That's the title of a very interesting article in Publishing Perspectives.  Here's a bit of the beginning: PARIS: In this early era of enhanced e-books, start-ups in the business have to remain nimble. Consider Julien Simon who runs Walrus, a French enhanced e-book publisher and creative studio. Simon and his three partners work with EPUB 3, the newest format for e-books that offers, among other things, scripted interactivity and embedded multimedia. Until last month Walrus’ enhanced books were uniquely readable as iBooks on Apple devices because of the platform’s ability to read videos. Then, in mid...

Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece on the error-ridden nature of many e-books, especially those of older pre-digital-publication titles. It explains why and how these errors manage to creep in—the different number of digital formats that all need to be corrected, and the age of the source material are often prime factors—as is the rush to get pre-digital works into electronic print as soon as possible so as to sell more copies. I found amusing this passage, from a spokesman for a publishing company that produced a book so riddled with errors the author of the article got a...

And speaking of cloud-based subscription models for e-reading, Publishing Perspectives has another company-founder-written column. Justo Hidalgo, co-founder of 24Symbols (which we covered here and here), writes about the cloud-based subscription model of his company and how he believes it can turn pirates into paying customers. Hidalgo points out that the music and movie industries have shown that trying to fight piracy is a fairly futile, and that pirates are usually dedicated fans who want more control over the way they consume their media. (Which makes sense, really—why would you pirate something you didn’t want?) He thinks that publishers...

In a related note to last night’s story on hardcovers vs. paperbacks, today Publishing Perspectives carried an interview with Randy Petway, vice president of digital publishing services company Publishing Technology. Much of the interview talks about things that mainstream publishers could learn from academic publishers, but he also talks about the potential threat e-books pose to print books. Petway notes that not everyone values the physical properties of books (look, feel, smell, etc.), and that “At the end of the day, if your goal is simply to read, then the e-book is not just acceptable but preferable for flexibility...

On Publishing Perspectives Daniel Kalder talks with Scott Walker, president of Brain Candy LLC and one of the people behind the Creative Commons shared-universe project Runes of Gallidon. Walker believes that there is a gap between creators of commercial media, and the fans who enjoy the commercial media enough to create their own derivative works based on it and distribute them for free. He thinks the gap can be bridged, with financial benefits for all. In Walker’s proposed “transmedia” projects like Runes of Gallidon, there are gatekeepers on the world to make sure that any prospective new additions fit...

Publishing Perspectives reports on a new study (PDF file) commissioned from Bain & Co. by the Forum d’Avignon that suggests 15 to 20% of the developed world’s population could be using digital reading devices by 2015, and that digital formats may account for “20 to 28% of industry profits in the medium to long term.” The survey sample consisted of 3,000 people from several countries. There are a number of interesting findings here, but I was drawn in particular to this paragraph from the Publishing Perspectives article: The biggest obstacle to adopting a digital device,...

Publishing Perspectives has an editorial by Chris Vanozzi, co-founder of Quilliant.com—another one of the self-promotion guest pieces that Publishing Perspectives often runs, but at least an interesting one. Quilliant, as Vanozzi explains in the article, is another attempt to “recreate the classic writing group over the web.” Writers fill out a profile about what kind of writing they do, and they are matched with other writers working in similar areas to work together and trade feedback. The goal, he explains, is to help writers find an audience, to help literary agents find promising writers, and to help...

In a Publishing Perspectives op-ed, Chris Rechtsteiner, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Page Foundry, Inc., a company that produces a “digital content enablement platform,” has some prognostications about creating “sustainable value” in e-publishing. He has some interesting things to say, bearing in mind that his recommendations are in line with the services his company provides. First of all, Rechtsteiner says that publishers need to focus on creating “sustainable value”—the impression that their digital content has value in the long term, and is not simply ephemeral and disposable. Instead, it “must become an integral part of the reader’s...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece from young-adult publisher Jacob Lewis on why he has decided to create an on-line community called Figment where teens can write and share stories. Lewis was inspired by the way teens have adopted cell phones in Japan for many and more general purposes than they are usually used in America. But there was more to it than just wanting to see how well that would work over here. One aspect of the Japanese model that is particularly compelling is the intimate relationship created between writer and reader. Delivered...

Remember that method of forcing iPhone apps to run full-screen on jailbroken iPads without pixel-doubling we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that required manually editing a configuration file on the iPad? Gizmodo reports that someone has now come out with a Cydia application (actually an OS extension) called FullForce that will automate the process for jailbroken iPads. Gizmodo mentions the iPhone New York Times app and Facebook app as prime candidates for FullForce use—and Nate the Great confirms that it does work with Stanza. It’s suddenly become a lot more tempting to jailbreak my iPad. ...

Three big publishers and a number of smaller publishers have signed onto a “made in Spain” e-book platform called Libranda, Publishing Perspectives reports. It will use EPUB with Adobe DRM, and allow purchased books to be read on up to 6 PCs and 6 mobile devices by default (though publishers may choose to use more restrictive settings). Unfortunately, e-books in Spain will be sold with a value-added tax of 18% rather than usual 4% for printed books. For taxation purposes, e-books are apparently considered computer software rather than books.(See also the discussion topic in which Edward Nawotka asks...

Publishing Perspectives posted an article yesterday by Kristen McLean, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC), about the benefits that computer technology has had and e-books are likely to have for child literacy. (There is also a related editorial/discussion topic by Edward Nawotka.) McLean notes that studies have shown literacy rates for children have already increased considerably over those for children of the same age prior to the computer. But reading literacy is only one kind of literacy that children are going to need in coming years. Participation, collaboration, intuitive problem-solving,...