800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader

Peter Brantley
December 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads:

Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten a rocket boost from the Dutch firm iRex Technologies, which announced it has made a deal with NewspaperDirect to deliver 800 newspapers on iRex's Digital Reader 1000 ...

The iRex/NewspaperDirect partnership will undoubtedly cause some headaches for Amazon.com, too. A visit to Amazon's Kindle newspaper web page shows 28 listings. The 800 titles to be carried on the iRex 1000, dubbed 'Kindle Killer' by some, will obviously dwarf Kindle's offering. Of course, many of them are foreign language papers like Le Figaro and Die Welt. But 800 is 800 and that's good news for the environment.

Related Stories:

• iRex's Large E-Reader Aimed at Business Crowd
• France Telecom E-Reader Includes Subscriptions
• UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

Webcast Video: What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization

Mac Slocum
December 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from the recent TOC Webcast, "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization," with Liza Daly.

Slides from "Making the Case for POD" Webcast

Mac Slocum
December 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Brian O'Leary had made his slides available from this week's TOC Webcast, "Making the Case for POD." A complete recording of the event will also be posted here soon.

Publishers: Let the Containers Go

Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:

Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."

(Via the Book Oven Blog)

Related Stories:

• James Gleick, NY Times: "How to Publish Without Perishing "
• Clay Shirky: "Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism ..."
• The Confusion Between Content and Containers
• Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive

Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs

Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog:

The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.

Human-generated Mechanical Turk results can be a wildcard -- and the lack of instant gratification is a disadvantage -- but this method could theoretically expand mobile product apps beyond text messages and barcode readers.

(Via Paul Miller's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps
• New York Times: "New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone"
• Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
• Daddy, Where's Your Phone?
• Amazon and Google Challenging iTunes through Mobile

Politico Expands Content Sharing Service

Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Here's a sliver of positivity from the gloomy news business: Politico's content sharing network has added more than 100 clients since launching in September. From Editor & Publisher:

Politico Network, which makes the political news Web site's content available in exchange for advertising placement, launched Sept. 9, according to Beth Frerking, an assistant managing editor.

Newspapers and broadcast outlets utilize the content for their Web sites in exchange for placing advertisements provided by Politico, with revenue shared by both.

Frerking says different content packages are available that provide between five and 15 Politico items per week. The more content the client uses, the less their share of the ad revenue.

"We sell ads for the entire network and the revenue is based on how much you use, either 50%, 40% or 30%," she explained. "Rather than charging you for it, it works like this."

CNN is also getting into the sharing/subscription game via its recently announced wire service, which is positioned as an alternative to the Associated Press wire.

Related Stories:

• Tim McGuire: "POLITICO'S move is another episode in the AP/Newspaper saga"
• Politico Expanding Staff, Circulation and Ad Space
• Newspaper Chain Refuses to Renew AP Contract
• Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem

[TOC Webcast] Tomorrow: Making the Case for Print on Demand

Mac Slocum
December 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Tools of Change for Publishing will host a free webcast tomorrow at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific). Presenter Brian O'Leary will discuss "Making the Case for Print on Demand."

Webcast Overview

Publishers who dismiss the use of print-on-demand (POD) technologies as too expensive may be missing an opportunity to better manage their inventory, total costs and the unit costs of books sold. This session will provide an economic rationale for more extensive use of POD services, based upon analysis and real-world use cases.

Slots are limited, so register for free today.

Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers

Mac Slocum
December 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Ebooks as iPhone applications started as a novelty/workaround, but the technique is now being used by Houghton Mifflin for a full-fledged digital rollout. From Wired's Epicenter blog:

The publisher recently partnered with a design and development company called ScrollMotion to launch a series of bestselling in-copyright e-books for the iPhone where each title is its own app and a reader is bundled with each download. Thus the iPhone itself, despite the small screen and lack of E Ink technology, becomes the reader.

