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Electronic book readers save paper, but can a piece of plastic really be better for the environment? ES&T reporter Erika Engelhaupt is determined—very determined—to find out.
Hype and Hoping
Posted by
6 May, 2008
Posted in LBF 2008, eBooks
eBooks are everywhere. They romped gleefully through the London Book Fair, dominating all in their unstoppable zeitgeisty path. The Bookseller cannot stop writing about digital issues. Our dear broadsheets are even picking up on the story, reporting about the rise of digital here, here and here. Publishers, services providers, manufacturers, gurus, consultancies, warehouses, distributors, information vendors and, yes, readers pile joyfully into the gleaming future of the digital space. A utopian world of digital plenty is upon us. Undervalued for years, it seems that digital publishing is finding its place in the sun.
Which is why I am worried.
ell bee eff is gonna rock ya
Posted by
17 April, 2008
Posted in General, LBF 2008, Publishing, eBooks
There was a strong focus on digitisation at this year’s London Book Fair, with a full programme of seminars on the subject, and a general buzz around how to go about digitising your content. Sara also revealed, during the seminar entitled “Commercial Angles to Digitisation: Do They Exist in the Book World?”, that Pan Macmillan will publish new print and e-books simultaneously from January 2009. Other big publishers making similar moves are Penguin and Bloomsbury. Read a US perspective on this UK-based news here.
There seems to be a healthy progression underway from the question of “Will people want to read from a screen?” to active engagement with the task of going digital. With any luck, at LBF 2009 we’ll be looking back at the year of digitisation and focusing on what else we can do with digital publishing, apart from eBooks.
For a quick run down on the central issues, listen to Sara’s segment in The Guardian podcast from the LBF.
Cultural Amnesia and ’special edition’ eBooks
Posted by
14 April, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Reading devices, eBooks
We published our first eBook back in 1979, of course. It came preloaded in its own reading device, with a screen about three inches by four, and featured full multimedia support, scrolling text, a hyperlinked index, automatic text-to-speech, regular (if infrequent) wireless updates, and a slip case with ‘Don’t Panic’ printed in large friendly letters. Unfortunately, due to a highly improbable set of circumstances involving roadworks for a new bypass, all copies were destroyed and it never made it to the shops.
Like Cultural Amnesia, it was definitive, although it boldly claimed that in cases of discrepancy it was reality that was wrong. The one major feature it omitted was to allow the user to annotate it, then collect, save, distribute and share this marginal metadata with other readers. It’s some of Clive James’s marginal metadata that comprises the special feature of this edition, ideas and themes that were ‘parked to one side’ then span off and found individual form, and which have now been included.
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Notes in the margin of an eBook?
Posted by
7 April, 2008
Posted in eBooks
In parallel with the publication of the paperback, Clive James’s ‘intellectual autobiography’, Cultural Amnesia, is also being published as the first in our series of ‘special edition’ eBooks, featuring extra material not available in the print version and including a specially written foreword by Clive James.
We’re offering this eBook DRM-free; this is a deliberate choice on the part of both Pan Macmillan and Clive James. What we hope is that this will be a positive experience for our readers as well as contributing to the growing body of evidence that DRM-free is the way forward for digital publishing.
Anyway, I’ll stop blathering on about this wonderful new package here and point you to the Picador blog, where you can read more about it from Clive James himself and get all the juicy details.
You can browse inside the eBook using the widget below - just click the cover to get started. There is also an audio excerpt to listen to. Please feel free to add the widget to your own blog or site.
Telling Stories
Posted by
4 April, 2008
Posted in Blogging, Development, Publishing, read/write culture
Chances are that if your reading this blog you will have come across Penguin’s grands projets, We Tell Stories. In case you haven’t (where have you been?) its six digital stories and an ARG from Penguin UK and Six to Start, a funky start up that builds cool games. Enough has been said, for and against, in terms of content and conception but this piece on blog powerhouse Gawker got me thinking.
Its hard to know exactly what Penguin’s criterion of success in this project is- it must have cost a bomb and has no obvious revenue stream. As for traffic figures, I haven’t clue. In terms of coverage I think it can definitely be considered a success and has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today and Wired amongst others despite the ARG being a UK only affair. If nothing else it has introduced many people to a new way of storytelling and pioneered digital fiction in mainstream publishing.
Gawker don’t seem to like this. In the louche style characteristic of the site(s) they ask: “There’s got to be a better way for publishers to get people to read more books… using actual books. Um, right?” Um, no. Because I don’t think Penguin were trying to get people to read more books.
“Creative Business in the Digital Era”
Posted by
20 March, 2008
Posted in Advertising, Copyright, Development, Publishing
On Monday I attended a fascinating day of talks and discussions hosted by the rather wonderful Open Rights Group looking at “Creative Business in the Digital Era“. The Open Rights Group is dedicated to protecting and promoting digital rights at this precarious point in their history, when the struggle between closure and openness is still on.
The premise of the day was simple. In the digital era information and hence media (and the creative industries) exist in a frictionless environment where data can be copied and disseminated with ease, moving outside the traditional revenue earning channels and fundamentally threatening the business models of publishers, record companies and film studios, amongst others, not to mention artists, retailers and all the other subsidiary industries dependent on the sector. How, in this situation, to make money?
the uses of blogging
Posted by
19 March, 2008
Posted in Blogging
Michael and I have been talking through ideas for posts on this blog about blogging itself. These discussions range quite widely and you can expect some challenging words from Michael in due course.
