PDF vs. EPUB vs. Mobi Format Download Comparison for oreilly.com

Andrew Savikas
December 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

UPDATE: Additional view showing relative volume, rather than percentage.

I'm honored to have been elected to the IDPF Board of Directors, and will use the occasion to share some interesting data about download formats from oreilly.com.

For most of our titles, we offer three different (DRM-free) formats: PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket. PDF continues to be the most popular format, though it's losing ground to EPUB (and to a lesser extent, Mobi). We've been tracking which of those three formats customers actually download after purchasing (it's of course possible that they download multiple formats), and here's the breakdown over the last 16 months:

And here's the same data in terms of relative volume, rather than percentages:

David Pogue Revisits DRM Question about Ebooks

Andrew Savikas
December 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11) | Listen

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:

Well, it sounded like it could be a very costly experiment. But I agreed. My publisher, O'Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected pdf file. After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year's sales.

The results? It was true. 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. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year. That's not a perfect, all-variables-equal experiment, of course; any number of factors could explain the results. But for sure, it wasn't the disaster I'd feared.

I'm thrilled David was willing to take a look at the data, and at least be willing to consider that piracy is less of a threat than many publishers and authors fear, especially when readers are given great reasons to pay for the ebooks (in our case, multiple DRM-free formats, perpetual access, and free updates).

What's worth also pointing out about David's books (and it's something I tried pointing out in the comments section of his blog post, but at last check my comment is still "awaiting moderation") is that while his print books continue to sell like proverbial hotcakes (one of his books made up about 4% of sales across the entire computer book market in a recent week), those DRM-free ebooks are also outperforming. The app version of iPhone: The Missing Manual is our best selling app of 2009, and two of his books are #1 and #3 for us on Kindle this year.

First Look at nook: Not Encouraging

Andrew Savikas
December 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

We (finally) received our nooks (pre-ordered quite some time ago), and the early results are ... disappointing. Loading one (any) of our EPUB ebooks causes the nook to hang, and the book never opens.

Liza Daly hit the same snag as reported on the Threepress blog:

I tried loading a number of O'Reilly Media titles that are valid and work on the Sony Reader and every other ePub device. The Nook only brought up the "Formatting" message, and then hung. Only a full restart would bring it back.

This is an extremely serious problem.

Though many of our EPUB files are large (because of images), they're definitely standards-compliant, and load just fine into Bookworm and Stanza (which is the rendering engine used for our iPhone apps). Ditto for Aldiko (the rendering engine used for our Android apps).

We were able to get one book to load after removing all of the CSS, but that's not a viable long-term workaround. I'm disappointed to see this that after B&N watched Amazon do such a terrible job in rendering complex content on Kindle ("what are these tay-buhls of which you speak? Who would put one in a book?").

(We're clearly not the only ones disappointed -- David Pogue even called the nook "a mess" in his review.)

Dear New York Times: I would have loved to link to David's actual column, but it's behind a registration wall. Which means nobody else links to it either, which is why it's not on the first (or even the second) page of a Google search for "pogue nook". Those registrations really worth sending so much traffic elsewhere?

Rolling out Android .apk Files in Ebook Bundles

Andrew Savikas
December 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A distinguishing feature of Google's Android Market compared to the App Store is that it's a non-exclusive agreement. That means Android app developers are free to sell their apps in other places.

With the nearly 200 Microsoft Press ebooks now available through oreilly.com, we've begun adding the Android ".apk" application file to our ebook bundle (we'll be rolling it out for all of our ebooks soon). We don't yet know if enough people are interested enough to bother installing the application (the process isn't very friendly) as opposed to just adding the EPUB file (via Bookworm or Aldiko), but thought it worth trying.

Outperforming Books at Getting a Job Done

Andrew Savikas
November 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Clay Christensen talks about how people hire products to do jobs for them, and for a very long time books have been the best performers at doing certain types of jobs. That's changing of course, and the crop of new Augmented Reality applications should be on the radar of many types of publisher, from travel to fiction to repair manuals:

In the not-too-distant future, it might be possible to slip on a pair of augmented-reality (AR) goggles instead of fumbling with a manual while trying to repair a car engine. Instructions overlaid on the real world would show how to complete a task by identifying, for example, exactly where the ignition coil was, and how to wire it up correctly.

A new AR system developed at Columbia University starts to do just this, and testing performed by Marine mechanics suggests that it can help users find and begin a maintenance task in almost half the usual time.

We'll have a session on Augmented Reality at February's TOC Conference.

https://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23800/?a=f

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

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

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

William Patry delivering Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Duke

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

Google Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry, who will be one of our keynote speakers at TOC 2010, delivered a great lecture at Duke last month dissecting the "moral panic" approach to copyright debate, as exemplified by the late Jack Valenti, former CEO of the MPAA. His talk is just under 30 minutes, and then he goes into Q&A with the audience. I particularly appreciated his point that copyright is a social structure, not a moral one, and not one that's based on property rights.

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

Qwitter: Accessible Twitter client (uses TTS) (via @doctorow)

Andrew Savikas
November 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Just make sure not to follow anyone who's a member of the Author's Guild ...

"The Qwitter client enables blind individuals to interface with the Twitter service globally, regardless of application focus. Based off of revolutionary concepts pioneered in The Jawter Jaws Scripts, Qwitter, with full support for the three major comercial screen readers and sapi speech, provides you instant access to all aspects of the twitter microblogging service, giving you the ability to post a tweet from anywhere, read tweets, perform searches, and far, far more."

https://www.qwitter-client.net/

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

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

Andrew Savikas
November 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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

"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."

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

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Early Registration Now Open for TOC 2010 New York

Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Early registration is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference returning to the Marriott Marquis Feb. 22-24 2010.

The program for TOC 2010 reflects how quickly the landscape is changing for publishers -- digital can no longer be thought of as a separate topic; digital creation, delivery, distribution, consumption, and communication are permeating every layer of the publishing ecology.

This year we've tried to include a lot of conversations about and with readers, to encourage discussion about how new formats and modes are shaping preferences and behavior. We've also split the popular Lightning Demo sessions into two different components, both now part of the main program. The familiar 5-minute demo format will remain for a dedicated Breakout Session, and as a special Plenary Session, we'll be using the popular and entertaining Pecha Kucha format, where each speaker gets 20 slides that advance automatically every 20 seconds. We've also split several of the tutorials into two 90-minute workshops, rather than the longer 3-hour format.

It's important to remember that we are still very early in a transition as big or bigger than the shift from manuscript to print as the primary form for books. And it's useful to look back on that transition for insight into how the apparent shortcomings of the new and uncertain matter little in the long run. From James J. O'Donnell's essay, The pragmatics of the new: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus in The Future of the Book:

Every negative claim made about print [in the 15th century] is correct, and every negative prophecy came true. Take the argument about the likeness of copies making collation and correction impossible: a perfectly valid point. Why did it not derail print in its glorious career? ... [T]he system of communication introduced by print was so large, so fast, so powerful, and ultimately such a source of wealth that the defects of the system could be remedied as far as need be. ... In short, in the end, the defects of print and the criticisms they drew didn't matter. This is a lesson worth mulling at length.

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Free news but paid comments? (via @adamgaumont)

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

https://sicmind.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/premium-content/

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Interesting TV subscriptions via iTunes in the works? (via @jafurtado)

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

https://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091102/apples-itunes-pitch-tv-for-30-a-month/

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

"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."

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

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous