TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Finding the sweet spot between free and paid

By Paul Biba

Bruce Brandfon, Scientific American: always charged for content and a few years gave it away for free on the web. Couldn’t monetize it by way of advertising. A year ago decided to publish tidbits and took the features stories off the web. Previously published features on the web for free before the magazine came out. As a result subscriptions increased. Lesson learned as publishers of content is that rates they were able to generate on the web were very small compared to the rates they could generate in print. Was able to replace direct mail by using website. Goal is to enhance experience to the extent that people will pay for site in addition to the magazine. People are hung up on devices too much cause that will shake itself out. Scary part is that 25 year olds getting information from completely different sources, not papers and magazines. Biggest challenge of us as curators of information is that we are now becoming responsible for the quality of the information we consume.

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Rethinking author contracts for the digital world

By Paul Biba

Christopher Kenneally, Copyright Clearance Center, moderator; John Silbersack, Trident Media Group; Sara Pearl, Trident Media Group

John Silbersack: literary agent. even for major authors electronic book sales only account for a few percentage points. Meeting with ebook companies who want to explain their ebook models almost every week, but still very little money being generated on these deals. Most companies don’t offer an advance but higher royalties. These companies are also selling a marketing platform. Probably not the time to fight the battle about who owns backlist ebook rights because of low monetary value. But it is a battle that will have to be fought eventually. 700 backlist works in the Isaac Asimov estate. How does the agent make them available? Time to try short term licenses and experimentation to find best way. Often these new products will be sold side-by-side with the original book. What makes this content different and takes it out of verbatim rights? For out of print books that have reverted to the author, spending a lot of time now sending termination notices to publishers. For the last 50 years in publishing has been a pretty common practice to use orphan works without permission and put aside some money in case someone comes forward. Not so different than what Google is doing now. For the working writer the Google settlement doesn’t make much difference because can opt in/out. How Amazon take a larger percentage of revenue from an ebook sale than the author gets.
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Novel in 2050 Panel at South by Southwest

By Robert Nagle

I know this sounds a bit loony but….

Last summer, Richard Nash proposed a talk about the Novel in 2050  for South by Southwest (SXSW).  As usual, the geeks at SXSW voted it down (this happens to many worthy panel ideas).   Then I thought, these questions are good; why not have the same session anyway and have it in some room somewhere at South by Southwest?  Even if Richard Nash isn’t there to run it, I’m sure there will be enough literary geeks at SXSW to keep a good discussion going.

So I wrote a little announcement about it.  If any readers plan to make it, you may run into some familiar names on Teleread. Richard Nash has a prior commitment, but he says he will show up anyway.  (Read Chris Meadows’ article about  Richard Nash here  and an audio interview David Rothman did with him last year).

It will be on Sunday March 14 at 2:00 PM at South by Southwest. Location TBA. It could be awesome, or it could totally suck.

South by Southwest attracts more people in web design/multimedia/politics than in publishing, but a lot of literary/freelance types end up showing up.  SXSW will have  a handful of interesting panels, including one or two about the iPad.

See also: Chris Meadows about whether ebook conferences create a kind of  ebook elite.  Also, some artists have started to do live illustrations of SXSW panels which can be stunning to look at. See these panels and Honoria Starbuck’s amazingly fun abstract drawings.  (The picture you see was for last year’s Aristotle on Twitter panel).

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Tabbloid It!

By Tony Bandy

Are you a news junkie like me?  I find myself constantly checking my iGoogle page or Google Fast Flip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) to see the latest stories.  I’ve also got my RSS reader going as well.

However, one of my biggest problems is figuring out a way to keep my eReader current.  Since I’m using an older model Sony (PRS-505) that has no wireless connection, it’s been challenging in trying to figure out the best way to do this.

Recently I’ve found a great application that might be a way around this, helping me to keep my Sony up to date.  I’m talking about an application from HP called “Tabbloid”.  This small application seems to have flown “under the radar” so to speak, but its premise and execution so far have been flawless.  Basically, it’s a small customized newspaper that’s emailed to you each morning and consists of news and other stories created from your own RSS feeds or topics of your choosing.  The service is free and is really easy to use!  Interested?

To get started, head to the main Tabbloid page located at http://www.tabbloid.com/.  From there, add your news sources.  These can be feed urls extracted from your current RSS reader, OPML file, or just single addresses that you might already know.  If you’re not much on the techy side of RSS, Tabbloid also has preformatted lists of subjects such as technology, business, sports, etc. that you can choose from.

