy our glossy print book, but you can only read it at home. Not at work. Not on vacation. Not on the bus. At home!” Okay, so it’s not exactly like that, but it is perceived as unnecessarily restrictive. And if B&N can manage to open up the electronic publishing industry, I’m confident that consumers (and authors) will respond.

Okay, enough prattling and jab-jab-jabberwocky… What’s the bottom line?

[PubIt!] is essentially designed to give independent writers a venue for hawking their masterpieces, with PubIt! converting files to ePUB for use on a wide range of e-readers… Published titles will be available for sale within 24 to 72 hours after upload on the B&N eBookstore, and the company’s pretty proud of its “no hidden fees” policy… PubIt! ebooks will also be lendable for a fortnight… (engadget)

Using the service, authors can publish and sell eBooks through the Borders eBook store, as well as other partner eBook retailers… Authors can sell works of any length and chose [sic] the price within a price range set by the retailer. Authors can add content by typing in the platform, by copying and pasting it into an online form, or content can be fed from an existing website or blog. The content will be saved as an ePub file.

There are two tiers of pricing for those looking to get published –$89.99 and $199.99. Under the basic package, BookBrewer will assign the book an ISBN and make it available to major eBook stores at a price set by the writer. Royalties will be based on sales and will vary with each retailer. The higher priced package comes with a full version of the ePub file, that authors can share with friends, family and press and submit to other eBook stores. (mediabistro.com)