One of the benefits of electronic media is that e-book stores are never closed for the holidays—at least for purchasers. But in some cases, for publishers, it’s another story. EbookNewser reports Apple’s iBookstore team sent an email to iBookstore sellers letting them know that the iTunes Connect app and e-book publishing platform is down from now until Thursday, December 29th for the holidays. It will not be taking any new updates during this time, and scheduled releases and pricing changes will be delayed. The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We...

Amazon may be stirring up controversy for its actions against independent bookstores (or other brick-and-mortar e-tailers), but at the same time it is creating new opportunities for authors. That’s the focus of a post by Mathew Ingram on GigaOm, in which he profiles a few journalists who have seen a remarkable degree of success with their Kindle Singles—e-books which could not have been easily published in print form. Journalist Marc Herman’s Kindle Single on the aftermath of the Libyan revolution sold enough copies at $1.99 each to begin to recoup costs for the trip to Libya in the first...

Simon & Schuster has entered a deal to start publishing books by self-publishing star author John Locke. There’s not so much that’s new about that in and of itself—after all, just a few months ago several publishers bid on works by self-publishing star Amanda Hocking. But something that is new, the Bookseller points out, is the terms of the publishing agreement: Simon & Schuster is just taking the print books and creating a new imprint to do it, and Locke will continue self-publishing his own e-books. Not only does this mean S&S is splitting print and digital rights—something publishers...

Today Push Pop Press, the e-publishing firm who produced an interactive version of an Al Gore climatology book, announced today that it has been acquired by Facebook. Facebook has no interest in publishing interactive e-books, and Push Pop has announced it will no longer be publishing anything. Instead, Facebook will be incorporating Push Pop’s technology into its own platform. As Tim Carmody put it on Wired: So instead of an independent born-digital press, publishing next-generation multimedia novels (or magazines or textbooks or children's books or cookbooks), Facebook will probably get marginally better iOS apps. ...

FutureBook has a piece by Kay Sayce of digital publishing firm Firsty Group talking about the newly-recognized need for publishers to sell e-books direct to the consumer through their websites. Sayce cites a recent survey by the American Association of Publishers which indicates that US publishers’ direct-to-consumer (D2C) websites make up an average of 44% of those publishers’ sales revenue. Creating a D2C website, Sayce explains, is a three-step process, requiring building first the website itself, then a strong relationship with readers, and finally brand awareness. She goes into more detail about the process, and notes that Firsty Group...

At one time in my career as an editor my function was crystal clear: everyone understood and agreed on the role a copyeditor played in the publishing business. But as the years have passed and the traditional publishing industry has consolidated into six megacorporations whose decisions are made based on bean counting, what was once clearcut has become fogged. (For an overview of the various editorial roles, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor.) This was brought to mind the other day when I was contacted by a client to copyedit a new medical book. The client's inquiry included these points: has recommended...

Hiroki Kamata, the Editor of E-Book 2.0 Magazine, explains on Publishing Perspectives why, despite being a leader in technology and consumer electronics, Japan only has 30,000 Japanese language ebook titles available: Simply put, publishers continue to remain reluctant to convert their books into digital formats due to cost, as well as their own ongoing fears about digitization. Why are publishers so suspicious when it comes to e-books? First, they believe e-books will eventually cannibalize their print book business. Second, they suspect the book market will continue to decline and, ultimately, become less lucrative. Third, they think international e-book businesses, especially Amazon’s...

Last week, The Digital Reader noted that erotic fiction publisher Ellora's Cave plans to release a custom ereader device at its annual RomantiCon Convention in September. Although it's rare to see a publisher move directly into the device space, it could bring obvious benefits, like lower costs and direct access to shoppers. It's also the sort of thing one might expect to see first from a romance or erotica publisher, since those genres tend to have customers who are comfortable buying and reading ebooks. (Only some of Ellora's Cave's titles are sold in print.) There's not much information about the device...

Futurebook has an article looking at a recent discussion in Soho held as part of a “Future of Publishing” conference series. As the piece points out, it seems like you can’t turn around without running into another conference or other event trying to determine how to deal with the “future of publishing”, but this series differs in that it tends to offer some hands-on exercises aimed at finding practical solutions. A few interesting things that came out of this discussion include the contention that, even though e-book readers and tablets have taken off in the last few years, the...

Long has my inbox-on both LinkedIN and Facebook-been filled with inquiries on various ePub creation software, especially regarding two specific platforms: Sigil and Calibre. Both are free, open-source creations of unselfish and brilliant folks that saw the eBook industry coming a long time ago. I've fiddled around happily with Calibre for over a year and been fairly happy, but only just this week did I pay heed to the various forum posts praising Sigil. After watching a few video tutorials and scrolling through the basic crash course I downloaded the open source system in less than a minute. The pros of...

There have been several moments these past few months where I've looked in amazement at what some photo and drawing apps can do on the iPad, and wondered whether they'd be good tools for book cover design. Not only has Piotr Kowalczyk at Password Incorrect wondered the same thing, but he's actually starting to experiment with the idea. Specifically, Kowalczyk is testing an app called Phoster, which provides 70 templates that let you combine your own artwork with pre-designed typefaces and layouts. With the right photo and some thoughtful adjustments, the resulting images can pass for clean, modern book covers...

Do I really have to say anything else?  I have dropped my ebook prices, across the board, to 99¢ ($0.99US). Well, except for the free books.  They're still free. Okay, maybe I need to say a bit more about this.  As in: Why did I do it? The short answer is, I did it because my book sales have been in a slump for the past few months.  I could, of course, speculate on all sorts of arcane market forces, bad breaks, genre popularity slips and pirate conspiracies to account for that, but I'm pretty sure the...