On the other side, the recently released Classics app uses the iPhone's software update to load new ebooks, and a number of publishers (including O'Reilly) deliver ebooks to the iPhone and iPod Touch through the Stanza e-reader.

Both methods have their pros and cons (e.g. storage limitations, selection, interface), but I'd like to know what TOC readers think: Which format holds the most promise? Which do you use?

Related Stories:

• Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Q&A; With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

Q&A; With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader

Mac Slocum
November 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

We've covered iPhone-based e-readers in the past, but the Classics application offers a few twists: it's not free, and the app's book content is updated along with the software itself. Classics co-creator Phill Ryu discusses the application's design and development in the following Q&A.;

Why did you develop a book-centric application?

When we started comparing the iPhone to the Kindle, it was immediately clear to us that we could take advantage of the iPhone's brilliant color screen and touch capabilities to create a reading experience that would stand out from the crowd, so it began as a very, very tempting challenge almost, and eventually turned into a months-long passion project.

How many books do you offer?

We're currently offering a dozen books. They're handpicked favorites of ours, but we'll be adding more with free updates to the app.

Are these books all in the public domain?

Yeah, they are public domain. At the start, [co-creator Andrew] Kaz and I thought we could really do something radical in terms of the digital reading experience, but we couldn't start working with publishers based on the strength of some cool interface ideas, so we settled with the "Classics" name and created this as essentially the first prototype of our reading engine.

Did you consider releasing this application for free?

Yes, for a moment. Then someone knocked on my apartment door and slipped in a rent payment notice letter. The reality of the situation was, we had gone basically broke over the summer working on a pretty cool desktop app, and had to halt development on that until we could find some income. At that point, we came up with the brilliant plan to develop an iPhone app in a few weeks to generate some income, to continue the aforementioned desktop app. Classics of course ended up turning into a serious passion project lasting months of development time, and we went extra broke due to it, so going free was hardly an option. We're rather painfully aware that free apps tend to gather something like 25-50 times the downloads of similarly charting paid apps, and we'd like to reach that audience someday, but most likely it'll be with a spinoff app, and not with Classics.

Are you still developing the desktop app? Does this app also focus on books/content?

I really can't (and shouldn't) talk details, because the app might never fly depending on how talks with some content publishers go, but no, it's not book related.

You're using Apple's built-in software update process to load new books into the application. How did you come up with this idea?

For a variety of reasons. One thing that drove us toward this was gentle but insistent prodding from Apple throughout the dev process to stay away from selling books through our app. We'll be transitioning to server-hosted books later on though, once the collection has grown further.

Did Apple explicitly guide you away from selling books?

They guided us away from selling books directly through our app, which is against the terms for iPhone developers. We're hoping we can figure out an elegant workaround that they are fine with, but I want to stress that overall, they've been very supportive of this app, and have even been showing it off in the ongoing iPhone tech talks around the world.

How often will books be added?

I would expect to see several new books with each app update, the first of which should come later this month or so.

Will updates be free?

Yes. The app may become more expensive later on as it matures, but updates will remain free for all existing customers.

Since the books update along with the software, will users be able to keep/archive titles previously loaded into the application?

We have no plans to remove any books we release. Once the library size becomes prohibitive, we are planning to shift to server hosted books.

Apple requires applications to be under 10MB for download over cellular connections. Does this restriction limit the total number of books you can make available through Classics?

Not really, in that we are already pushing 20MB. We're hoping that we can eventually transition to server-hosted books while retaining the user experience though.

How many people were involved in the development of Classics?

Beyond Kaz and I, there were four designers who helped with various parts of the app (including the cover art, interface, and even processing illustrations for the books), as well as a friend and Web programmer who helped us create some in-house tools for correcting and formatting these books.

The Classics bookshelf interface has a unique look. How much effort went into this design?

Probably more than most people would think! The bookshelf interface for book management was inspired by Delicious Library's visual shelves (an app that Kaz worked on when he was 14). So starting from there, we worked with David Lanham on realizing our own flavor of bookshelf, and slowly refined the look over the next couple months, experimenting with various levels of decoration, tints, etc.

