By Dr. Frank Lowney I recently traveled to Kansas City, Mo., to attend the annual convention put on by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), and to participate in a panel discussion on the impact of emerging technologies upon the textbook business. The CAMpus market EXpo, or CAMEX, is billed as the “largest annual tradeshow and educational event in the collegiate retailing industry.” NACS represents nearly all U.S. college stores, but CAMEX is attended primarily by people who run campus-owned stores. Half of all college stores are campus-owned; the other half are outsourced operations such as eFollett. The experience firmed-up many of...

The news, released today, that the San Francisco-based Inkling has decided to give away for free its "collaborative digital publishing environment" known as Inkling Habitat was probably the e-publishing community's most eyebrow-raising story of the week thus far. As Laura Hazard Owen wrote today for Paid Content, the company "has spent three years and $30 million to build Habitat, a cloud-based set of digital publishing tools that let users create and collaborate on high-quality, interactive ebooks." That sounds like fairly exciting stuff. Although if Inking Habitat actually manages to get itself off the proverbial ground over the next few months with any sort...

On The Verge, new e-book reader Laura June comes to the same realization as quite a few of her forebears (including me) over the last few years: in emphasized orange all-capital header-sized letters: “e-books are apparently lousy with typos.” She brings up the example of Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum, a still-in-print book by a living author translated from Italian at great trouble and expense, which features a number of c-for-e OCR errors: I’ve found other typos in other books too, but statistics on this are hard to come by, and since I’ve only been using an e-reader for a few weeks,...

When author Penelope Trunk wanted to publish a book about the American Dream, she writes in her blog that she was blown away by how inept her traditional publisher was when it came to marketing it. (She does not name the publisher, but says it’s a major household name.) This publisher had already paid her an advance, and as the time approached when the book itself would be published, she was stunned when her publisher originally suggested marketing through “newsgroups”, and then through a LinkedIn fan page. When she took a meeting with them to discuss the issue, she...

The New York Times has an interesting piece by Julie Bosman positing that, thanks to the ease with which e-books now allow authors to publish and self-publish, and let readers buy instantaneously, authors are now feeling “obligated” to write more, faster. Rather than publish the “usual” one book per year, authors are pressured to “[pull] the literary equivalent of a double shift” and write more frequently. “It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is...

Self-publishing, usually through Amazon, seems to be the latest hot thing, displacing getting a book accepted through the Big Six publishers. But there’s an alternative between those two that people tend to overlook: publishing through a small press. Our own founder David Rothman had his own book The Solomon Scandals published through a small press, for example. Another author who published through a small press is Liana Brooks, who has an interview on indie fantasy author Lindsay Buroker’s blog discussing the book she chose to publish through a small e-book press instead of publish herself. The book, Even Villains...

If I were to pick one word describing the publishing industry’s attitude toward Amazon over the last couple of years, that word would be “panic”. We see it in the Authors Guild’s angry tirades about Amazon having too much power, in Barnes & Noble’s and other booksellers’ decision to boycott Amazon-published books, and most of all in the imposition of agency pricing by which publishers attempted to padlock a bell onto that obnoxious Amazon cat. But on Publishing Perspectives, Lisa Buchan, CEO of on-line book rights trading community Sparkabook, says that these fears may be overblown. ...

Until recently, the main formatting tools that self-publishing writers could use to create e-books were expensive desktop-publishing applications that cost a lot of money to buy and a lot of time to learn. (I’m not counting Calibre here because Calibre is a conversion app—you still have to do the actual writing and formatting in something else.) However, the $50 writing and note-keeping app Scrivener has changed that. Scrivener can export e-books in PDF, Kindle, EPUB, and Word (required for Smashwords) formats, among others. On his blog “Writing is Hard Work,” independent author and English teacher Roger Colby...

I found an interesting article on the blog of “technology innovation company” DPCI about how PDF format is an e-publishing dead end. In an era when e-readers have so many different potential screen sizes and different text formatting and rewrapping abilities, the article notes, a format that was primarily developed to freeze a page into a form that would look the same no matter where it was printed is a dead end for screen reading. PDF is a dead-end format. What I mean by this is that the nature of the format mimics what it was...

Paul forwarded to me an email from Michael O’Neil from the National Coalition Against Censorship, with a press release noting that the NCAC and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) are mobilizing to put pressure on PayPal to reverse its requirement that online bookshops stop carrying certain kinds of erotica. Scribd carries a copy of the open letter the organizations sent to PayPal. The press release says: The ABFFE and NCAC letter notes that PayPal’s policy has the potential to suppress important literary works.  “Incest, rape and bestiality have been depicted in world...

Remember when Amazon started removing various kinds of erotica from its store? It’s happening again, this time with a number of independent e-publishing sites such as All Romance and Smashwords. Today, Nate Hoffelder called attention to an e-mail from Mark Coker of Smashwords to authors who publish through the platform. Coker reported that PayPal had issued Smashwords an ultimatum regarding certain categories of erotica published through the site. If books in these categories were not removed, PayPal would stop doing business with the site. Because Smashwords relies so heavily on PayPal as a payment processor, the site is...

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t see a threat in Amazon, but instead sees opportunity. Mayer has some books in the Kindle Select program, but he is also providing exclusives to Barnes & Noble and doing business with Kobo and others as well. I’m not...