ePublishing: eBooks, Kindle, ePub, and Paper

Penguin CEO John Makinson speech to FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference, London, 2nd March 2010:

The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers. The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC.

We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs. We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.

(via paidContent.Org)

The new paperback edition of Ozzie Rozzie is now available from Lulu.com.

Also available: Amazon Kindle version.

The British Library is to make a large amount of its collection of books free to download. The project is funded by Microsoft by “a very generous amount”. Interestingly, the books will made be available for Kindle, according to the Times, which also reports that printed copies will also be made available via Amazon:

Like the onscreen versions, the paperbacks, costing £15-£20, will look like the frequently rare 19th-century editions in the library’s collection — including their typeface and illustrations. Originals of works by Austen and Dickens typically cost at least £250.

Books to be made available from Spring 2010 will include Victorian classics such as A Strange Story by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon. 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books are now digitised.

In the Guardian, an interesting take on the coming of eBooks from Ian Jack:

Lenin had a famous equation: communism = the power of the Soviets + electricity. An optimist might adapt that to: publishing = the power of the author + electricity. The ebook abolishes the cost of ink, paper, binding, warehousing and shipping, as well as, further down the chain, salaries and overheads in bookstores, supposing they survive. On paper – inappropriate phrase – the benefits look like increased profits to the publisher (because so much of the cost has been stripped out), improved royalties to the author and lower prices and more houseroom for the reader. Another way to look at it, however, is through the paradigm of supermarkets and their suppliers, in which Amazon and iBookstore are Tesco, the publishers are the vegetable growers working on thin margins and the authors are the vegetables.

Full article here.

The slant of the article is scared, observing the inevitable reduced print run and commercial squeezes to come – the possibilities arising from adoption of the new technology, potentially enabling entirely new forms of literature to exist are not even raised.

Brilliantly written with such articulate and light hearted flair. One Way Journey takes you on a short remarkable journey of a beautiful mind and reaffirms that honest, and conscientious writing is what the world needs to thrive on.

– Ruby Hassan

Very pleased with the results.

http://bit.ly/onewayjourney – get the paperback book here.