Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM.

Several years ago Steve Jobs posted a letter to the music industry pleading for DRM to be abandoned. My favorite part of that letter is where Jobs asked why the music industry would allow DRM to go away. The answer: "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy." In fact, a study last year by Rice University and Duke University contends that removing DRM can actually decrease piracy.

Publishing-industry observers and consultants have certainly ramped up the anti-DRM rhetoric in the last few weeks, haven’t they? I wonder if there’s some particular reason for that. The Kindle Fire securing Amazon’s lead in the e-book market bringing on a fresh wave of lock-in panic?

I also wonder whether anything will come of it. Are publishers taking heed and even now holding secret discussions on whether to follow the music industry’s lead? I suppose we can hope, at least.

On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that it was “a truly life-changing experience”. She lists a number of the benefits and useful features it has, such as the ability to drag and drop scenes into order, consolidate research notes into one handy place, and—what Penn calls a “game-changer”—seamlessly export e-books into Kindle and ePub files.

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

Penn still recommends using professional formatters for books with complicated formatting or lots of images—but for ordinary prose novels, this takes a lot of the bother out of creating self-publishable works, and is also great for providing copies to beta readers.

That’s certainly less expensive than a professional publishing app, and if it doesn’t necessarily provide you with the same fineness of control over everything that those apps do, fiddling with fine detail may not matter to people who just want something that will look all right on a screen. (Of course, I don’t know how much fine detail control it allows, not having used it myself, but Penn seems happy enough with it.)

I think I’m really going to have to look into trying that thing out one of these days.

Of course, it’s been possible to do the same thing with Instapaper plus Calibre for a while now, but that does add an intermediate step.

(We did mention this a year ago, but it’s such a useful tool that seeing a mention on Lifehacker is a great excuse to bring it up again.)

For one thing, he points out that MP3s aren’t actually used all that much in digital music sales. Apple uses AAC, which has generally better sound quality. The only major commercial market for MP3s is Amazon, and it only has 10% of the music market.

And whereas MP3 had a number of advantages over the competing CD format (in particular, it was much smaller and easier to transfer digitally), EPUB doesn’t offer any really compelling advantages over other e-book formats.

He also points out something interesting about DRM and consumer lock-in.

The obvious feature that gets blamed for lock-in is DRM, but it’s not the only way.  One of the reasons why Apple dropped DRM for music (though not the only one) is because it no longer needed DRM for lock-in; it could resort to more subtle means, such as the hassle of taking iTunes tracks and moving them to, say, your Android phone; or certain tricks Apple plays with its codecs to make them not play well with others.

Rosenblatt suggests that if Amazon succeeds in dominating the e-book market, it might very well drop DRM if it knows it no longer needs it to keep people locked into its MOBI-specific reader platform. After all, there aren’t many competitors they could move the books to if they had them.(Publishers would insist that it keep DRM on textbooks, he says, because students don’t buy them willingly. I wonder why he thinks that publishers of other books wouldn’t insist on it?)

He sees a more competitive market as leading to more DRM, as both Amazon and its successful competitors resort to DRM to keep customers from being able to jump ship, since there would in this case be a competitor for them to jump ship to.

The point is that in none of these scenarios do we get all three attributes: ease of use, interoperability, and choice – the way we do with print books.  Technology markets like this do not exist. They are mirages. Just like the commercial market for MP3s.

I’m not sure I buy Amazon being able to talk publishers into ditching DRM in any event, but it is at least an interesting theory.

Stephenson uses the example of the Beatles Yellow Submarine iBook, available for free from the iBookstore, which uses embedded Javascript to add interactivity. He suggests that this interactivity could be a great way for publishers to add additional revenue streams, such as the ability to purchase music from within the Yellow Submarine book.

While I will admit that it’s good to see appbooks that can be read from within the iBooks application, I’m a little worried about what this might mean for market fragmentation. Can other e-reading apps support Javascript in EPUBs? Is it even part of the EPUB standard? Or is iBooks going to be the only game in town for interactive works that don’t have to be installed separately?

I’m also a little worried that publishers will go overboard with these revenue streams. I already discussed the possibilities of product placement in e-books, comparing it to Taco Bell or Pizza Hut’s placement in Demolition Man. And in an online chat the other day, a friend of mine mentioned with consternation that The Hunger Games is getting its own line of designer nail polish. This probably has more to do with the forthcoming movies than the best-selling young-adult novels on which they are based, but can you imagine downloading a Hunger Games e-book and discovering you could tap a link within it to order these tie-in goods? In this age of declining revenues, will publishers be able to resist that kind of temptation?

