Pariah Burke's List: __ePublishing Preschedule

It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints.

Fixed-layout ebooks enable the expan­sion of the Visual Web into offline reading. InDesign just can’t do the entire fixed-layout ebook cre­ation by itself.

Publishers are becoming increasingly savvy in understanding the value of their archival content. Michael Rondon of Folio: gives a good overview of a few titles that are leveraging the past in their current business models.

A list of the funniest comic strips and cartoons about ebooks, e-readers, and reading in digital times.

Here are links to 9 of my favorite IFTTT recipes to help authors be more productive:

Marketing an eBook might be a time-extensive process that will require you to devote your resources to selling it to potential readers, and establishing your own audience. Thanks to the simplicity of the strategies provided above, you should be able to get people to read your eBook – and become interested in your future ones – pretty soon.

When Helsingin Sanomat began creating content for its tablet edition, it realised it needed to think differently about its advertising offerings. New measurements allow the media company to redefine success for advertisers.

Why did we decide to strike out on our own? There are many reasons. Here are a few of them:

In a rare interview, Cue sat down with Fortune to talk about the ebook controversythat has embroiled Apple and the six top book publishers ever since the iPad launched with the iBookstore in 2011.

Apple was found guilty of conspiring to raise ebook prices in 2011, after the launch of the iBookstore saw price of ebook new releases spike 17% overnight. Apple has maintained its innocence through the entire ordeal, and though the company has been criticized for its litigious nature, Cue says the company has to “fight for the truth,” no matter what.

The Nook, which once looked like Barnes & Noble’s best shot at adapting to the digital retail landscape, has become a drag on its bottom line. Barnes & Noble reported on Thursday that revenue for the Nook segment in the most recent quarter fell 41 percent, to $64 million, compared with the period last year. Sales of e-books and other digital content fell 21 percent, to $45 million.

Teachers are resourceful, and in public education there is often an air of scarcity and a perceived need for frugality. Teaching exemplifies the sharing economy—busy teachers trade their custom-made resources amongst each other to meet their local curriculum needs and to keep the classroom machine humming along. (Sometimes they share a little too generously: as creators of educational resources, we know that the photocopier has never been our friend.)

Tablet sales growth is declining, and Apple is selling fewer iPads every quarter. PC sales are improving. Ever-larger smartphones make great consumption devices. Microsoft has even realized Windows should be a desktop operating system, because PCs aren’t going anywhere.

Tablets used to seem like the future. Everyone would abandon laptops and desktops — or, at least, everyone would have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC. But tablets are now looking more like a niche product.

The children’s book market is fast becoming one of the most dynamic in the digital space. That’s the conclusion of the Digital Publishing Summit organized by Aquafadas just before the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair, where four publishers from four different parts of the world shared their experiences. Even in a difficult market such as Russia’s, where piracy is a huge brake on the digital economy, children’s books represent the most interesting segment for tablets, smartphones and e-reader distribution. They all use Aquafadas technology to create their digital books, and each shared their experiences in the digital publishing market.

Digital & mobile initiatives are priorities, but the industry overestimates.

“Without the false comfort of digital newsstands, publishers might be forced to stop holding their noses and plunge into the big scary world where they are competing with everyone on the web for time and money, not just the former rivals they used to face in your local newsagent.”

“All of this is because of the Internet: by removing friction it removes the need for folks in the middle, and the result is that value will flow to the edges. In the case of publishing that is aggregators on one side, and focused, responsive, and differentiated writers and publications on the other,” says Thompson.

I’d say that’s probably the most accurate account for most self-published authors who went into the publishing and writing industry as blindly as I did. They say that life is a rat race. Self-publishing is a rat race where every wrong turn means you get electrocuted and when you do find a scrap of cheese, you have to fight all the other rats in a switch blade match to the death. Okay, maybe not that bad, but close enough.

Now there’s a new metrics program that is designed specifically for authors and over time will provide analytics for a range of social media networks on one simple dashboard. This new application is appropriately called AuthorRise and at least while it’s in Beta it’s free to use.

Visual marketing may seem foreign to an author, after all we specialize in words, right? Changes in social media have shifted slightly to a more visual world with Pinterest, Instagram, and the wild popularity of YouTube.

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll increase both your chances of a review and your chances of a good review.