e-books - Taryn . on Diigo

Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books - NYTimes.com

Tags: Google, e-books, publishing_industry, copyright on 2008-11-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The 26th Story: Content is Promiscuous and Ubiquitous...

links

Tags: academia, reading, publishing, e-books on 2008-11-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Media's last diehard? -Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins)

Tags: e-books, publishing, publishing_industry, technology, social_network, digital_media, president_obama, Google on 2008-11-08 -All Annotations (11) -About

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The technology of these e-ink screens is developing rapidly. Right now, put in television terms, we’re still in the 1950is with a black and white model. But the future is bright and colourful. In the months to come we’ll have foldable screens, colour screens, screens which can handle moving images, screens with interactive clickable advertising And a company I think you’ll be hearing a lot about soon is Plastic Logic. Using technology developed in Cambridge they’re going to be producing an ereader with a flexible screen.
all the different players that make up the digital landscape - the network owners, the device manufacturers, the platform operators and the likes of us, the content providers. All l of these players, derive their value from different parts of the chain. The problem for us, is that for the first three – content is something to be squeezed in the value chain. For them, content is like petrol in a car -the relatively cheap motive power of a costly and complex machine. Whereas, for the content providers, content is more akin to wine in a bottle -something of high value in a cheap encapsulation. We want to retain the high value of content, but have it delivered on cheap, multiple, globally available, platforms, networks and devices.
Can everyone have a profitable future? Because the digital revolution is being driven by the first three, surprise, surprise, the price of content is being driven down. This is obviously very worrying. Equally worrying, is the fact that some of these players, are able to fund the development of all aspects of the value chain themselves. This brings me on to my fourth challenge which is media convergence. Sky is a good example of a company, that started as network player which went on to invest heavily in content and finally in hardware. Of more relevance to publishing, are the likes of Google and Amazon, who are broadening their remit and are both now in the hardware game.
Unfortunately, the book publishing industry, is probably too fragmented, and undercapitalised, to follow this route. Instead, it has to make sure it adds sufficient value to content, to retain its place in this converging world. Publishers recognise that they can’t subsume the activities of other players but they have to work with them, in a model that protects the value of content, and their role in developing it and selling it. That’s why the recent deal with Google, is of such historic importance.
Thankfully, the book industry is in better shape than the music industry. And I’m not as worried as some by risk of disintermediation. A publisher’s job is complex, and I believe we still have an important role to play going forward.
The old model whereby a publisher commissioned a work and then went through a series of steps to deliver it to a retailer, who delivered it to an unknown reader, isn’t enough. The interactivity of the Web allows readers to play a part in the process, to engage with authors and each other and in some instances, become authors themselves. The old linear model is becoming circular. For 500 years, the consumption of books was largely a private affair but the Internet has socialised that experience. If publishers are canny, they will see this as an opportunity to add more value and to create new revenue streams.
Going forward, we need to operate two models: - the existing model, whereby we add value by selecting, nurturing, marketing and finally selling content to the consumer – in whatever form they demand and a second model whereby we create value in the experiences around that content where we facilitate the dialogue between writers and readers.
This project is a purely marketing exercise aimed at increasing the continued relevance of Doris’s work to new generations but it also illustrates the kind of value, that can be added, by a publisher, to the experience of consuming a text. Connecting readers, writers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers, is all part of a publisher’s new mandate and with this project, we’re doing just that.
The interesting thing about authonomy is that by putting us at the centre of a hub of interactivity, between readers and would-be writers it provides us with a new business model. In addition to being a new pool for talent spotting, we’ve also created a community of people who love reading and writing. It’s growing at such a rate - over 2m page impressions in just 6 weeks – that we’ll soon be able to start generating advertising income.
The last initiative, I’d like to mention, is our most ambitious project to date – which we’ll be launching in January next year. It’s called Book Army and it’s a fantastic social networking site organised around books and authors. Every book and every author that’s in print
the secret weapon, in BookArmy’s arsenal, is a sophisticated algorithm, which generates book recommendations, based on feedback from other readers about their likes and dislikes.

