By Dean Johnson An open e-Letter to the publishing industry: Great Expectations “Not another ‘Digital Publishing Expert’ telling us how to play in our own back yard,” I hear you cry. After all, anyone who claims to know your market better than you do, probably doesn’t really know enough. As publishers, you understand your existing customers and how they behave, …
Book2Look’s “Biblet” Takes the Book Widget to the Next Level
By Siobhan O’Leary Widgets can tell us what the weather will be, what time it is, or even help us plan dinner. And, of course, there are widgets that allow us to preview, share and buy books. German technology company Book2look (www.book2look.com) is a social media marketing tool that allows publishers to create widgets (book2look calls them Biblets) and embed …
Creating Free Content to Sell More Content: A Good Idea or Not?
By Hannah Johnson At the Mediabistro eBook Summit, held yesterday in New York City, book marketing dominated the morning sessions. But nobody was talking about print advertising or book tours. Instead, well-trodden topics like social media, online audience building and reader demographics were discussed in light of the growing e-book sales in the United States. As an e-book publisher, Brendan …
Making Open Access Pay
By Siobhan O’Leary BERLIN: Last month’s annual German Book Office Editor’s Trip to Berlin and Munich brought six university press editors from the US together with an array of German scholarly and STM publishers. Participants included Marguerite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor, The MIT Press; Jean Black, Executive Editor, Yale University Press; Jennifer Crewe, Associate Director and Editorial Director, Columbia University …
Self-Promotion, With Integrity: How Stephen Elliott Creates His Own ‘Rumpus’
By David Duhr For a man who equates his life to that of a retiree, Stephen Elliott has had a cyclonic year. Since publishing The Adderall Diaries in late 2009, Elliott has gone on a 33-city house-to-house reading tour, created his own iPad application, formed a lending library for 400 readers, and is currently adapting his book into a screenplay. …
New Zealand’s Kiwa Media Pioneers Multi-lingual, Multi-media (and Maori) E-books for Children
By Edward Nawotka AUCKLAND: Looking for an enhanced e-book that you can read in English, Spanish, Japanese, Italian Chinese or . . . Maori? Kiwa Media, a software developer in Auckland, New Zealand has has what you need. Throughout 2010, Kiwa Media has launched some fifteen enhanced e-books for children -– dubbed QBooks –- that function like typical illustrated e-books, …
Just 7% of Publishers Enhancing E-books, Among Findings in New Aptara E-book Survey
By Edward Nawotka Digital service provider Aptara released the second in a series of surveys tracking the development of the e-book market. This new survey covered some 600 publishers across trade, professional and education markets. Dev Ganesan, Aptara’s President and CEO, noted in the press release about the survey, “With a desire to meet the growing expectations of digitally-savvy readers, …
Following Successful 2010 FIL, Guadalajara Launches New Los Angeles Book Fair in 2011
If the Guadalajara Book Fair is any indication, Mexican publishing in particular and Spanish-language publishing in general, is indeed burgeoning.
Dedalus Saved by Fairy Godmothers: How the UK’s Esoteric Literary Publisher Survives Trying Times
“We exist to do the difficult things of publishing,” Eric Lane of Dedalus on life running “the most literary publishing house in Europe.” By Daniel Kalder CAMBRIDGESHIRE, UK: I first encountered Dedalus Books’ esoteric literary catalogue in the old Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a strange place: upstairs they sold Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and French editions …
How Neal Stephenson’s The Mongoliad is Revolutionizing Immersive Online Storytelling
By Michael Bhaskar People constantly talk about social reading as the next business model for publishing. Well, it’s here, it’s The Mongoliad. In the febrile, occasionally paranoid, always news hungry world of digital publishing, it seems strange that something so important should have slipped by so unnoticed, yet The Mongoliad seems to have been largely overlooked by the publishing Establishment. …