Last week, we posted about a new Tools of Change webcast from Peter Meyers that looked at several ebook production tools currently available. If you missed it, the webcast is now archived and available for viewing after a free registration screen. If you're not a webcast kind of person, you might want to revisit the earlier post for a quick overview of the programs discussed, then take a look below at the slide deck he used: Digital Bookmaking Roundup-Peter Meyers View more presentations from Pete Meyers TOC Webcast Archive: Digital Bookmaking Tools (registration required) "Digital Bookmaking Tools Webcast:...

The O’Reilly Tools of Change blog has launched a new weekly column covering at e-book news. This week’s column looks at the Samsung E60’s UK release by WHSmith, the $70 price cut for the Aluratek Libre (from $169 to $99), the new Laser EB101 device in Australia, the Pocketbook announcement we covered earlier, and a couple of brief notes about the Blio and the new Sony Readers. One reader that isn’t mentioned in the O’Reilly article is the new Sharp device (pictured above). Sharp’s President Mikio Katayama becomes the latest electronics exec to trash-talk the iPad, claiming the...

Kaplan Publishing is going to give away 95 of its books as free iBooks editions for the week of August 24-30. Brett Sandusky, director of marketing at Kaplan, has a post at the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog about the giveaway, and about the marketing challenges that free e-books present. Advocates and enthusiasts of free e-books may be a little confused by this, given that it doesn’t seem exactly “challenging” to give an e-book away for free and reap the benefits that come afterward—after all, Baen has been doing it for over ten years—but Sandusky writes: ...

Last month, I mentioned Ubimark’s publication of a print edition of Around the World in 80 Days with “e-footnotes”—QR codes that can be scanned by a free iPhone app to turn into links to webpages with additional content. Now Tools of Change reports that Ricoh Innovations is set to allow publishers to do the same thing with no QR codes required. According to Jamey Graham, Distinguished Research Engineer at Ricoh, RI's technology is similar to that of QR codes, but uses the natural patterns of an object or a page as opposed to a barcode....

Kassia Kroszer at Booksquare has a great wrap-up of the Tools of Change conference, in which she talks about her own and others’ presentations, links to interesting blog articles, and shares some general thoughts on the state of the e-publishing industry at this point. There are far too many interesting observations to summarize, so I’ll just pick out a few to mention here. Early on, Kroszer points out that “all publishing is already digital”—insofar as manuscripts are by and large now submitted electronically, rather than as typewritten or handwritten pages. But publishers are still using an old-fashioned...

Tim O"Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly media. Challenge is not to build the coolest and most enhanced ebooks. The publisher will never be a winner in a technology race. Innovations do come from publishers, but that's not the heart of what publishers do. Publishers' job is to do for authors those things that authors can't do for themselves. Be creative, but remember what you really do. Which is often the boring stuff. If not good at those things then someone will take your place. It's not easy to be found in this new world. Big haystack. All of...

Ramy Habeeb, established first Arabic language ebook house. Arab publishing market behind western publishing, and its lessons also applicable to other emerging economies. 60,000 titles published every year. Arabic market is the size of the US. Problems: distribution is still very primitive, In Egypt, 80% of books only available within 5 kilometers of publishing house. Censorship is still a problem. Three kinds: on purpose, self censorship and unconscious censorship. No viable OCR solution available in Arabic. International standards are a problem. Nobody uses ISBN numbers. They have them but don't use them or any other international standard. Industry...

Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic. Startup academic publisher. Publishing monographs in academia, an endangered species. 1980 sold 3,000 copies of typical monograph, now sell about 350. Challenge: how do we get to a point where we can sustainably publish long form monographs. (Discussion covers only social sciences and humanities) Academics still want independent verification of quality, editing, typesetting, curation, branding. Pressures on academic community: expanding academic ecosystem and need more publishing services, governments and foundation wants to see impact for research they are funding. Pressures on academic publishers: technology driven changes require investment in time of global...

Angela Bole, BSIG; Kelly Gallagher, Bowker Consumer attitudes to ebook reading. Ongoing project. Very fresh data, completed survey last week and this is the first release to the public. Looked a print book readers who are moving to ebooks. Respondents had to have read an ebook. 95% confidence level, about 44K respondents. Purchasing behavior: #1 reason to buy an ebook is affordability 34% acquired their first ebook within the last sixth months Purchasers of ebooks are buying fewer hardbacks and paperbacks 47% read ebooks on a desktop, 32% on the Kindle, 11% on iPhone, 10% on iPod Touch, 9% on...