Marketing guru Seth Godin has a piece on PaidContent (reposted from his Domino Project blog) responding to an interview with the head of Ingram Books about the future of books and publishing. In the interview, Ingram CEO David “Skip” Prichard trots out some of the usual predictions about the future of the book—multimedia extras, print-on-demand, physical bookstores finding “niches” to adapt to, and print publishers still being necessary. Godin calls Prichard’s views “economically ridiculous,” basing his argument on Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory. Godin suggests that the broad consumer choice the long tail makes possible will drive down production...

Sometimes I think you can make e-reading news out of just about anything. Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics, has taken a look at the recent Netflix price hike in an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog, and compares Netflix’s attempts to shift customers to digital streaming and away from costly physical media to newspapers’ attempts to move customers on-line and away from costly print media. (Mathew Ingram also has a piece analyzing Doctor’s analysis on GigaOm.) Doctor’s piece is long and involved, going into detail on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s strategy. It also discusses newspaper publishers’...

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's an interesting article from the New York Times that's making the rounds this week, about how a long-running, and hugely popular, publishing course at Columbia University now includes topics on digital publishing and ebooks. The summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.” Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master “e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not...

@calimaq has posted (in French) about a Europeana program that began at the beginning of 2011 to aggregate digital content from European libraries. The focus of the post is on what this might mean for digitized book content from Google. Here’s a mechanical translation of the post using Google Translate and another from Bing Translate. You can read more about the aggregation via “Europeana Libraries: Aggregating digital content from Europe’s libraries” from the European Commission. Hat Tip/Thanks To: @blanktextfield and @calimaq...

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:...

A partially sighted law student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia has filed a complaint against the school and six textbook publishers, reports the Times Colonist, over what he says is a discriminatory procurement system for students who need alternative textbook formats. For students to get an electronic copy of a textbook, they must first purchase the hardcopy and submit their booklist to the university. The university places a request for the alternate-format book to the publisher once the student has given them a booklist for all their courses. It may take up to eight weeks to get the book...

From the Nieman Journalism Lab's week in review: The Guardian’s digital leap: The Guardian has long been one of the top newspapers on the web, but this week, the British paper announced a major step in its development as a digital news organization with a transition to a “digital first” operation. So what exactly does that mean? Essentially, that the Guardian will pour more of its resources (especially financial) into its digital operation in an effort to double its digital revenues within the next five years. Like at many papers, the Guardian’s print side is sagging severely. According to execs, the paper’s parent...

Reader’s Digest, one of the original “content aggregators,” is working on revamping itself digitally. Long before the web even existed, Readers Digest was republishing content from other magazines, bundled together in a form that would give subscribers access to a wide variety of interesting content. The magazine was apparently hit hard by the digital age—it just emerged from bankruptcy last year—but has been making a comeback; it is currently the bestselling magazine in the Kindle Store, and has released three apps this year. And it just hired Matthew Goldenberg, former managing editor and operations director for Bloomberg, to be the general...

In a follow-up to last night’s story on the court case with implications for the DMCA, lawyer Nilay Patel takes a look at the case and declares it does not quite have the implications everyone is saying it does. Patel reminds us that even if the decision was binding, at the moment it is only valid in the 5th circuit states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—it’s going to take a review by the Supreme Court to make it the law of the land (or not). The case represents a “split in the circuits”—a disagreement between two or more...

In a related note to the previous story, Engadget points to an NPD report cited by Joystiq on the computer game market noting that nearly half of all computer games sold in 2009 were downloaded via digital distribution networks (21.3 million) rather than bought in boxes from retail outlets (23.5 million). Steam topped the list of top five digital retailers, followed by Direct2Drive and Blizzard.com. In this, the computer game industry joins the music, movie, and of course book industries as digitally-delivered content begins to displace that which is sold or rented more traditionally. However, new GameStop...

Sometimes the importance of digital reading shows up in unexpected places. Business Insider reports on Wednesday night’s episode of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, which featured an interview with Newsweek editor in chief Jon Meacham. It came out yesterday that, after nearly 50 years of ownership, the Washington Post company has put Newsweek up for sale. The magazine has been declining in readership and advertising considerably over the last few years. Meacham echoed Marc Andreesen’s advice to print publishers to “burn your boats”. In the era of the Internet, he admitted, most people probably...