ENTRIES TAGGED "iPhone"
What devices and formats do your customers prefer?
Your future content plans can be shaped by asking these questions
Most publishers create ebooks in all formats figuring it doesn’t matter whether mobi is more important than EPUB or if the content is read on an iPad more frequently than on a mobile phone. That approach means these publishers have no idea how their content is being consumed. It also means they probably don’t have a direct channel to their customers or some other way of polling them on their preferences.
How can we redefine the book?
Where does the "book" stop and the "application" begin?
A book may no longer be a physical object, but its ordinary definition remains straightforward as a “written composition that is intended for publication”. Traditional or digital, we feel confident in our ability to recognise a book.
We barely remember today that early electronic platforms offered fewer visual options than the printed page, and encouraged the release of text-only editions from which even the original covers had been removed. Four short years after the launch of the original Kindle, LCD screens were becoming quite popular in mainstream readers. Today, they are almost everywhere, some of them brighter and sharper than their desktop counterparts.
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.
Nearly 800 O'Reilly and Microsoft Press titles now available in iBookstore
Ebooks are already a big part of our publishing business, and we know many of those ebooks are read on iOS devices. Having those ebooks available for sale in the iBookstore makes it even easier to find, buy, and read hundreds of O'Reilly and Microsoft Press titles on iOS devices.
What publishers can and should learn from "The Elements"
Theodore Gray on true interactivity and apps vs. ebooks.
Theodore Gray, author/creator of "The Elements," shares his thoughts on interactivity in ebooks, why programmers should be treated like authors, and why he believes the print form will continue to exist for quite some time.
Ebook Reseller Wishlist/Scorecard
I spend a lot of time talking with companies that want to resell O'Reilly ebooks. Some are large companies you've certainly heard of, others are small startups that haven't yet launched. But what's remarkably consistent is that few of them offer many of the options and features we at O'Reilly consider critical for customers. Because I'm sure these will come…
A few weeks in, a third of iPad Books are Fiction
Measured in terms of number of titles, half of the over 46,000 (paid and free) books available that we detected as being offered through the iBooks app are from 6 categories1. Fiction & Literature alone account for close to a third of all available iBooks titles: The current set of titles is indicative of the publishers (and/or imprints) that Apple…
Cookbooks: The highest priced iPad book category
Just like the iTunes app store, the iBooks app on the iPad spotlights the Top Paid (and Top Free) books within each category. Here are some charts that compare the average price (by rank)1 across the major categories. The average price of the Top 50 titles across the major categories range from $7-$15. Cookbooks, History, Biographies are slightly higher priced,…
Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive
In an earlier post, I examined the average price of the Top 100 PAID apps and noted that the relationship between price and popularity was somewhat dependent on the category. But in the Book category, I concluded that the Top 10 PAID apps were on average cheaper than those ranked 91-100. But what if we examine all Book apps, will the long tail apps be pricier?
David Pogue Revisits DRM Question about Ebooks
In a blog post today, New York Times Columnist (and bestselling O’Reilly author) David Pogue responds to a reader question about DRM (he calls it “copy protection”) in light of all the recent ereader buzz, and he’s very honest and open about his (very natural) reaction to finding copies of his books out in the wild: “As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can’t stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free.” He then discusses sales for one of his books since we began offering it as a (DRM-free) ebook: “The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying… The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall.”