The 26th Story: Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry

Tags: seth_godin, publishing_industry, e-books on 2008-11-08 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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if:book: the five drafts of the gettysburg address: a sophie book

USC got $1.25 million to develop Java-based Sophie

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if:book: looking for lit in all the wrong places

interesting discussion all the way through

Tags: e-books, publishing, publishing_industry, literature, video_game on 2008-10-04 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover (ELO)

skip ahead to 25 minutes or so

Tags: digital_media, literature, e-books, publishing, history, writing, video on 2008-09-25 -All Annotations (1) -About

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New River Journal - Spring 08

mostly ?; roulette crashed the browser; note Factography

Tags: e-books, literature, written_for_the_web on 2008-09-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Is e-literature just one big anti-climax? | Books | guardian.co.uk

note no discussion of content

Tags: e-books, literature on 2008-09-25 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It? -- New York Magazine

"...difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power..." [I wish NYMag would offer a single-page format]

Tags: publishing, publishing_industry, e-books, writing on 2008-09-17 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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p.2
By the nineties, five big conglomerates were divvying up the spoils and their lucrative backlists. Many of the smaller companies that had been struggling, like FSG, Ecco, and Crown, were flush with corporate resources. But in exchange, they gave up final say in how they’d publish their books—or even what books they’d publish. And suddenly an industry accustomed to 5 percent margins was being run by media moguls aiming for double digits.

p.3
But overspending isn’t going away, even with a rotten economy. Last month, Harvard economist Anita Elberse wrote a piece debunking the hypothesis of Chris Anderson’s anti-blockbuster blockbuster, The Long Tail (which Bob Miller acquired at Hyperion for a mere $550,000). Elberse led off with a tidbit from a study of Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing. Of 61 books on its 2006 list, each title averaged a profit of almost $100,000. But without the top seller, which earned $5 million, that average drops to $18,000. “A blockbuster strategy still makes the most sense,” she concludes. [The article in reference is narrow and thoroughly poor - hinges on the book-as-commodity paradigm.]

p.5
“Some people say there’s not enough marketing done for a book, and I think that’s total bullshit. You do the marketing that works, and not much is working right now.” —PETER MILLER, DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY, BLOOMSBURY

p.6
The remaindering and shredding of books—a cost borne largely by the publisher—is a relic of a consignment model developed during the Depression that makes no modern sense. Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call “co-op,” under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it’s payola (or, as some call it, extortion).

“The fear of Google [BookSearch] is ridiculous paranoia. The fear of Amazon is enlightened self-interest.” —MIKE SHATZKIN, BOOK-INDUSTRY CONSULTANT

p.7
Editors and retailers alike fear that it’s bent on building a vertical publishi
post by taryn930 on 2008-09-17

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Generational Myth - ChronicleReview.com - (Siva)

read as f/u: Eszter Hargittai; Gina Walejko; danah boyd; David Buckingham, Susan Herring; Kathryn Montgomery; Mark Bauerlein

Tags: digital_native, academia, marketing, class, education, facebook, e-books, Hume, Durkheim on 2008-09-17 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (10) -About

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When Siva fixes his RSS feed so all the paragraphs aren't jumbled into one great big blob of pissed-off-at-Google-and-Berkman, I'll happily stick him back in my reader.
post by taryn930 on 2008-09-17

Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.
And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.
visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004
Once we assume that all young people love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that match those presumptions.
Invoking "generations" demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, technology, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It tends to exclude immigrants and non-English-speaking Americans, not to mention those who live beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior
Mannheim answered Hume by positing that generations are not dem-ographically determined, but historically. Big events forge common identities. And proximity to an experience matters more than birth year.
kids today are fundamentally different from the rest of us because their default modes of interaction involve mixing and mashing digital files and exposing (and rewriting) themselves through online profiles and avatars. That assumption bolsters the policy positions that the investigators already embraced: that the law should allow young people to remix and share bits of culture, while helping them respect and manage privacy. The policy goals are laudable. And the research is interesting. But Palfrey and Gasser did not need to render young people exotic to make their points. The concept of "born digital" flattens out the needs and experiences of young people into a uniform wish list of policies that conveniently matches the agenda of digital enthusiasts and entrepreneurs of all ages.
Add Sticky Note
- Yes. And in fact the most intriguing aspects of Born Digital are the authors themselves.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-17
Howe and Strauss go to show you that you'll never go broke in America marketing to marketers

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Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? - Features, Books - The Independent

see conversation with Kevin Kelly and Sven Bikerts

Tags: literacy, reading, literature, academia, fiction, e-books, publishing_industry, interview on 2008-09-16 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (13) -About

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Michael Bhaskar's follow up: http://thedigitalist.net/?p=231

"...188 million blogs seems to curl the lips and spike the arrogance of those who can’t see that this is now part of the writosphere as much as scribbling sestinas and neo-Freudian meditations on childhood.

