virtualDavis

“In my world, copyright’s purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage – that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical…” ~Cory Doctorow (via e-publishing, etc.)

This compelling insight from Cory Doctorow arrives in worn-but-valued-hand-me-down condition from Ed Renehan (Managing Director of New Street Communications) who inherited it from Andrew Sullivan.

Zany and intriguing book concept! Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is a timely reminder that ebooks can’t do everything…

Looks like “old school” publishers and authors are continuing to struggle with the transition from print publishing to digital publishing.

At The National Book Awards last night, books were being celebrated, but eBooks not as much. The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz called the eBooks, “The bastard cousin of the print book” and Patti Smith begged the audience not to give up physical books. In her winning speech she said, “There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.” (eBookNewser)

The bastard cousin? Hmmm… I’m not quite sure how that works, but it’s a catchy epithet!

All is vanity by quinn.anya, on Flickr

[Seth] Godin, a best-selling author of marketing books such as Tribes and Permission Marketing, felt he no longer needed his traditional publisher. Notably, Godin defined “publishing” far more broadly than did Penguin Group. He plans on distributing his content in a number of media—audio books, apps, podcasts, print on demand, etc.

As for the value of publishers, Godin commented: “Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books. What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers.” … As someone who has had six books and innumerable articles published by traditional print publishers… I have seen the transformation of a raw manuscript into an edited, indexed, laid-out publication. It is a sight to behold, and certainly something I couldn’t do on my own.

That said, if publishers can’t find innovative ways to create new markets for an author’s content, and if more successful authors shift to Godin’s model, we may get to the point where print publishers are seen as the vanity press and high-quality self-publishing is the new professional standard. If writers do not know who their audiences are, they can, in essence, ride the coattails of the marketing channels of a traditional publisher. If, on the other hand, they have already built their readership through other avenues, they may rely on their own reputation for credibility, rather than on the imprimatur of a publisher, to sell their books. econtentmag.com

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

Check out the Movellas backstory! (via youtube.com)

Have you heard about Movellas? New to me, a curiosity fished out of my Twitter stream… But intriguing. Attractive video. Simple, straightforward site. Unfortunately this Danish startup seems to attracting primarily (almost exclusively?) non-English language storytellers. So, I’m not able to vouch for the quality of the “mobile novel” ostensibly born of at Movellas. I searched for a language filter to sort out novels I could read. Doesn’t seem possible at this time. I’ll check back…

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.