Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

"Web-based ePub validator adds Preflight and API" (via @liza)

Andrew Savikas
November 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Despite recent gains for books, Games still dominate in the App Store (via @dliman)

Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica slices and dices current app trends for iPhone and Android (nice data points on price stabilization too):

"While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps."

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/games-top-the-charts-iphone-android-markets.html

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

New info on upcoming Ibis Reader from @liza's threepress -- another books-in-cloud model

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via web from Andrew's posterous

"E pluribus tunum: Uniform prices for online music are no way to maximise profit"

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

This research suggest maximum value in a digital media market like iTunes (for both producer and consumer) comes from a combination of subscription/membership fee and per-item purchase:

"Charging an "entry fee" for use of the service and then a small, fixed per-song cost for downloads turned out to benefit both the seller and the buyer. The most revenue, according to the 2009 survey data, would be generated by charging the students $21.19 for entry and 37 cents a song. This could raise the producer surplus by 30% compared with uniform pricing. Consumer surplus would also rise in this instance, because some people would buy songs they would have not have done at a higher uniform price. Spotify, a rival to iTunes, has a model somewhat like this for its premium service, where it charges a monthly fee for songs without limit."

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/economicsfocus/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14699573

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we've learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O'Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned"

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

O'Reilly Ebooks Now in Aldiko Online Catalog for Android

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The iPhone gets a lot of the attention when it comes to smartphones, but signs point to Android playing a huge role in the growing smartphone market, with 20+ new devices by the end of this year worldwide (like the Motorola Droid). O'Reilly readers with an Android device can now browse and buy via the online catalog in the Aldiko ereader app.

Buying through Aldiko gets you the same DRM-free ebook bundle offered on oreilly.com (and there's even a 15% discount applied at checkout).

The catalog is implemented using a prototype of the OPDS spec, part of the BookServer architecture.

The Meaning of Droid | Monday Note

Andrew Savikas
November 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

Android's Impact on eBooks, Reading « Kindle Review - Kindle 2 Review, Books

Andrew Savikas
November 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Posted via web from Andrew's posterous

Hard Numbers Behind the Current and Coming Mobile Future

Andrew Savikas
October 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Every year at Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker does a fantastic whirlwind tour of economic and technology trends she's watching, and in addition to a terrifying look at the US Income Statement, her presentation this year spent a lot of time looking at mobile trends. Mobile is the next "computer cycle" (think Mainframe, Mini, PC, Internet), and the numbers are just staggering.

Of course, the news won't be good for everyone:

Mobile-Related Share Shifts Will Create / Destroy Material Shareholder Wealth: Massive technology changes typically shift dynamics between incumbents / attackers creating winners / losers.

If you want to know where the future of paid digital content is, read this now.

BookServer: A Web of Books

Andrew Savikas
October 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

I'm thrilled to be at the Internet Archive's "Making Books Apparent" event today in San Francisco, where they're debuting the new BookServer architecture.

As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites.

We were early participants in the conversations that led to today's launch, and look forward to seeing this standard gain further adoption to support a rich digital book discovery, lending, and commerce marketplace on the Web (especially the mobile web).

Follow the action on Twitter.

Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store

Andrew Savikas
October 9, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there's a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.

While I can't speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it's a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren't Amazon's idea), because we want O'Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.

Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I'm happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O'Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who's already purchased one of our Kindle books. Here's the Product Details section from The Twitter Book on the Kindle Store:

As a reminder, most O'Reilly books aren't yet available on the Kindle in large part because the Kindle 1 doesn't yet support tables. But you can buy a Kindle-compatible Mobipocket version directly from oreilly.com as part of our "ebook bundles," which also include EPUB and PDF formats, which provide a nice alternative if you have a Kindle 1 and run into a table from one of our books that's difficult to read.

Just to be clear, our desire to make these books free of DRM does not mean that we are allowing our readers to redistribute copies to their friends, but to allow them to read the book on all of their own devices, and to otherwise make use of them without artificial encumbrances. If you're interested in multi-user licenses, talk to us.

Thanks again to Amazon for working with us on this.

Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

Andrew Savikas
October 8, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data).

They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each category of app into a corresponding quadrant:

They note that books fall squarely into the "use a lot for a short period of time" category, which is not unexpected:

In Quadrant II, we find categories like Books and Games, among the two largest app categories in both the App Store and Android Market. These application categories are characterized, on average, by intense usage over a finite period of time. Because games and books offer content that typically is consumed only once, the user usually moves on after reading a book or finishing a game.

They also draw some interesting conclusions on which categories are suitable for subscription vs. a la carte models.

Note this data comes from the set of apps using the Flurry software (they say more than 2,000), so is by no means a scientific sampling. Interesting reading nonetheless.

Anecdotal Evidence from the Digital Shift

Andrew Savikas
October 6, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Back in 2004, when I spent most of my time doing format conversions and production automation, I had the privilege of turning much of what I learned doing things like batch running Word macros from the DOS command line with Ruby into a book, Word Hacks. Like our other Hacks books, it's a lesson in the value of curation and convenience -- much of the contents came from existing information, culled from blog posts, help forums, and other sources (all with permission and attribution, of course).

While it sold quite modestly, it was reviewed well, I earned out my advance, and as recently as September I ran into someone who told me the book has helped them do their job more effectively (their job being substantially similar to the one I was doing at the time I wrote the book).