Creative writing is as much about tweeting and posting on blogs as anything; or if not then it will be, or at least, if writers accept the challenge, could be."
post by taryn930 on 2008-09-25

Birkerts found that, as watchers of TV and videos, "they had difficulty
slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; they had
problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with
vocabulary that seemed 'pretentious'; they were especially uncomfortable
with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight
plot; and they were put off by an ironic tone, because it flaunted
superiority and made them feel they were missing something." It dawned
on Birkerts that a whole generation of young American readers were becoming
gradually decoupled from the whole culture of the written word.
Twenty-five years ago,
when the Amis-Barnes-Rushdie generation was getting under way, readers
seemed to have no problem ' being steered towards experimental,
inward-looking, linguistically challenging fiction. Flaubert's Parrot sold
well, despite its metafictional games with biography, as did Amis's Money,
despite its torrentially exhausting Amer-English prose style. Graham Swift's
Waterland, now on school English syllabuses, flew out of bookshops in its
Picador paperback livery, as did One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Midnight's Children.

Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal; "difficult"
novels don't sell. Adam Mars-Jones's massive, and beautifully-written novel
Pilcrow, published earlier this year, sold only a few hundred copies, and
there have been several similar casualties. Although, traditionally, every
Booker winner invariably becomes a world bestseller, the 2008 winner, Anne
Enright's The Gathering, made the briefest appearance in the top 10 before
disappearing.
To sell now, books evidently need to be big on plot and incident, short on
interior monologue – the sort of titles that the Richard & Judy
Book Club strenuously promotes. "Most literary programmes, which are on
late at night and concerned with 'literature', intimidate lots of people,"
said Judy Finnegan last year. "For some, that a book has been
Booker-nominated is actually a turn-off." Can this, then, be the future
of reading: an increasing number of low-brow, plot-driven works will flood
the market, consigning works of literary merit to a watery grave, while the
low-brows vie with each other for the attention of readers so badly affected
by the moving stream of internet info-processing, that they can no longer
focus their attention for longer than a few pages?
The instructions tell you, "One battery charge is equal to 6,800 page
turns (that's enough to read War and Peace five times over on a single
charge!)" Yeah, right. But it's not going to happen on the Sony Reader.
Nobody is ever going to read Tolstoy on this fatuous device. It's an
electronic simulation of a page, but it'll never convince you it's a book,
to be read by your sentient eyes and brain. It doesn't have the solidity,
the pages, the tactile companionship of a book. You'll never know where you
are in the story, or how much of it is left. You won't have the cover
artwork, to steal inside your head and become a lifelong reminder of the
book it encased.

And you can't turn the pages. I spent half an hour reading Agatha Christie's
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the first book to be installed) with my fingers
itching to turn a page; "turn" one electronically, and the screen
goes blank before the next page is displayed. It's a nasty moment, the
screen going blank and interrupting your train of thought; but it's a good
metaphor for the blankness to which our minds are tending, as we gradually
lose the ability to interpret the old world of sequential thoughts in the
new blizzard of information retrieval.
Add Sticky Note
- pfft. the dramatics.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16
The agent : Clare Alexander
Add Sticky Note
- doesn't get it
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16
Our reading rooms are still as busy as ever: the most high-quality
digitisation does not replace the power of seeing the original artefact.
However, people are now more aware of what we've got
The publisher: Jeremy Ettinghausen

"Penguin is the publisher that invented the paperback: innovation is in
our DNA.
"Could you compare a blog or a story told via Twitter to Dickens? Well,
Dickens wrote in soap opera-like episodes. It's always easier to decide
where the cultural action has been, but hard to spot it at the time. These
things are happening and we need to adjust."
"Their interest is in the books reviewed in the broadsheets and the ones
that win the Booker. Their ambition is to be on sale in high-street
bookshops and published in book form by a mainstream publisher. That is, to
them, a badge, because it measures the value of their writing against the
writing they admire.

