ENTRIES TAGGED "ebooks"
Book Publishing Unbound
Adventures in Publishing – a new industry report from Brand Perfect
Brand Perfect’s new report looks at how traditional publishers are contending with the challenges being brought about by increasingly fragmentary digital publishing, and highlights some of the most successful commercial projects that are responding to them.
Ebooks and the future of research
Society cannot afford to lose its distributed knowledge backup system
Knowledge cannot progress unless it is aware of its past: a knowledge-seeker must reference the works of previous generations. Literary scholars return to manuscripts, musicians to partitions, artists to museums…
The continued availability of reference works underpins our entire research system. It has become so ingrained in our methods that it barely registers on our list of values to uphold. Yet, that very availability has dissolved into a mirage, to surprisingly little protest.
The four stages of the “Spotify for eBooks” adoption model
... or why I believe in a bright future for ebook subscription
During the 2013 edition of the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City, I will be participating in a panel that has been called ‘The Elusive Netflix of eBooks‘. The title implies the notion that a subscription service for ebooks has not fully worked yet. While it is true there is no 500-pound gorilla selling subscriptions yet, my point of view as someone behind one of the companies offering such a service, is that this is just part of the process. A process that is just taking the right steps in the right direction.
Let me explain what I mean by going through four main stages, loosely taken from what any innovative product adoption lifecycle typically looks like.
A Publisher’s Job Is to Provide a Good API for Books
You can start with your index.
Introduction
Here is a radical statement: A publisher’s job is to provide good APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for their books. Now that almost all books are made into digital products (that is, ebooks), good publishers of the future will be the ones who provide great APIs. In this article I am going to explore:
- why I think publishers must provide good APIs
- why this is actually much easier and less scary than you might think
- why the old-fashioned book index should be the starting point for book APIs
Are we solving customer problems?
Customers only care about their needs, not your business problems
This article contains my personal views, not those of my employer Lonely Planet.
The challenge the publishing industry faces today is complex. Against centuries of industry inertia and decades of business momentum, the job of transforming publishing is demanding to say the least. The healthy and long-lasting business model we once had is still funding emerging digital models but simultaneously holding them back.
Three questions for…Christian Damke of Skoobe
Subscription models improve discovery and offer a new revenue stream
1. What is Skoobe?
Skoobe is an ebook subscription service for smartphones and tablets featuring fiction and non-fiction trade books. Members can read as many books as they want. There are no out-of-stock titles at Skoobe; every ebook is available always and everywhere. The free app allows you to read extracts of all available books without registration or payment and is also widely used [as a discovery tool] to find new books for later purchase. The membership costs 9.99 Euros per month and is automatically renewed every month. Since our launch in February 2012 we have been consistently among the most downloaded apps in the books category and have been awarded 4.5 stars on average both in the Appstore as well as in Google Play.
Creating reader community with open APIs
The connections between readers and potential readers matter most
I spoke at the “Frankfurt Digital Night” at this year’s Frankfurt Book fair, making essentially three points (see slides embedded below): first, publishing requires – and has always required – a commitment to creating and courting communities of readers. Second, there are new digital tools emerging for creating and courting these communities. Third, in this context, openness in terms of APIs is becoming a feature.
Wiley & O’Reilly Media sign ebook distribution deal
3,000+ technology ebooks added to the oreilly.com catalog
I’ve mentioned before that O’Reilly’s direct ebook channel is an extremely important sales outlet for us. We want our content to be in all stores but the direct channel is pretty much the only one where we can establish an ongoing relationship with readers.
TOC’s Global Ebook Market report
The only resource you need for current conditions & future projections
One year ago we published the first edition of our Global Ebook Market report. We focused on the major English language territories but also featured coverage of several other popular languages as well.
Publishing News: B&N improves its ecosystem
B&N Nook HD tablets launch, with Nook Video on deck; Bjarnason argues against web-based ebook formatting; and taxes won't save journalism.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
B&N pursues the “low-end tablet throne”
Barnes & Noble’s new HD tablet launch was the headline news this week. Reuters reports B&N introduced a 7-inch Nook HD tablet for $199 and a 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet for $269 — a price point B&N CEO William Lynch called a “wow price point.” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters the devices were a big improvement over earlier iterations and that they even “one-up Amazon in some areas.”
Laura Hazard Owen took an in-depth look at the tablets over at GigaOm and outlines a few of the improved areas. First, B&N is looking to improve discoverability with the new devices and bring the tablet shopping experience a bit closer to the in-store experience. Owen reports that readers can browse the store from inside ebooks to discover additional titles by that book’s author and similar titles in the genre. B&N also is launching Nook Channels to help readers discover books that are similar to other books they’ve liked. Owen reports the channels are curated collections of books with 40 to 50 titles — many of which are curated by B&N’s in-store booksellers. There also will be a new “Your Nook Today” button on the Nook home screens, which most notably will provide book recommendations based on the device’s content.
B&N also announced plans to launch a Nook-branded video store this fall, called Nook Video. Lauren Goode at All Things Digital has the need-to-know info on the service. Goode writes that it won’t be video subscription service, but will offer rentals and download purchases for streaming, and all content will be stored in the Nook Cloud. Goode also highlighted an interesting feature regarding owned physical DVDs:
“Nook Video will also create and store digital copies of the DVDs that you normally play on UltraViolet and Blu-ray players. So if you purchase a Blu-ray or UV DVD and sync your console with your Nook Video account, it will create a digital copy in your Nook Cloud. You could then, theoretically, watch it on another gadget, via the Nook app.”
Kind of like iTunes Match for DVDs. Joe Arico at Mobiledia argues that the Nook Video announcement takes the new Nook HD tablets to the next level and fills a crucial gap in the B&N ecosystem, making B&N “much more of a legitimate contender for the mid and low-end tablet throne.”