Taking the Leap into All-POD

Mac Slocum
September 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

James Bridle has launched Bookkake, a print-on-demand (POD) publisher focusing on transgressive literature. From booktwo.org:

... Bookkake is not in the fortune-building or the fortune-breaking business. Print-on-demand and direct sales mean that we cut out much of the warehousing, distribution, and discounting costs that are currently causing so much trouble in the trade. Order a book from the Bookkake website and it is printed and shipped directly to you.

POD editions can be ordered in the UK and US with free shipping. In addition, all Bookkake titles are available as free ebooks in DRM-free PDF, EPUB and MIDP formats:

... I firmly believe that by supplying interesting readers with the best version of what they can get elsewhere for free, I'll be rewarded with customer appreciation and loyalty.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
• Open Question: What is the Best Use for Print on Demand?
• Budding Authors Use Espresso Book Machine to Publish
• Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
• Treating Ebooks Like Software

10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer

Peter Brantley
September 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole list:

Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader wants to buy a book for a friend, she wants to buy a specific book. She doesn't want to send a generic gift certificate and hope her friend uses it for said book.

Related Stories:

• Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Q&A; with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
• Ebook Format Primer
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks

Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.

A kiosk-based system targeted at college students will struggle to compete against digital options like iTunes and P2P networks, but Ars Technica says movies are the first step in a broader initiative:

... it's part of a plan to get electronic distribution channels up and running in advance of the availability of digital textbook material. If all goes well, the first digital textbooks and supplementary class material will appear there starting next summer. Left unsaid, however, was whether this material would be protected by DRM; it's a safe bet that it will.

Related Stories:

• Joe Wikert: "Bookstores vs. Online"
• Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
• BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
• Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams

Why You Should Care About XML

Andrew Savikas
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (26) | Listen

Since we began talking about the StartWithXML project, a few offline comments have come in suggesting that imposing XML on authors (and editors for that matter) won't work.

When framed that way, I'm in violent agreement. I would never argue that authors and editors should or will become fluent in XML or be expected to manually mark-up their content. I naively tried fighting that battle before, and was consistently defeated soundly. It is simply too much "extra" work that gets in the way of the writing process.

But there are several reasons why it's really really important for publishers to start paying attention to XML right now, and across their entire workflow:

• XML is here to stay, for the reasonably forseeable future. While it's always dangerous to attempt to predict expiration dates on technology, I think it's fair to assume XML will have a shelf life at least as long as ASCII, which has been with us for more than 40 years, and isn't going anywhere soon.
• Web publishing and print publishing are converging, and writing and production for print will be much more influenced by the Web than vice-versa. It will only get harder to succeed in publishing without putting the Web on par with (or ahead of) print as the primary target. The longer you wait to get that content into Web-friendly and re-usable XML, the worse.

Many in publishing balk at bringing XML "up the stack" to the production, editing, or even the authoring stage. And with good reason; XML isn't really meant to be created or edited by hand (though a nice feature is that in a pinch it easily can be). There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."

Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Feedbooks is a Web-based service that converts, catalogs and distributes ebooks in a variety of formats. Co-founder Hadrien Gardeur discusses Feedbook's system and future services in the following Q&A.;

How would you define your company? Is Feedbooks a distributor? A digitizing service? A social network? Something else?

Probably all three. We already distribute a massive number of ebooks and most of our users currently use Feedbooks to discover and download public domain or Creative Commons licensed ebooks. But we're also working on various tools for authors and small publishers to create ebooks. We'd like to turn our readers into potential authors, and create a service where new authors can distribute their creations to a large user base.

Who is your typical user?

Do we really have a typical user? We probably used to have typical users when we mostly provided ebooks for dedicated reading devices: heavy readers. But that's not the case anymore, now that we've extended the service to the iPhone, too.

Why did you start Feedbooks?

We've seen a lot of very exciting services for music and video these last few years and I really believe that there's a huge potential for ebooks too, thanks to E Ink-based devices and multi-purposes platforms such as the iPhone and Android. I love reading and I'd like to create a great service where anyone can discover new books, and where authors can easily connect with readers.

Your Web site lists support for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook Gen3, the iPhone and other smartphones. How are you able to support all of these devices?

We use an abstract representation, somehow similar to DTBook, to store all of our books. We can generate a file on the fly based on this representation. Adding new formats is fairly easy thanks to this technology. We were the first service to distribute books in EPUB for this reason.

Which ebook format is most popular with your users? Which e-reader is most popular?

EPUB and the iPhone are probably the most popular right now thanks to our seamless integration into Stanza. The most popular dedicated device is the Kindle.