I had a strong feeling, however, that I wanted to start the discussion around the theme of the uses of blogging – by which I mean the actual practical uses that people put this radically accessible self-publishing platform to. And my mind settled easily on Maxine Clarke, who is a friend and colleague at Nature Publishing Group, and with whom I’ve had a blogging connection for over two years now, as representative of this theme.
Maxine’s primary personal blog – Petrona – was a Typepad Featured Blog a year ago, and I think the reviewer exposed the brilliant core of Maxine’s experience of blogging: “Maxine has been a science journal editor for most of her working life, but in reading Petrona it can seem like she was reborn once she became a blogger. It started as an experiment, but then became substantially meaningful to her, if not her favorite personal pursuit. She is blown away by the power of connection in the international community of bloggers, and is open when pondering the collective blogging life: “Perhaps the effects will be similar to the society-changing effect of mass introduction of TV. This new power, however arises from not only being a mass media like TV but by being an open, interactive system, controlled at the individual’s level; enabled by information technology, not a passive recipient of it. I sometimes wonder what Orwell would have made of it all.”
Maxine started poking around with one blog and rapidly engaged with the medium (from authoring best practice and blog etiquette to promotional tricks) and the platforms (increasing her production and technical skills along the way), and now has multiple personal and work blogs running, and uses them each for different purposes.
Maxine has found a number of uses for blogging, and kindly agreed to write an article for The Digitalist, describing these uses, both in her personal and her work life.
In the first part of her article, Maxine highlights how book blogging has enriched her reading life; in the second part, she outlines some of the constructive uses of blogging in her professional capacity.
Do authors deserve ‘a better deal’ from digital publishing?
Posted by
13 March, 2008
Posted in Publishing
Kate Pullinger is one of the most creative, forward thinking authors I know, and she has my utmost respect for the positive way in which she is embracing the digital possibilities of the web, mobile technology and digital publishing in general. So it was with great interest that I read her piece on digital royalties in the g2 supplement of The Guardian the other week.
Now, I can empathise with the impulse to ensure that publishers don’t take an unnecessary large slice of the digital pie, if the economics work favourably and there are real cost savings to be made in a digital world.
But, but, but - let’s do a reality check. In the UK consumer fiction / non-fiction space at least, digital revenues *today* are a tiny (no, virtually non-existent, let’s face it) proportion of overall revenues. So we’re operating in an economy still hugely dominated by print. Publishers still therefore bear all the traditional costs of print (advances, editorial, production, sales and marketing costs, promo, paper, print production costs, warehousing and distribution, plus sizeable cuts to the wholesalers and retailers in the distribution chain). In fact margins have been squeezed further and further over the years for trade publishers as the high street has consolidated and supermarket sales of books have driven a bestseller culture that relies on heavy discounting. A book which actually earns out its advance is not the most common of creatures. In today’s publishing economy then, digital is an additional set of costs (conversion to multiple formats to support different types of ‘e-reading’; digital file hosting (virtual ‘warehousing’); content and metadata tracking and management; digital security and protection, I could go on…). These costs are 100% investment costs against an uncertain revenue stream which is likely to be little more than an interesting ’sideshow’ for quite some time, even when the channels for distribution of this content begin to open up.
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The Literary Internet
Posted by
10 March, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, read/write culture
Faber CEO Stephen Page has caused a mini storm by arguing that the web offers a haven for embattled literary publishing in an article written for the Guardian. Much of the fuss seems to be that Faber & Faber, the epitome of high brow, the aristocracy of publishing etc, is now getting involved with the web, something applauded and decried in roughly equal measure. Page is to be applauded, not least because his sentiments echo some recent posts here on the digitalist.
He writes: “So publishers must harness the great power of online networks through enriching reader experience. We must provide content that can be searched and browsed, and create extra materials - interviews, podcasts and the like…The key to this is just to make available and to resist too much control”. So far so commonsensical, a fair point amounting to no more than what is currently the standard modus operandi of most media organisations. His contention that “Literature can thrive in these [web] places” is more interesting in that Page is arguing that specifically literary fiction, harassed by an indifferent readership, squeezed by the exigencies of economic survival, has not only a role and place on the web, but that the web might be its saviour.
“Very Star Trek”
Posted by
4 March, 2008
Posted in Reading devices
Several years ago it was announced that a Phillips subsidiary would release a device called the Readius. Nearly three years on and a prototype was unveiled a few weeks ago from Polymer Vision. It looks rather fascinating; Engadget is even calling it “the stuff”.
Coming an array of wireless options (EDGE, Bluetooth, SMs etc) and a folding, flexible e-ink display (reminiscent of these kind of projects) it marks a break with the standard, fixed structure of electronic reading devices. According to Windows for Devices it should be capable of running Windows and Linux, will support DRM and will connect to PCs via a USB port. The screen will be “twice the surface area of the largest conventional mobile phone display”. As for formats the MobileRead forum suggests that it will work with “pdf + HTML + ASCII”. There are, inevitably, limitations: it doesn’t connect to the internet, it doesn’t support ADE books and pricing will be comparable to a “high end smartphone”.
Initially on release in Italy through Telecom Italia there is no news as yet on a UK or worldwide launch, at least that I can find. While new devices are generally to be welcomed, especially innovative designs such as the Readius, one gets the sense that the tower of eBabel and the imperatives of convergence instigated by, amongst others, the iPhone and a more general consumer weariness with multiple expensive gadgets, will hamper the Readius. If we get our hands on one then more to follow.
In the meantime here is a demo.
