Sometimes it can be fun to watch expert prognosticators go back and recount the mistakes they have made. Mike Shatzkin has a post like that, focusing on two predictions he made that, in retrospect, turned out not to be valid. Shatzkin got into e-books at about the same time and in the same way I did: reading them on his Palm Pilot back in the late 1990s. He watched the first few waves of dedicated e-readers fail miserably, and concluded that people simply wouldn’t be interested in reading on a device too large to fit in a hip pocket....

O'Reilly Media is experimenting with a new publishing model for Todd Sattersten's book "Every Book Is a Startup," releasing it now as an ebook even though it's not complete. Right now the book is $5 for the first two chapters, with all future chapters promised as free updates, and as the book grows in length the price will go up. When finished, it will also be released in print for $25. The idea, writes Joe Wilkert on his blog, is to use the agile model of software startups—"release early and release often"—both to encourage purchases and to collect useful feedback on...

O'Reilly Media is trying out a new smaller, traveling version of its hugely popular Tools of Change conferences, called miniTOC. The first one takes place in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday the 27th, and will explore current trends in digital publishing from a local perspective: miniTOC Portland provides an opportunity for Portland's publishing and tech luminaries to share how they are forging ahead in the publishing/tech/content space. The best and brightest of PDX's art, business, craft and technology leaders will be gathered for a day of collaboration and connecting around their shared love of the bookish. If you're in the area and want...

"Why can't I subscribe to an author?" asks O'Reilly's Joe Wikert in a post on his personal Kindleville blog last week. He points out that while you can gather all the RSS feeds, Google alerts, and hashtag searches you like, it's not the most efficient way to follow a specific writer's work. Here at Teleread we've highlighted a couple of websites that offer a related service. Book Buzzes watches Amazon and alerts you when an author has a new book coming out, while BookWatch is an iOS app that performs a similar service for iBooks. But those are linked to...

Some e-books are published with plenty of errors, and others might have other reasons to be updated over time—especially non-fiction books in fields subject to new discoveries. And it would seem that e-books should be easily changeable at need, given their malleable, re-downloadable nature. But at present, none of the major commercial e-book vendors really supports much in the way of e-book change notifications. On his blog “A New Kind of Book,” Peter Meyers talks about this problem and offers suggestions for ways to fix it. He points out that Apple has a particularly good change notification and explanation...

I’ve touched on the possible beneficial aspects of piracy before. But here’s a column by Dan Misener on CBC News’s Arts & Entertainment section in which he draws some of the same conclusions. Misener spoke to publishing consultant Brian O’Leary, who reports that DRM-cracked pirated e-books are becoming increasingly more common—but that doesn’t necessarily mean piracy is having a bigger impact. O'Leary makes the distinction between the instances of e-book piracy (the number of pirated e-book files available for download) and the impact of e-book piracy (the actual effect on the business of publishing). For...

Forbes has a very interesting three-page interview with Tim O’Reilly in which he discusses a number of things about piracy, the e-book market, and the future of publishing. Back in 2002, O’Reilly described piracy as “progressive taxation” on fame, and has been quoted in defenses of piracy ever since (including mine). He’s got some more fascinating insights to give here. The first question has to do with the “death of print”. O’Reilly points out that print probably won’t die, but electronic media will transform what a “book” is. He uses an example of electronic maps, such as Google Maps—no...

As if in response to the last article’s dismissal of the $.99-$2.99 price point, O’Reilly Radar has a brief interview with Todd Sattersten of BizBookLab about the pricing issue. Sattersten points out that the main issue at hand is consumer perception of value. Consumers see that everything else digital is cheaper than the physical equivalent, and think e-books vs. books should be the same way. He brings up the example of a print book that’s cheaper than an e-book, explaining “That creates a short circuit in customers' brains. You don't pay more for things that are more convenient....

Technical publisher O’Reilly is having an e-book sale today to benefit Japan. All of the publisher’s books are on sale for 50% off, and O’Reilly will be donating all revenues, less author royalties, to the Japanese Red Cross Society. If you’re actually donating money directly, I’ve been told that Japan’s disaster relief now has just about all the money it needs, and it’s better to make a donation to places that can make a difference in more parts of the world, like Doctors Without Borders. But on the other hand, 50% off DRM-free O’Reilly e-books would be a great...

There have been a couple of interesting discussions over the last couple of days on articles pertaining to piracy of e-books. (A lot of piracy-related articles here tend to grow interesting, long discussions—take this one, for instance.) They have brought in a lot of new readers—at least, we hope they’ll become new regular readers—who have raised a number of interesting points. The City of Lost Wages One common theme seems to be feeling deprived of income by pirates. Celine Chatillon wrote: Every pirated book is a royalty (about 50 cents in most cases) that I do NOT earn. I’m unemployed and in poor...

Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly has posted a very interesting chart of the breakdown of format downloads by percentage of O’Reilly books for the last two years. The chart shows PDFs falling from around 90% of the total to around 50%. The sharpest drop in PDF happened around the end of 2008, and the decline has been more or less stady since then (save for a big spike brought on by an “any book for $9.99” promotion earlier this year). The biggest gain has been seen by EPUB format, which seems to account for about 25%, followed by Mobipocket...

On O’Reilly Radar, Hugh McGuire has made an interesting and provocative post that suggests that e-books may become more than just “digital versions of print books”. In fact, he suggests that “the line between book and Internet will disappear.” The thing is, I just can’t see why that should be right. McGuire explains that, as digital information, there should be a lot more that we can do with e-books than we actually are doing with them now. The idea that e-books should be confined to being simply digital representations of paper text without additions or improvements, he feels,...