Have established book publishers used your service to create ebook editions?

No, we're still working on those features. I expect major publishers to use XML+XSLT or Adobe InDesign rather than a dedicated service. We're creating our publishing feature with the end-user or small publishers in mind rather than major publishers.

Do you plan to sell ebooks?

We do. I believe that free content and user-generated content in general shouldn't be in a different environment than the rest of ebooks. It makes a lot more sense to have both in the same environment and create an optimal experience for the user.

When will sales begin?

No specific date yet, we'd rather focus on building a good service first and then add this component.

Print on demand (POD) services seem like a logical extension for Feedbooks. Is this something you're planing?

Sure, I consider POD as another potential format for our platform. It's a lot easier to turn an ebook into a POD book than the other way around.

The Feedbooks RSS tool appears to be targeted at Kindle users who want to receive updated news and information from RSS feeds. Do you anticipate other uses for this tool, such as a blog-to-book service?

It's not targeted at Kindle users only. I use it every day on a Sony Reader, and it's actually quite popular with the iPhone, too. I've been experimenting with blog-to-book, there's a lot of such "blooks" (blog+book, serialized novels using blogs) out there. I created a catalog entry for Stanza to test how the readers react to these serialized novels. Such a tool could probably be very interesting for publishers, too.

Feedbooks and Lexcycle, the company behind the Stanza e-reader, have a close working relationship. How did this come together?

Lexcycle launched the iPhone version of Stanza a few days before we decided to release the first version of our new API. Marc [Prud'hommeaux, principal developer at Lexcycle] contacted me: they were looking for content that could be directly integrated into Stanza's online catalog. We exchanged a lot of e-mails with various information, and did a lot of work together to make sure that this would work from day one. There's still a lot of new features that I'd like to introduce and we'll continue improving both the API and Stanza in the future, to create an optimal experience.

How are publishers and others using the Feedbooks API?

I would describe our API as read-mostly for the moment. It's mostly useful for reading systems such as Stanza. Once we turn it into something that's read/write, the situation will be quite different and I can imagine various innovative publishing techniques based on this.

What publishing techniques do you foresee?

Publishing should be more of a seamless experience. We already use a lot of publishing tools (blogs, social networks etc...) and we shouldn't have such a gap between these tools and ebooks.

What are the biggest issues with digital conversion?

There's a lot of formats, and you can expect standards such as EPUB to evolve in the near future. But I believe that the biggest issue for publishers is to find the right balance between what users are allowed to do and the ability to preserve the layout and design of a book. The holy grail for publishers is probably something as powerful as PDF, but reflowable. Ebooks allow users to customize a lot of things and preserving the design of a book shouldn't be at the cost of this flexibility.

Related Stories:

• Ebook Format Primer
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• How To Read O'Reilly EPUB Ebooks on your iPhone with Stanza
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Q&A; with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit

Open Question: All-in-One Devices or Single Use E-Readers?

Mac Slocum
September 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Comparisons between the Kindle and the iPhone often touch on functional differences: the Kindle is a dedicated reading device with a few extra features; the iPhone is a bundled gadget that can serve as an e-reader.

The gap between single- and multi-use devices raises key questions about the future of e-readers and ebooks:

• When it comes to reading digital books, do consumers prefer a dedicated device or an all-in-one gadget?
• Is the market big enough to support both types of devices?

On the Print is Dead blog, Jeff Gomez says dedicated e-readers work well for book reading:

One thing that I don't mind about the Kindle is that it's an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device -- one thing that did everything -- and that I wouldn't want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don't pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don't use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can't read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.

Alison Flood from The Guardian casts a vote for bundled devices:

I'm waiting for an e-reader that bundles many uses into one: music player, phone, BlackBerry, internet, ebooks. That's what will really make the market take off. Of course they won't ever replace books, but then they're not meant to. It'll be something new and different and very exciting. Just don't drop it in the bath.

Which type of device do you prefer? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.

Related Stories:

• Print is Dead: "The Kindle Kronikles: Part 2. The Device"
• The Guardian: "They still haven't cracked the ebook"
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Ergonomics and Ebook Success
• The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game

Open Question: Do You Re-Read Books?

Mac Slocum
September 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Proponents on both sides of the ebook debate point to the archival/re-read nature of their chosen format, but I'm curious to see if re-reading is a common activity or one of those things we'd all like to do but can't find the time. Here's a few questions toward that end:

• Do you re-read books?
• If yes, how often? (i.e. You re-read 1-2 titles per year.)
• Which titles or genres do you re-read?
• Does a book's format -- print or digital -- make you more or less inclined to re-read a title?

Please share your thoughts in the comments area.