ENTRIES TAGGED "ebooks"

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PlayTales one year later

New apps, new technology, and new statistics

by Kate Shoaf | March 5, 2013

In March 2012, Joe Wikert posted an interview with a new bookstore app startup called PlayTales. Since then the app market has continued to grow, and PlayTales along with it.  My name is Kate Shoaf, PlayTales’ PR and communications manager, and I’d like to tell you how we’ve modified our apps and distribution platforms to suit the ever-changing international app market.

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How can we redefine the book?

Where does the "book" stop and the "application" begin?

by François Joseph de Kermadec | @fjdekermadec | +François Joseph de Kermadec | March 4, 2013

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.

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The People’s EBook

A wildly succesful Kickstarter project promises a free, beautifully-simple tool to make e-books better.

by Kat Meyer | @KatMeyer | March 1, 2013

“What the photocopier was to zines, we hope the People’s E-Book will be to digital books.” – Greg Albers

Working for TOC, I meet and talk to people from all over the world who are doing incredible things to transform the publishing industry. Sometimes I forget there are people right here in my own Arizona backyard doing some pretty cool things to transform publishing.

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Greg Albers

One such person is Greg Albers of Hol Art Books. Greg is the best kind of book person. He’s an art book person. He’s also prone to thinking outside the book box in big way, and his wildly successful “People’s E-Book” Kickstarter campaign aims to do just that.

We’ve seen publishing/book-related Kickstarter publishing campaigns aplenty, but most focus on a particular project – seeking funding for the making, promotion, and/or distribution on a specific title. Greg’s Kickstarter campaign, “The People’s E-Book” is about creating an ebook production app. One that is both super simple to use and free.

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The publishing industry has a problem, and EPUB is not the solution

Ebooks are deliberately being made defective through digital restrictions

by Jani Patokallio | @jpatokal | February 26, 2013

This article contains my personal views, not those of my employer Lonely Planet.

I’ll be blunt. Ebooks and EPUB are to the publishing industry what Blu-Ray is to the movie industry: a solution to yesterday’s problem made irrelevant by broader change in the industry. Both have a couple of years left in them, and there’s good money to be made while the kinks get worked out from the alternatives, but the way the wind is blowing is clear.

Whenever someone proposes EPUB as a solution, ask yourself a question: what’s the problem they’re trying to solve? As a standard drafted by the IDPF, a self-proclaimed “organization for the Digital Publishing Industry”, EPUB is built squarely to address the industry’s biggest headache: ensuring that, in the digital age, they retain the ability to charge money for distributing content. The best interests of authors or readers simply do not figure in the equation. Read more…

Comments: 56 |
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Losing the book as a symbol

Publishing needs to build new symbols for the digital age

by François Joseph de Kermadec | @fjdekermadec | +François Joseph de Kermadec | February 20, 2013

Transitioning the publishing industry to digital technologies involves lifting the words out of printed pages, and pouring them into the amorphous containers we call ebooks. Books are no longer the tangible, brick-shaped presence they were: they must, instead, be stretched and poured into and onto any device fit for reading, from the laptop to the Kindle to the phone.

In fact, “the book” no longer designates the physical expression of the text, but the text itself, a self-contained bundle of information, whose structure and boundaries have been jointly defined by the author and the publisher. Picking up a book where you left it no longer involves picking up the same object, but rather the same text on whatever device happens to be at hand.

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…and along with EPUB 3: New CSS!

Simplifying and eliminating competing visual distractions for the reader

by Nellie McKesson | @NellieMcKesson | +Nellie McKesson | February 11, 2013

Hopefully you all read Sanders Kleinfeld’s great writeup about O’Reilly’s move to EPUB 3, and the changes and challenges that brings. Along with updating our toolchain, we also revisited our EPUB design and took a stab at improving the user experience. While most of the updates aren’t necessarily very visually exciting or seemingly worth a lot of fanfare, I thought this would be a good opportunity to give some background into the reasoning behind the design choices I made, and some of the limitations we still face, even with the advent of EPUB 3.

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Comments: 2 |
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Book Publishing Unbound

Adventures in Publishing – a new industry report from Brand Perfect

by Neil Ayres | @neilayres | February 6, 2013

Brand Perfect’s new report looks at how traditional publishers are contending with the challenges being brought about by increasingly fragmentary digital publishing, and highlights some of the most successful commercial projects that are responding to them.

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Ebooks and the future of research

Society cannot afford to lose its distributed knowledge backup system

by François Joseph de Kermadec | @fjdekermadec | +François Joseph de Kermadec | February 6, 2013

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.

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The four stages of the “Spotify for eBooks” adoption model

... or why I believe in a bright future for ebook subscription

by Justo Hidalgo | @justohidalgo | +Justo Hidalgo | February 5, 2013

During the 2013 edition of the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City, I will be participating in a panel that has been called ‘The Elusive Netflix of eBooks‘. The title implies the notion that a subscription service for ebooks has not fully worked yet. While it is true there is no 500-pound gorilla selling subscriptions yet, my point of view as someone behind one of the companies offering such a service, is that this is just part of the process. A process that is just taking the right steps in the right direction.

Let me explain what I mean by going through four main stages, loosely taken from what any innovative product adoption lifecycle typically looks like.

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A Publisher’s Job Is to Provide a Good API for Books

You can start with your index.

by Hugh McGuire | @hughmcguire | +Hugh McGuire | February 1, 2013

Introduction

Here is a radical statement: A publisher’s job is to provide good APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for their books. Now that almost all books are made into digital products (that is, ebooks), good publishers of the future will be the ones who provide great APIs. In this article I am going to explore:

  • why I think publishers must provide good APIs
  • why this is actually much easier and less scary than you might think
  • why the old-fashioned book index should be the starting point for book APIs

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