From here, it’s a simple matter of adding your email address and specifying how often you want the delivery to take place.  This can be daily or weekly and you have the option of choosing your time of delivery as well as the time zone you might be living in.  After this, save your customized delivery options and check your email to get started.  Each morning you will get a freshly made PDF as well as a summary email of the contents.

Once you’ve been on the service for a while and you have the feeds you want as well as the delivery schedule, then moving the issue to your eReader each morning is a simple matter of moving the PDF over to the device (if it supports the format) or using a conversion program to convert it to your format of choice.  I’ve had good luck using Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) for conversion so far.  You might have to experiment a bit in getting the routine down, but after that, it should be smooth sailing.  You might need to experiment a bit as well with your device, to see which settings and formats work best.

Overall, I think HP has a good idea going here and having the ability to bring this over to my eReader each morning makes for some good reading throughout the day when I cannot make it online to view things in real time.  While I’ve only mentioned my Sony in this story, this has application no matter what type of device you may be using.  Hit the links below for more information if you have a moment!  Have fun!

Tabbloid Main Page:

http://www.tabbloid.com

Lifehacker post on Tabbloid:

http://lifehacker.com/5080971/tabbloid-turns-your-rss-feed-into-a-newspaper

WordPress Tabbloid Plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/make-tabbloid/

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Publishing Expo Keynote: CEO Roundtable

By Paul Biba

Margo Baldwin, President, Chelsea Green Publishing; Clint Greenleaf, President, Greenleaf Book Group; Robert Miller, President, HarperStudio; Sara Nelson, Books Editor, O, the Oprah Magazine, Moderator

Margo Baldwin: needed to be niched to stay in business – environment and sustainable living. Try to get a book out from manuscript to bound book in 4 to 5 weeks. Can get well known authors this way. Their books don’t require big advances. They have a mission to help save the world and tends to attract like minded authors. Their specialty books require little marketing and people can easing find them on the internet. Do own distribution cause this helps them control their cash flow. Don’t do business with Borders because think will be gone soon. Their big growth is in specialty retailers (garden stores, for example). The overall pie can grow, not shrink, for certain kinds of books because you can make multiple kinds of products surrounding a single book. Pie for hardcovers will shrink but other parts of the pie will grow. If have a brand can role out many different versions of a book. Big worry is that they are becoming a technology company and it means that every job in the company has to be rethought. Very hard to move retail chains off returns. Worries about piracy and will be more of an issue if consumers don’t get prices they want. In total expects an expanded marketplace with access to a lot of people who didn’t buy books before.

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Quick Notes: Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, New York Times, iPhones

By Chris Meadows

SmashWords is getting smashed by Read an E-book Week, reports Steve Jordan at Nate’s Ebook News blog. Smashwords is running a special promotion for the week, with 3,000 authors participating, and seems to be running into some bandwidth bottlenecks. This level of demand is certainly a great sign for the viability of the medium.

AllThingsD’s “MediaMemo” section reports that Barnes & Noble has hired Time’s Jonathan Shar to head up its "Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble.com" division. Shar is a 15-year veteran with both print and digital experience. B&N could probably have done a better job coming up with a department name, though.

The New York Times is planning to spin off its Book Review section as a separate e-publication for e-readers, New York Times Marketing Director James Dunn said today at a journalism symposium in Columbia, Missouri. Within the next few weeks, it will be published first for Sony, then for Kindle, and Nook e-readers. Dunn said that the paper would be looking at other sections to see what might best be spun off as further separate publications.

It seems that a Stanford survey has determined iPhones may be “addictive”—essentially by asking people, “Hey, do you think you’re addicted?” I’m not entirely sure I find that methodology convincing. Still, the convenience of always having something to read in my pocket is hard to deny.

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Publishing Expo Keynote: Reinventing Today’s Publishing Company

By Paul Biba

Cathie Black, President Hearst Magazines; Jane Friedman, CEO, OpenRoad Integrated Media; Evan Schnittman, VP Global Business Development, Oxford University Press, Moderator

Cathie Black: starting advertising campaign about how important magazines are to counter the relentless death knell publicity about magazines. Very tough 18 months, don’t have a consumer problem, have an advertising problem. But looks like a good first half and advertising starting to come back. All magazines working on a multi-platform basis now. Magazine company is a “diversified” magazine company today. Becoming an advertising agency themselves. Consumers starting to buy magazines again. Raised magazine prices on newsstand, but increased size of the publications also. Every one of her magazines has a website. In 08, 40% of profits came from overseas editions. Magazine industry will be smaller in 10 years. Will never see another 2007 advertising revenue again. Now charging for some of the services that they used to offer to advertisers. 5 years from now: digital advertising revenue today is pennies on the dollar. Devices: don’t want to be in the device business. Consortium created with 5 publishing companies to try to avoid the mistakes the newspaper industry made – give it away for free. Consortium will try to work out issues for the future. The content created for one device may not work on another device. Zinio is worth looking out.