Of course, the other half of the bookshelf view are the custom book covers. As I mentioned before, Classics ended up being a passion project for all of us, and the designers really went overboard with the covers. (In a good way.) We started with the idea of procedurally generating each leatherbound book cover with different colors, sizes and such, with a unique "cover image" for each book designed to look like they were embossed on this set of leatherbound novels. Unfortunately, this ended up looking extremely bland. So after literally weeks of going back and forth on this with Dan Goffin, who was drawing concept art for book covers from the start, we settled on a much more colorful, and less restrictive style of fully illustrated covers.

I think this is the point where it gets a bit crazy. At this point, the concept books were looking much nicer, but we began to feel that the slightly simplified style made them look more like icons than real books. They looked a little fake. So the designers ended up illustrating these in high res, as if they were real books. The user for now actually never sees the vast majority of the detailing, but I think this level of detail adds a really unique level of polish to the app.

Will you port Classics to other systems, such as Android?

We haven't even investigated Android at all yet, but it's certainly a possibility. For now though, this remains an app we just personally really wanted on our iPhones!

Have you used/seen some of the other book-based iPhone applications? What's your impression of these?

Yes. And I feel like you are leading me on a bit with this question, but I'll take the bait and bite. I've tried a bunch of the other book apps out there, and frankly, the overall quality of these apps (in particular the "one-offs") horrified us, and only further motivated us to go full out with Classics. The only other book app out there worth picking up is Stanza.

How many copies of Classics have you sold? Have book publishers or others approached you about including their material in the app?

We've sold over 20,000 copies so far, though there hasn't been so much in terms of profit yet due to our initial investment in the app. We're optimistic though, and we're hoping some leads work out with publishers. There are publishers who want to work with us and sell books on the store, but the main issue for now is that there aren't many viable options for them besides selling one-off book apps, which is not ideal. If there's a nice way to do this though, we'll find it.

Related Stories:

• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Stanza E-Reader Catching On with iPhone Users
• How To Read O'Reilly EPUB eBooks on your iPhone with Stanza
• iPhone Apps Developer "Shell Shocked" by Outsized Payday
• Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Andy Finnell: "How to Price Your iPhone App out of Existence"

Random House Expands Ebook Offerings, Embraces EPUB

Peter Brantley
November 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Random House is pursing digital with a vengeance, recognizing a growth market. From the Huffington Post:

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Also notable, Random will make all current and future ebooks available in EPUB format.

Related Stories:

• TOC Resource: EPUB
• How To Read O'Reilly EPUB eBooks on your iPhone with Stanza
• First Frontlist O'Reilly Ebook Bundle (Including EPUB) Now Available
• Looking at EPUB's Flexibility and Fidelity
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)

Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza

Andrew Savikas
November 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Back in August, I showed how to read O'Reilly EPUB ebooks on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) using the popular (and free) Stanza reader app. I'm pleased to announce that you can now directly download EPUB ebooks purchased from O'Reilly on your iPhone to Stanza. The integration is experimental for now, as we iron out some kinks and work to make our own site more iPhone-friendly.

These instructions assume that:

• You've purchased one or more O'Reilly ebook bundles from oreilly.com (as of this writing, there are 57 total titles available -- an updated list is available at oreilly.com/ebooks).
• You have an iPhone or iPod Touch with the Stanza App installed

To download one of your O'Reilly ebooks to Stanza, follow these instructions (if you're reading this post via RSS, you may need to click through to the original post to see the screenshots):

1. On your iPhone (or iPod Touch) open Safari and go to https://members.oreilly.com

   

2. After signing in, navigate to the Electronic Media tab.

   

3. If you zoom in, you'll see that among the download options, there's now a "Stanza ePub" button. Press the button to begin downloading (to scroll the list of titles, use a two-fingered vertical drag -- again, this is experimental, and we are working on a better iPhone UI).