This weekend my quarterly royalty statement came, and even I was struck by the relative proportion of sales coming from digital sources (this is from Q2 2009). Please note this is totally anecdotal data from a single book that probably hasn't been on the shelves in most retailers for years, so do take with the appropriate grain of salt:

Less than 20% of sales were for the print book. This is something we've seen for other "long tail" titles that show very little demand when viewed through the lens of retail print sales (i.e., Bookscan). Making titles available in digital form means the opportunity to capture sales long after a title has left most bookstore shelves.

There's still (a few) spots open for TOC Frankfurt next week on Oct. 13. Use discount code TOC09BL.

Microsoft/O'Reilly Alliance Means DRM-free Ebooks Coming from MS Press

Andrew Savikas
September 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth calling out specifically here:

I'm particularly excited that as part of this agreement, Microsoft has committed to make its ebooks DRM-free and device-independent. One of our goals at O'Reilly has been to make sure that ebook customers can read them on any device, and have the ability to keep using them even if they change their preferred device. Having Microsoft Press join us in this commitment is a big step forward towards an open ebook market.

We begin transitioning distribution (including digital) in December, which means there will be lots to show and tell at February's TOC Conference.

Mobile as New Medium

Andrew Savikas
September 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (21) | Listen

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation about textbooks and iPhones, and couldn't help but weigh in on the question of how to handle some the issues like cross referencing and annotations on the iPhone compared with in a textbook. Several people suggested the comments were worth sharing with a larger audience:

These are relatively minor technical problems that generally already have solutions. The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as "how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone" is framing it wrong. The challenge is "how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses -- eyes, ears, and a mouth -- along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the 'job' of educating a student." That's a much more interesting problem to me than "how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen."

Mobile is big on the agenda at TOC Frankfurt, TOC New York, and I'm sure will come up during the upcoming TOC online event.

O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks

Adam Witwer
September 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

As Andrew has discussed in some detail recently on this blog, O'Reilly has started publishing many books as iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Over the past couple of months, we've received a considerable amount of feedback from customers who have purchased the apps.

To address some of the most common questions we get, I recently added a page on oreilly.com. I cover three main topics:

• "Hidden" features -- handy things you can do that aren't always obvious in the UI
• Long code lines -- my attempt to help users deal with the question we get most often on the support queues
• Extracting the EPUB files -- yes, there is an EPUB file in that app, and you can get to it quite easily

I hope this page is useful to you. As we continue to receive feedback from our customers, I plan to add more tips and information.

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

Andrew Savikas
August 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see the images.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. That trend has continued (and accelerated), and right now about 60% of our App sales are coming from outside the US:

When I've talked with other publishers about our success with iPhone Apps, they typically discounted what I said because I was talking about iPhone: The Missing Manual, a title particularly suited to the device. And to a degree, that's a fair argument, and I don't expect very many other books-as-apps to sell as well as that one. But the results for the next batch of 17 titles is instructive. For the two-week period of July 20 to August 2 (the first two calendar weeks the apps were on sale), five of the 17 titles sold more units as iPhone apps than via print (as measured in Bookscan). Here's a comparison across all 17 titles:

That got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

In the App Store, each country has its own top 100 lists (overall and for each category, and for free as well as paid). Something that's #1 here in the US may not even register on the top 100 in another country. Here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for the "Classics" App, the #1 paid book app right now:

Classics is one of the most popular paid book apps in nearly every country with iPhone service (the list actually goes further down than shown above).

Now here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for "Twilight" which has been holding steady in the top 25 paid apps here in the US:

Yup, that's it. Just the US. Presumably this is a rights issue -- Hachette either doesn't have the rights to sell this book as an App anywhere else, or they're choosing not to. But taken in light of our own sales of nearly 2/3 outside the US and the data from Classics, that means a publisher who can't (or won't) sell their app outside the States is missing a lot of the market. Here's the current rankings for the "A Twilight Trivia" app, which is ranked above Twilight in the US (and is not affiliated with Hachette or Stephenie Brown):

So there's clear interest in the Twilight content on the iPhone outside the US -- enough interest to keep this app well into the top 100 paid book apps in dozens of countries.

Perhaps the most important "digital rights management" at stake right now is that of the rights to sell digital content globally.

If you're planning to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, producing and selling digital and mobile content from a global perspective will be a big part of the program at TOC Frankfurt on Oct. 13.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

Andrew Savikas
August 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.

Two Cool New Bookworm Features

Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

There's no question that there's plenty of room for improvement among EPUB readers. From simple things like poorly handling multiple author names to more complicated issues like CSS support, readers (the people, not the software) deserve better. That's one reason we've been sponsoring the open-source Bookworm reader, which is among the best ebook readers around (and looks great on mobile browsers, including Kindle's).

Liza Daly (@liza) has a post over on the O'Reilly Labs blog covering two very cool new Bookworm features:

• Feedbooks integration: one-click import from the most popular Feedbook titles, localized to the language set in your Bookworm preferences
• Add to Bookworm: any website can use the same technique to create an "add to Bookworm" button

Bookworm is currently available in seven languages: English, German, Danish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese (if you're interested in helping to translate Bookworm into more lnaguages, let us know). Report bugs and request features over at the public issue tracker. (And if you want to contribute to the project, visit the project page over on Google Code.)