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Cheap paperbacks vs. cheaper e-books

By Chris Meadows

On Publishing Perspectives, Edward Nawotka posts an editorial wondering whether cheap paperbacks still have a place in the market when their prices are undercut by e-books.

He mentions a line of extremely inexpensive paperbacks that Penguin has been publishing in Australia at the “low” price of AU$9.95 (or about US$9.05) to celebrate its 75th anniversary. (I guess paperbacks must normally be much more expensive over there, given that’s a couple of dollars more than many regularly-priced ones go for over here.)

Many of these books are available as e-books in the public domain, for free, but Penguin has still managed to sell over 250,000 copies of those paperbacks in the first three months. Of course, anyone who has followed Baen for long is familiar with the idea that free e-books promote sales of printed copies, so that may be what has happened here.

Regardless, it certainly shows that paper books are not out of the sales running yet—even reprints of old ones.

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Will Apple purge e-book ‘appbooks’ from the app store?

By Chris Meadows

Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch wonders whether e-books might not be the next type of app to be purged from the App Store. (As we’ve been wondering here for quite some time.)

Though Kincaid makes it clear he does not think e-book readers such as Stanza or Kindle will go, since they provide a great deal of additional functionality themselves, he points out that all of the stand-alone appbooks (especially those that are just a wrapper around a Project Gutenberg public-domain text) cause a great deal of clutter in the e-books category, and would offer an inferior experience to the iBooks interface on a big-screened iPad.

It is worth pointing out that apart from the “sexual apps” purge, Apple has recently begun cracking down on “cookie-cutter” applications—apps built on templates, such as wrappers of simple RSS feeds, that provide similar functionality to a standard mobile webpage. (Ironically, this would probably apply to our own TeleRead iPhone app as well.)

It would seem that a Project Gutenberg e-book in an app wrapper would be no less a “cookie-cutter” app than a RSS feed in an app wrapper. But apparently Apple is limiting itself to blocking new cookie-cutter apps rather than purging existing ones, at least for now.

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Browsing the Alex eReader DS-10 manual

By Paul Biba

Amazon Kindle Review has a long article about the new Alex ereader. They have gone into the user manual and list a lot of the features and operating parameters. Well worth a read for any of you who, like me, are interested in this device. Here are the first six features they mention. There are a lot more at the site.

# The features are very well thought out. The number of options is a bit overwhelming. There are literally dozens of different settings.
# There are Notification icons in the LCD status bar including – new email, battery indicators, uploading/downloading data, and more. Plus you can scroll through notifications and open them.
# ‘Touch and Project’ feature that lets you project the text content of a website from the LCD screen to the eInk screen.
# There’s an Alex Market to download applications. You can also download applications from your browser.
# Alex’s browser has 5 text sizes, javascript, and a pop-up blocker. You can also clear the browser cache, history, and stored cookies.
# Email App supports up to 5 POP3 or IMAP accounts. The Email App is very impressive.

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How the iPad will change publishing?

By Chris Meadows

Nieman Journalism blogger Martin Langeveld posts a whitepaper currently being presented at a journalism conference at the University of Missouri in Columbia. The whitepaper reflects on the ways that the iPad will change the face of publishing.

Langeveld writes:

iPad is not a linear, incremental development. It’s not a simple next step after everything that has preceded it (even iPhone); it’s a new direction that will have unpredictable impacts on digital behavior.

He then proceeds to…predict these “unpredictable impacts”.

They include a substantial increase in mobile shopping, as the iPad provides a much better display medium than a smaller-sized smartphone screen, and a decline in print and “insert” advertising as ads move increasingly to the mobile web. It is even possible that mail-order catalogs will stop being shipped by post, as the iPad and tablets like it end up as “coffee table” devices.

Langeveld lays out a list of assumptions for publishers to make, and strategies to pursue, based on this idea. Papers should “reinvent content for the mobile Web and iPad,” and journalists should “develop new streams of content, in new formats and with new kinds of interactivity and connectivity.”

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Digitization of U. S. Grant’s papers completed

By Paul Biba

/>The digitization process is complete and all 31 volumes of Grant’s collected papers are now available on line through the Mississippi State University libraries. The volumes contain thousands of letter written by the president and other materials and photographs.

You can view the documents through the U. S. Grant Associations website here.

(via ResourceShelf)

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