February 2009 Archives
Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game
Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune: According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and…
TOC Twitter Visualization Contest Winner
The winner of our impromptu contest for best visualization of the TOC Conference Twitter activity is Stephen Smith for his tag clouds and stats over at toctweet.com: Congrats to Steve, who gets a free full pass to TOC 2010! (With an honorable mention to @thewritermama for banging out 720(!) tweets during the show.)…
Indigo's Shortcovers Launched Today: A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement
The Shortcovers website and companion iPhone and Blackberry apps launched today. Put simply, it's a website for buying ebooks. But there's a few interesting twists that (for now) set it apart. Though most of the current content is books, the primary unit of the service is the "shortcover" — things like an article, a blog post, and a book chapter. That means publishers have the option of making individual chapters available for sale (or as free samples). But perhaps the more interesting consequence of that is something they're calling "mixes," where readers can combine multiple shortcovers into a single "mix" (think iTunes playlist), and share that with other readers.
Hallway Video from TOC Conference: Tim O'Reilly on Open Publishing
The folks from the RIT Open Publishing Lab have posted a short video talking with Tim O'Reilly in the hallway of the TOC Conference about Open Publishing:…
Taxonomies and Starting With XML
This is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote last week on taxonomies and chunking. Last October, the StartWithXML team wrote a post called "To Chunk or Not To Chunk," where we discussed tagging and infrastructure issues, and a discussion ensued about what happens when you don't know what you'll be using chunks for. How do you tag those?…
Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free
At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer needs and expectations, which might mean changing the way you do business. What content providers must realize is that a changing business model wherein revenues are no longer captured in…
Virginia Open Sourcing Physics Textbook ("Flexbook")
I was part of a brief Twitter exchange recently with Cengage's Ken Brooks about the cost of textbooks: kenbrooks: @doctorow #toc That depends entirely on the type of book. A K-12 reading program costs $millions. andrewsavikas: @kenbrooks not necessarily. See ck12.org kenbrooks: @andrewsavikas Talk to McGraw Hill or Pearson about basal reading programs. The intricacies are staggering. #toc I like…
OMG. Best. TOC. Wrapup. Ever.
Every single thing on Kat Meyer's Tiger-Beat-style cover from her TOC wrapup cracked me up: I think we may have a new cover design for our printed program for TOC 2010. Well done, Kat….
Full Text of Jason Epstein's TOC 2009 Keynote
Few can claim the depth of experience with publishing that Jason Epstein brought to the stage at the TOC Conference. Among my favorite moments of the conference this year was the chance during a break to hear Jason talk with Tim O'Reilly about their respective views on the past and future of publishing. Several attendees asked for the full text…
Are Ebook Device Makers Missing the Market?
Over on Dear Author, Jane Litte suggests current ebook device marketers aren't effectively targeting what is likely the most influential segment of their market — women: The idea is to get women thinking that the vehicle fits into their lives, rather than the woman fitting her life around the vehicle. The most recent Kindle 2.0 ad shows a business man…