But on the other hand, maybe publishers will manage to hold onto some common sense, or at least rationally weigh the risks and decide that the chance of additional revenue isn’t worth turning off the main consumer base. Or perhaps we could see some sort of “e-books with Special Offers”, in which people could pay full price for no ads or buy a version with product placement at a discount. And of course there will be books, like Yellow Submarine, where some form of product placement is natural. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

(I will note that I didn’t know the Yellow Submarine e-book was free, and as a Beatles fan I’m going to install it myself and see what it’s like.)

PaidContent has a report on Cork, Ireland e-book wholesaling company ePub Direct receiving €1.3 ($1.69/£1.09) million in venture capital funding to grow its business. The company supplies titles to 116 stores, including Amazon, Apple, and Waterstone’s, and also serves over 15,000 online libraries. The article isn’t clear on who ePub Direct supplies them from, but I would imagine it’s mostly European publishers.

Now if only Amazon would let people read EPUBs directly on its Kindle!

However, one enterprising gamer noticed that the game stores the text for all the books in plain text, and has thoughtfully taken eight hours to go through and format them into Mobi and EPUB files for gamers to download to their e-book readers. Of course, this technically violates copyright—would-be readers should own the game itself in order to have the legal right to read this material—so it wouldn’t be surprising if it gets taken down before long. But even if that happens, knowing the books are stored as text should enable fans with a little know-how to roll their own.

Duane writes that she took the opportunity to fix a few issues she’d noticed in the book over the last ten years, including restoring some material that had previously been cut and rewriting the last few chapters for greater clarity. She notes that this is one of her favorite books, and she may consider writing another book in the same setting at some point.

The book is available in Diane Duane’s Ebooks Direct store for $5.99, and can currently be downloaded as an EPUB, Mobi file, or a bundle of both. Duane expects to add more formats over the next week or so, but since her books are all DRM-free they can be converted with Calibre to whatever format you like.

To commemorate the release, for a short time she’s offering a discount code good for 30% off the $39.99 nine-volume Young Wizards International Edition e-book collection (but not Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses itself). Just enter ROSES as the coupon code at check-out.

I know I cover Diane Duane’s e-book launches a lot, but I can’t think of many other authors who have their own (DRM-free!) e-book stores and frequently revise and republish their backlist. If someone will point others out to me, I’ll give them some coverage too. I think it’s great to see well-known authors taking advantage of the promise of the e-book platform for connecting with fans and keeping old works relevant.

Coker writes:

To accommodate the books from these ebook design pros, we’ll offer a Meatgrinder bypass option called Smashwords Direct by the end of 2012. That means it’s coming but it’s not immediately imminent. Even when we offer that service, I expect most authors will still choose the Meatgrinder route because it’s faster, cheaper and, well, simpler.

The announcement seems to be garnering some positive reactions so far, such as this one from The Passive Voice.

The announcement did not mention whether Smashwords Direct will have different pricing than Meatgrinder. The “cheaper” phrasing seems to suggest it might, but on the other hand it could just be talking about the expenses required for someone to create his own pre-formatted e-book (buying the formatting software, and so on). Regardless, it certainly does seem to give the “your ebook, your way” slogan from the logo a bit more of a ring of truth.

Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store.

One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem to work yet. There are over 40,000 Smashwords books in iBookstore US, but I can’t find a lot of them in iBookstore PL. So far, if I wanted to buy Polish books published at Smashwords, I could jump either to Smashwords or to Kobo.

He also points out that Kobo’s use of plain-vanilla Adobe DRM on EPUBs means that it is not restricted solely to Kobo’s own e-book store—it can read any e-books that are sold in Adobe-DRM’d EPUB (as well, of course, as the ones sold DRM-free).

namenick makes some interesting points. It could very well be that even as Kobo remains in third or fourth place in the US e-book market, it will still stay in the running by catering to the places the bigger US names aren’t touching.

First, Duane is now able to make available multi-format bundles, including both EPUB and Kindle/MOBI, for all the DRM-free e-books in her store. (And .LIT will be added to these bundles as well, over the next month.) To celebrate, she’s running a week-long 20%-off sale using the coupon code BUNDLE. (When you place the order, you will enter the code on the very last screen after you verify your PayPal information.)

Second, Duane has added a package deal where all nine volumes of the “International Edition” of the Young Wizards series can be purchased together for $39.99, a 20% savings from purchasing each book individually. (And that “BUNDLE” coupon code works here, too, for additional savings.) These editions of the Young Wizards books have been proofed by Duane herself, so will presumably not have the typos that plagued the versions from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Apart from that, these are still the original editions, not the “New Millennium Editions” that will incorporate revisions into the first four books.

In deference to his need to earn a living, I will condense my detailed notes down to general terms. (Much of what he said was also echoed in the 30-minute interview he gave me on Friday.)

