Reading experience and mobile design
The convergence is inevitable
It’s all about user experience. Once you get past whether a book is available on a particular reading platform, the experience is the distinguishing factor. How do you jump back to the table of contents? How do you navigate to the next chapter? How do you leave notes? How does it feel? Is it slick? Clunky? Satisfying? Difficult? Worth the money?
Putting a value on classic content
Why is old content valued at zero, written off, never to be seen again?
Think of a newspaper or magazine as a mountain of data to which a thin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week. Everybody sees the new soil. But what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten. Even the people who own the mountain don’t know much about the lower layers.
The Book Maven’s top ten novels of 2012
And while we're at it, here are my bottom ten as well
Everyone puts together Top Ten lists, right? I put together both a Top and a Bottom Ten, and here’s why: I consider any Top Ten put together by an individual to be entirely subjective. These aren’t necessarily the “best;” they’re just the books that I loved best during a particular calendar year. How could they possibly be the “best,” given all of the books that I didn’t read? No one person can possibly compile a definitive list.
Best publishing industry articles of 2012
Tell us which articles best describe the future of publishing
Earlier this year we gathered the most interesting publishing industry articles from the O’Reilly Radar site and put them in this free ebook. For 2013 we want to take it up a notch.
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.
A short survey about turning discovery into sales
Where do you go for information when making a personal purchase?
When I moved recently from the West Coast to the East, I had to part with many beloved things. Friends and a great climate, of course, but unexpectedly I had to leave behind a clutch of wonderful bookstores, where I would browse for hours on a Saturday afternoon, buying many more books than I ever had the time to read. Bookish tourists should stop in Santa Cruz, CA and visit the marvelous Bookshop Santa Cruz and the great used bookstore, Logos Books. The more academically inclined will want to step into The Literary Guillotine, which features many titles selected by the faculty of the local campus of The University of California. But here where I now live, in Westchester County, NY, the bookstores are few in number and all lack the charm of my former hometown.
Buy once, sync anywhere
It's time to get a grip on the fragmentation of digital books
While building ValoBox we’ve been working with a number of publishers. We’ve been asked a number of times about the potential for publishers to integrate ValoBox more closely into their existing direct retail channels such as a ‘Read now’ button on their eCommerce site. This has been an intriguing element to look into, particularly as it goes to the heart of what we are really interested in: making the content within books more accessible. Our platform does it through enabling browser-based reading and micro-purchases, but it got us thinking of ways to solve the wider problem of paid content fragmentation.
WYSIWYG vs WYSI
WYSI editors enable a whole new level of interaction
Since HTML is the new paper and the new path to paper online editing environments are becoming much more important for publishing. Dominant until now has been the WYSIWYG editor we all know and…err…love? However the current WYSIWYG paradigm has been inadequate for a long time and we need to update and replace it. Producing text with a WYSIWYG editor feels like trying to write a letter while it’s still in the envelope. Let’s face it…these kinds of online text editors are not an extension of yourself, they are a cumbersome hindrance to getting a job done.
Publishing News: Traditional publisher tests self-publishing waters
Simon & Schuster launches Archway Publishing, BitTorrent wants to reinvent itself, and publishers can't win playing against Amazon's wallet.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
Simon & Schuster ventures into self-publishing
The headline news this week was Simon & Schuster’s deal with self-publishing company Author Solutions to launch Archway Publishing, a new self-publishing house. Leslie Kaufman reports at the New York Times that the company is looking to distinguish itself by offering premium services that go beyond what other self-publishing options offer — such as access to a speaker’s bureau that will assist with speaking engagements, and video production and distribution services for book trailers — in addition to editorial, design and distribution services.
The premium services come at a premium price as well — Kaufman reports that packages range “from $1,599 for the least expensive children’s package, to $24,999 for the most expensive business book package.” She also points out that Simon & Schuster personnel will not be involved in the new company, nor will Simon & Schuster attach their name to any of the final products. They will, however, mine the self-publishing author pool for talent. Kaufmann writes: “Adam Rothberg, vice president of corporate communication for Simon & Schuster, said that another attraction of Archway was that Simon & Schuster would be carefully monitoring sales of books completed through the new venture and would use it as a way to spot authors it might want to sign to a contract.”
The self-publishing book
Combining technologies to create new, richer products
As we sat in Liza Daly‘s and Keith Fahlgren‘s Books in Browsers presentation many of us wondered why she was wearing an iPhone earbud and mic. Many also noticed her words were being transcribed in a tiny box in the corner of the screen.