   

4. Pressing that button will open Stanza and download the book.

   

This kind of integration was simple and straightforward in large part because many of the moving parts around Stanza are based on open standards, including EPUB and the Atom Publishing Protocol (both successful and important XML standards that publishers should be paying attention to -- find out more at January's StartWithXML forum in New York).

Thanks to Marc Prud'hommeaux at Lexcycle for working with us on the integration, and to our own Nick Pilon for connecting the plumbing on our end. Marc will be talking about Stanza and about reading on the iPhone at February's TOC Conference.

Related Stories:

• How To Read O'Reilly EPUB eBooks on your iPhone with Stanza
• Stanza E-Reader Catching On with iPhone Users
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications

Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution

Bill McCoy
November 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (28) | Listen

Last week my friend and International Digital Publishing Forum board colleague Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, published a thoughtful article on TOC arguing that "digital book DRM is bad bad bad."

I rashly volunteered to offer a counterpoint. Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it's better or worse than the likely alternative.

To me, it's pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty -- so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.

Report: Wall Street Journal Grabbing High-End Ads from New York Times

Peter Brantley
November 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Silicon Alley Insider and others are reporting on Bloomberg's notice that the Wall Street Journal is grabbing high-end luxury advertising revenue from the New York Times:

As if the New York Times wasn't having enough trouble keeping up with an ad recession and the Internet crushing its print business. Now the newspaper is facing increasing competition for print ad s... from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal ...

... And then there's the stats: The WSJ has a paid circulation of 1.4 million, up 2.4% y/y. The NYT: 859,000, down 5.5%. With more readers, the WSJ can charge more for ads, $264,426 for full page color vs. $193,800 at the NYT.

Related Stories:

• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
• ReadWriteWeb: "First New York Times API is Live - Here's Why it Matters"
• Could a Young Newspaper Company Still Succeed?
• PC Magazine Goes Web Only

EFF Attorney: Google Book Search Settlement Weakens Innovation

Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

In an editorial in The Recorder, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google's settlement with publishers and authors signals an implicit abandonment of Google's legal team working on behalf of innovation across Silicon Valley:

.. By settling rather than taking the case all the way ... Google has solved its own copyright problem -- but not anyone else's. Without a legal precedent about the copyright status of book scanning, future innovators are left to defend their own copyright lawsuits. In essence, Google has left its former copyright adversaries to maul any competitors that want to follow its lead.

Google will doubtless be considering the same endgame for the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube. If Google can strike a settlement with a large slice of the aggrieved copyright owners, then it solves the copyright problem for itself, while leaving it as a barrier to entry for YouTube's competitors.

But when innovators like Google cut individual deals, it weakens the Silicon Valley innovation ecology for everyone, because it leaves the smaller companies to carry on the fight against well-endowed opponents. Those kinds of cases threaten to yield bad legal precedents that tilt the rules against disruptive innovation generally.

Related Stories:

• Publishers Weekly: "Google Settlement Gets Initial Approval"
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Registry Information: Google Book Search Copyright Settlement
• EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement
• Harvard Won't Permit Google Scans of In-Copyright Material

Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM

Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (20) | Listen

There is increased interest among trade publishers in pursuing some sort of "interoperable digital rights management" (DRM) for digital ebooks. There are many unlikely allies, who think that achieving a little DRM encourages publishers to move into digital spheres, and gives them breathing room. I think this is a really bad idea, and I wanted to publicly detail a few reasons.

What I've compiled is largely a list of counter-arguments; there are many affirmative defenses for unencumbered content that could be promoted. I've also numbered these paragraphs; on re-reading, they more often than not meld and intertwine as a potlatch of thoughts, and have not taken to my weak organization very well.

In a separate post, my friend and colleague Bill McCoy from Adobe will attempt to establish his own conclusions about whether an ebook DRM standard is a useful compromise, or a fool's errand. (Note 11/24/08: Bill's post is now available here.)