I missed the first 15 minutes of the panel, due to registration snafus. When I got there, Stackpole was discussing the benefits of Amazon to writers’ cash flow—Amazon pays 70% royalties (on e-books of $2.99 and up) and pays them every month, unlike publishers who pay a lower percentage and less frequently.

He talked about the need to write as often as possible, both to have new material available and to attract people to your older material. He also pointed out that writers should risk no more money than they have to on sale items, and not be suckered by economies of scale into buying some huge number of CDs or print-on-demand books or what-have-you and then finding they can’t make their mortgage payments.

Stackpole also noted that there are diminishing returns involved in trying to make sure your e-book is available on every platform. Between them, Kindle and Barnes & Noble have over 85% of the market; the time and effort involved in chasing the other 15% could be better spent writing more instead.

He recommended that writers learn to format their own works for publication, for the additional flexibility and lower cost. He recommended the program Legend Maker from zapptek.com, a $49.99 e-book formatting app for Macintosh that can create books in EPUB and Kindle formats. (In my interview, he mentioned that he had assisted in the development of the program, though did not benefit financially from it.)

While he recommends offering sample chapters for everything—just enough to hook the reader in and make him want to buy the book to find out what happens next—he does not think it is a good idea to give entire works away, like Cory Doctorow. Doctorow, he feels, makes most of his money from the Internet, rather than from his books. People who can’t do the same need to be selling their books.

(Of course, it’s worth noting that, as a self-publishing writer, Stackpole isn’t making all his money from his books, either, as the $8 fee for each of his several presentations at GenCon attests—even with the fee, this talk was very well-attended. I imagine Cory Doctorow earns a nice chunk from speaking fees, himself. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that; indeed, I’ve reported lately about literary agencies adding the sideline of helping their authors do just that sort of thing. This seems to be the literary equivalent of rock concerts from which bands earn more money than the royalties record labels pay them on their albums.)

Stackpole feels that the public perception that “you get what you pay for” means that 99-cent e-books, attractive as they might look at first, are effectively shooting yourself in the foot because you’re saying you’re only worth $1. And he does not think there is really much difference in sales between the 99 cent and $6 price points. “If you’ve already ponied up $500 for your iPad, you’re not sweating the difference between 99 cents and $6.”

In the last third of Stackpole’s talk, he went into detail about how to promote your book on-line, with many examples and guidelines. It effectively boiled down to creating an on-line persona for yourself, then being positive and interesting (nobody wants to read about how bad your hemorrhoids are this morning)—and never getting in arguments or flamewars. If you’re interesting on-line, people will assume your books are interesting too.

After the talk, Stackpole offered a $30 CDROM containing a career and resource guide for self-publishing writers that he had put together. (It is also available from his on-line store.)

And as I was chatting briefly with another attendee and mentioned I was from TeleRead, a woman came up to me and said that she actually read TeleRead. (I wish I’d had the presence of mind to note down her name from her badge. Alas, by the time I thought to do so it was too late.)

Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can’t access the latest guide unless you’re a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section:

“You can create a Read Aloud book by adding Media Overlays to a Fixed Layout book. A Media Overlay is an EPUB-specific Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) file that can be used to sync audio with text, allowing readers to follow along as the words are read aloud. An additional feature gives you the option of highlighting words as they are spoken.”

Fortunately, SMIL isn’t an Apple-created overlay, but a W3C recommended XML markup language that is used to control the timing of multimedia presentations, and in fact it’s been included in the proposed EPUB 3.0 Media Overlay specs.

By the way, the iPad also has a TTS function that will read most iBook EPUB files to you. It relies on the built-in voiceover functionality of iOS, which I guess is how it flew under the radar of the Authors Guild and anyone else who attacked Amazon’s Kindle TTS feature. In my tests, however, it doesn’t work on competing ebook apps.

5 Aug 2011 / Update on VoiceOver, the iOS TTS feature: I re-tested the most current Kindle, Kobo and Nook iPad apps after reading the comments below. Kindle doesn’t work at all (not even interface buttons are read aloud by VoiceOver). Nook will read some interface buttons but nothing else. Kobo actually does work, but it’s a little clumsy—you have to launch VoiceOver at the start of a chapter or section (at least in my tests), and although VoiceOver will continue to read the section after the first page, the onscreen page won’t advance. At first I suspected the varying levels of functionality had to do with what version of iOS was required, but VoiceOver has been available since iOS 3.0. Of the current app versions, Kindle requires iOS 3.0, Kobo requires iOS 3.2, and Nook requires iOS 4.0.

Via eBookNewser

Personally, I’m more annoyed that it’s a blatant rip-off. There are already plenty of free tools that do exactly the same thing, and the DRM-removal plug-ins for Calibre will free your entire library at once. Furthermore, I would be entirely unsurprised if it turned out that this company was simply repackaging and reselling the work the developers of those free tools had already done.