The Amazon Web Services outage took our website down for almost two days before we were able to migrate Wattpad’s content, user libraries and infrastructure to new servers. During the outage, we heard very little from Amazon, a lot from users and even more from online media. Some of the loudest voiced questions about the validity of cloud providers for business owners. Are the conveniences of the cloud worth the risk of possible outages? In short, Yes. Wattpad is a young business that is expanding by 300% a year. For us and other new start ups, hosting our own servers would distract our...

On her blog Words About Words, Charlotte English takes a look at the notion that e-book readers are the province of the wealthy, or at least the well-off. There is a perception, she notes, that the readers are expensive, and filling it with e-books is more so if you buy at full price. However, this isn’t quite true in practice. English suggests that the sort of people who would be likely to buy e-books at full price are the same sort who walk into bookstores every weekend and come out with four or five new books each visit—and nobody...

That's what the The Bookseller is saying today.  According to the article agents are expecting that escalators will become standard rather than an exception. An escalator clause means the royalty rate changes according to the level of sales. One leading agent said: "A number of publishers in the UK and the US are now offering escalating royalties [on e-books] . . . I want to work totally with publishers but I think they should at least be open to an escalating royalty rate on e-books." He said offering an escalator would be a way of bridging the gap between the royalty rate...

We've had some controversy in the comments over whether aspiring self-publishers should desigbn their own books. Here's a site listing what they consider to be the top design and top typography and font blogs.  This is what they say: They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but sometimes it’s the cover that draws us in to further explore what a book is all about. Book design has taken off with the rise of the Internet because there’s a clear sense of what readers are looking for when they hit the bookstore in search of their next read. These graphic design...

From the press release: The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,231 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning. The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,231 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page...

I downloaded an app for my iPad yesterday that excites me. It's a version of the Hebrew Bible with some interesting options for those who are trying to improve their Hebrew language skills. One can choose to read the text just in Hebrew, just in English, in a hybrid mode with Hebrew and English side by side, or in a 'learning' mode where the text appears in Hebrew, but when you tap a word, a box pops up with the English meaning. The recent Passover holiday reminded me how rusty my Hebrew has gotten, and following some first-grader-esque stumbles over the...

If the iPad was supposed to be a magic bullet for e-books, why hasn’t iBooks made more of a splash in the e-book market? Jason Bennett asks the question in an entry on Melville House Publishing’s blog, pointing to the much higher Kindle (24%) than iPad 1 (13%) ownership among those waiting in line to buy an iPad 2, and Apple’s overall cageyness about iBooks sales in its quarterly report. Apple certainly hasn’t seen fit to go to some of the lengths Amazon or Barnes and Noble have for providing more avenues of sale for their books. There...

Russell Davies has a piece in the Guardian reacting to the Metro’s somewhat breathless denunciation of piracy as a “colossal threat” last week. The Metro piece frets that piracy could cost authors and publishers millions of pounds, and “be as devastating as illegal file-sharing was for the music industry.” (Because we all know how bereft and bankrupt the music industry now is, what with no new music being recorded anymore since Napster turned every recording artist out on the street to busk for a living. Alas, if only consumers had been willing to pay for digital music sold...

Carrying on the electronic self-publishing theme of my posts tonight, Michael Stackpole (whose self-publishing efforts we’ve covered before) has a blog post talking about the reasons some authors fear self-e-publishing. He discusses the perceived illegitimacy of self-published books (a holdover from the pre-Internet days when self-publishing meant “vanity press”), pointing out that the traditional publishers don’t exactly have clean hands in that regard anymore either. Traditional publishing surrendered it’s claim to being gatekeepers every time they let a crap novel get printed. Am I to believe that Snooki is ever going to be short-listed for...

I suppose it was inevitable. As self-e-publishing has drawn more and more attention, with relatively major-name authors deciding to forego pro-publishing and go it alone, and over 1/4 of the Amazon Top 100 list being made up of such books, now signs of an anti-pro-publishing “backlash” have popped up. Blogger switch11 at iReaderReview points out the “mistake” one popular self-publishing author made when he decided to sign up with Macmillan. There’s no other way to put it – Signing a book deal was a huge mistake. John Rector could have been a Top 100 Kindle...

Pitch University, an advice site centered around how to pitch your book, has an interesting look at whether or not a writer should e-publish his book. Literary agent Christine Wittholn takes a look at the opportunities fostered by the e-publishing explosion and warns that they may not be right for everybody. E-publishing, she is quick to warn, creates a huge slushpile, with quality writers sometimes few and far between. If a writer is going to self-publish, he needs to know how to make his work stand out from the rest, and also has to know how to balance promotional...

These are my notes from the webinar that took place this morning. Major update to platform.  Best selling product.  Customers want more tablet features.  Update delivered this morning.  Apps, full featured email client, Flash and new interactive content. Claudia Romanini, Director of Developer Relations: invited 3rd party developers to contribute. Launched 6 months ago and now have over 5,000 developers signed up.  Not trying to build largest app offering. Conde Nast and Chronicle Books participating, also National Ge0graphic, Lonely Planet.  More than 125 apps at launch.  Competitive business model for developers.  Want even more reading-centric applications.  Email: full screen virtual keyboard.  Air...