Ebooks and e-publishing

Interesting article and bit of video on the display behind the QUE.

CLICK HERE

Well, the rumours of an Apple tablet have been ‘doing the rounds’ for months (years, actually), but all the excitement came to nought, because (apparently) Steve Jobs wasn’t happy with the product.

Now, according to blog reports, Steve is happy with the product, and Apple have booked a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for the 26th January 2010 for a “major product announcement”.

All the talk up to now has been that it will be a cut-down MacBook, and oversized iPhone, or something with computer functionality. Now, for the first time, reports are coming out that it’s actually an eReader called the iSlate. See THIS LINK, although the report states that the announcement will be at WWDC 2010, on the 7th June.

So what is Steve Jobs announcing to the world in January? It’s something big, and there hasn’t been as much Apple-related frenzy since the iPhone came out. The iPhone is becoming a viable reading device, with many written works now available as apps downloadable from iTunes. Is the time right for a 7″ or 10″ version of this?

One thing you can say about Apple – like ‘em, or loath ‘em, they know how to wind up a PR bandwagon. All aboard!

Marion Maneker, writing in the Washington Post, has finally hit the nail on the head. Publishers want more money from ebooks than customers are realistically prepared to pay. The most popular price point for ebooks downloaded from Amazon is … wait for it … $0.00. Yes, free.

Customers aren’t going to be suckered into paying even $9.99 for a piece of popular fiction in ebook form. Why should they? Over here in the UK, supermarkets can sell 3 from the top 10 / 20 / 50 bestsellers for £10. £3.33 each. Now we all know the logistics of supermarkets doing this, and publishers and traditional booksellers can bleat all they like; we, as customers, can buy 3 popular books for £10. And yet we’re asked to pay something like £8 for the ebook versions of these books? Ebooks, with no printing, no paper costs, no transport costs?

The article linked at the start of this post is interesting, and should be read by anyone interested in ebooks and their future.

Well, on Christmas day they did – LINK

Which is not altogether surprising, considering that the Kindle was “the most gifted item ever” from Amazon. So Christmas morning, everyone opens their gift-wrapped boxes, unwraps their Kindles, and goes online to buy some books for it.

But the good thing is that there are heaps more ebook readers out there, and a ever-growing market for ebooks.

If you’re short of exciting new fiction, and don’t mind reading fiction straight from the web, then the Web Fiction Guide might be for you. It has a whole range of categories of fiction, and includes complete novels, novels-in-progress and short stories. Well worth a look, in my opinion.

There’s a great article in Network World about piracy and ebooks: LINK

It’s a fascinating read.

And there’s a great quote at the end:

The problem of piracy takes a backseat to the challenge of getting people to read books in the first place.

Quotes from the recent Ebook Summit from .: Media Bistro :.

My favourite: “The kid with a blog has more distribution than I did for my first eight books.”
-Douglas Rushkoff

From .: Online Courses :. comes a great list of 100 links for eBook lovers. Some of these are superb.

The .: Huffington Post :. has reported that the year-to-date Ebook sales for October were over $130million, up 180.7% from 2008. And that ebook sales now account for 3% of total trade sales.

This ‘exponential’ rise is set to continue in 2010.

.:: Advertising and ebooks ::.
So, the worthy publishers are just waiting until they can get a workable model, and then we’ll get adverts in our ebooks.

COME ON, GUYS

The reason we read novels is so we can ‘lose’ ourselves in the story. Author intrusion – that situation where the reader is brought out of the story by some crass text or errors in the writing – is one of the failings of some writing. So the LAST THING we want to see in our electronic novels is an advert sitting there on the page or maybe some stupid popup appearing when the money-grabbing publishers feel we need the opportunity to spend some money.

The sooner the e-publishers reproduce the novel-reading experience, at a less-than-treebook price, the sooner we can all start using the wonderful technology we’re seeing now. If there’s one thing guaranteed to stifle the march of e-reading, it’s stupid overpricing of the stuff we want to read.

End of rant. For now.