"Ahead of this interview, I talked to them about digitisation and not one
of them had heard of Twitter, and they were all hostile to the idea of
e-books.

"They're not immersed in digital fiction, either – some have been
published online, but feel it's second-best; they're concerned about the
lack of editorial control on the Net and only pursue it because there is a
dearth of [print] outlets for short stories.
Add Sticky Note
- crappy personalities
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16

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if:book: a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era

Tags: writer, writing, reading, networked_book, e-books, publishing, publishing_industry, digital_media on 2008-09-08 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (59) -About

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Ever since we published Ken Wark's Gamer Theory I've tended to think of the author of a networked book as a leader of a group effort, similar in many respects to the role of a professor in a seminar. The professor has presumably set the topic and likely knows more about it than the other participants, but her role is to lead the group in a combined effort to synthesize and extend knowledge. This is not to suggest that one size will fit all authors
A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy's reading behavior: “He'll be reading a (printed) book. He'll put the book down and go to the book's website. Then, he'll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He'll put the book down again and google a query that's occurred to him.”
once we acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation — we can begin to redefine the roles of publisher and editor. An old-style formulation might be that t publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject.
Authors should be able to choose the level of moderation/participation at which they want to engage; ditto for readers.
It's not necessary for ALL projects to take this continuous/never-finished form.
main distinction of this new model is not type of media but the mechanism of distribution
in the long term arc of change i am imagining, novels will not continue to be the dominant form of fiction. My bet now is that to understand where fiction is going we should look at what’s happening with “video games.”
emergence of celebrity editors and readers
Over time we are also likely to see the emergence of "professional readers" whose work consistus of tagging our digitized culture
It’s important to design sites that are outward-looking, emphasizing the fact that boundaries with the rest of the net are porous.
Books can have momentum, not in the current sense of position on a best-seller or Amazon list, but rather in the size and activity-level of their communities.
Books can be imagined as channels, especially when they "gather" other books around them.
imagine google searches that make visible not just the interconnections between hits but also how the content of each hit relates to the rest of the document and/or discipline it’s part of

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thedigitalist.net » Short Fiction in the Age of the Ebook

Tags: fiction, reading, e-books on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

Tags: fiction, literature, publishing_industry, publishing, e-books, interactive_graphic, written_for_the_web on 2008-08-27 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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thedigitalist.net » 10 Reasons Not To Write Off Reading From A Screen

Tags: publishing, publishing_industry, e-books, reading on 2008-08-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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4th Story Media Partners with HarperCollins Publishers for Its First Venture: The Amanda Project, an Interactive, Collaborative Digital Mystery - Forbes.com

"It feels like the art and craft of publishing great stories for children is on the brink of revolutionary change," said Lisa Holton, founder and CEO, 4th Story Media. "We are exploring new ways of using the web to tell stories, while also leading kids back to the joys of reading. By combining talented authors with creative web designers we are fusing traditional storytelling with the interactive world of social networking, online games, and user-generated content. We are thrilled to introduce 4th Story Media with the launch of The Amanda Project and are delighted to be partnering with the exceptional team at HarperCollins to bring this series to life."

Tags: publishing_industry, e-books, literature, children, social_network, written_for_the_web on 2008-06-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books - New York Times

Tags: e-books, publishing_industry, ubicomp, books on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged e-books → View Popular

Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books - NYTimes.com

The 26th Story: Content is Promiscuous and Ubiquitous...

Media's last diehard? -Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins)

The 26th Story: Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry

if:book: the five drafts of the gettysburg address: a sophie book

if:book: looking for lit in all the wrong places

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover (ELO)

New River Journal - Spring 08

Is e-literature just one big anti-climax? | Books | guardian.co.uk

Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It? -- New York Magazine

Generational Myth - ChronicleReview.com - (Siva)

Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? - Features, Books - The Independent

if:book: a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era

thedigitalist.net » Short Fiction in the Age of the Ebook

We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

thedigitalist.net » 10 Reasons Not To Write Off Reading From A Screen

4th Story Media Partners with HarperCollins Publishers for Its First Venture: The Amanda Project, an Interactive, Collaborative Digital Mystery - Forbes.com

Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books - New York Times

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