Back in July 2008, I launched the Digital Publishing Network (DPN) at LinkedIn. This free group enables professionals and enthusiasts in the digital publishing universe to connect, network and communicate. DPN has had explosive growth since then, and currently has over 2500 members. If you are a digital publishing/e-book industry professional or enthusiast (and this term is very broad), you are invited to join DPN. Let me know if you need any help in joining the group. (P.s., if you are on LinkedIn and would like to personally connect with me — any reader of TeleRead is my colleague! — send me an...

Got an email from Jon Noring about the new Facebook group he formed. It looks well worthwhile and I've joined it. We need some sort of coordinated presence so I think this is an excellent idea. Jon has been a valuable contributor to TeleRead for quite a while. Here is his description from Facebook: The Facebook group: Digital Media Users Group (DMUG), is intended to be the first step in launching a national/international political lobbying organization to represent the interests of all digital media and Internet users. Since the number of concerned digital media and Internet...

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’! Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one. To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures. The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design. A little history of ePUB's predecessor as a consumer standard Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal...

Recently I’ve started to build my connections at LinkedIn. From my vantage point LinkedIn appears to be an excellent professionally-oriented online networking service. I’m also active in Facebook, and that has proven to be great for both personal and professional networking. (I don’t bother with MySpace for reasons I won’t explain here.) Anyway, I looked around LinkedIn for a general networking group for anyone involved in the digital publishing universe, and was surprised to find such a group did not exist (or if one does, it is very well hidden.) Thus, to fill the vacuum, I’ve...

Second Life---you could almost make a career of it. Has Google created a simpler approach? Can even an absolute novice set up a room within the new Lively service? Actually I just did. Now I hope that others can take my sparsely furnished room to the next level. VR isn't my thing, but it may be yours, so enjoy! Go to Lively to download the software; then click on this image and check out The TeleRead Room. Jon Noring, a long time VR booster, as well as the founder of the eBook Community List and ePub Community...

It's official now. This fall, Twilight Times Books, a small literary publisher, will publish The Solomon Scandals as both a nonDRMed e-book and a trade paperback. My Scandals might be the only Washington newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound named Thackeray II doing a Harry Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club. I frame the main plot, set around the 1980s, with a foreword and epilogue written in the late 21st century. I'm just a time-warpy kind of guy---warped, too?---having started the novel back in the 1970s on an electric typewriter. Scandals blends Suspense with...

I have been quite perplexed in reading the many comments about IDPF’s “ePub” format following the release late last year of its underlying specs. A number of very smart people, including several developers who naturally dig deeply into tech specs, have painted ePub as a dark and mysterious digital publication (e-book) format, unlike anything else in the Universe™. The way some have discussed ePub, if Indiana Jones were to explore the deep caverns of ePub, he would probably find something exotic and other-worldly, maybe even the remnants of a long-lost civilization. [note 1] In reality, though, the opposite is true. ePub is...

When I was in college I collected 78 RPM phonograph records, primarily jazz records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Either I was good at collecting, or just lucky. I found and acquired several large jazz and blues collections (a total of over 100,000 records, about 25 tons, passed through my fingers), and didn’t lose a dime in the process. I’ve long since given up massively collecting the “old 78’s”, and today have only kept a few favorites. One favorite I kept, a quite rare classic jazz recording from late 1928, is shown to the right. [note 1] My experience...

AAP’s recent open letter strongly supporting the use of ePub by publishers was covered by David Rothman in a separate blog article. Reading the letter, it was unclear to me whether AAP supported ePub as a consumer format. The letter focused mostly on using ePub as an intermediary format to be converted by wholesalers and retailers into various proprietary end-user formats currently in vogue. The letter did imply support of ePub as a consumer format, by the use of the word “IF” in the second paragraph, but it was not explicit and some might have interpreted the letter differently. If so, they...

Since interest in the new IDPF EPub e-book open standard appears to be growing by leaps and bounds, I've started a new Yahoo Group for detailed discussions about EPub, called EPub Community. EPub Community is intended for publication creators, developers, readers, and anyone else interested in all things related to EPub and the IDPF specifications which underlie EPub (OPS/OPF/OCF). Although the group's focus is likely to be fairly technical, we certainly invite and encourage non-technical discussions. More generic discussions about e-books, and other non-EPub-related discussions, can happen at Book Futures, The eBook Community or Digital Text Community. Subscription info: Sign up...

Baen has partly crowd-sourced the selection of manuscripts. But what about the ultimate crowd-sourcing---letting buyers choose from an enlarged pool of books? Can the right Web-tools then enable customers to find the right gems? It's a debate now happening on the eBook Community list. See list moderator and TeleBlog contributor Jon Noring's initial post and responses from Zumaya Publications Executive Editor Elizabeth K. Burton, publishing consultant Marion Gropen and others. My take: We need a variety of business models and book selection methods. Can we automate the search for the next Moby Dick? I've told of the potential of...

Moderator’s note: Great timing, Jon. I’ve just posted The Triumph of social sites: Publishers, listen up! Annotation-style capabilities, of course, will make in-book communities possible. - D.R. David Rothman recently called on IDPF to develop an open standard, third-party annotation and linking format. I’ve previously written about the need for such a standard in two TeleRead articles [1, 2]. Hopefully the third time will be a charm! The need for such a standard is pretty obvious. Various companies are already implementing their own proprietary standards for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital media such as books, music, video, etc. Annotation and...