One Hand Publishing

Reading Revolution - An article in the Huffington Post mentioned how social reading is the next phase of the e-book revolution. Amazon and Indigo were the first to embrace the idea of social reading. Customers were encouraged to comment in their company controlled chat rooms. This was not enough for Bob Stein, the founder of Criterion Collection, the celebrated video distribution company; he decided to add commentary tracks to movies on DVD as well. Recently Bob Stein has been cooking up a new application called “SocialBook”; It is similar to Amazon and Indigo. However, it doesn’t limit readers to a certain digital room in e-readers, such as Kobo or Kindle. Readers will be able to share what they are reading and invite friends and family to the conversation. And it doesn’t stop there, SocialBook participants will be put right in the text of the book; imagine if you could scribble notes, highlight portions, pull out quotes and even re-arrange the content right in the digital margin of the book.

Stein believes Socialbook and networked technologies like it make discussion about books far more social, dynamic and powerful. “I’m quite sure that this concept of social reading is much deeper than anything I’ve done before,” Stein told us. “Criterion was cool, re-imagining the page [with CD-ROMs] to include audio and video. Great idea, I’m glad we did it and it was important, but the idea that media is becoming fundamentally social is much deeper.”

Stein believes online sharing may become the dominant way of both consuming and producing stories.

“This idea that we read by ourselves is a relatively recent idea and is going to go away,” he said. “The reality is that once you start locating texts inside of that dynamic network, you start opening up the possibilities for the book to become a place where readers can start to congregate and start to talk to each other, and once people start to see the power of that, they won’t want to go back.”

Not all of us are a believer of intense online socialization of reading and writing, such as James Bridle, a UK-based editor. Though he does agree that digital technologies could be used to enhance the relationship between authors and readers. It could be as valuable as online social reading and writing. To take it up a notch, Hugh McGuire, the Montreal-based founder of online publishers Pressbooks and Libravox set a new book business model such as making all the information in all future books open, accessible and free for analysis.

“One of the things I believe is that a lot of books will end up totally on the web, and that’s something that horrifies people for, I think, cultural reasons,” said McGuire.

He said a lot of people think “books are important and the web is for Twitter and Facebook and silly things. I say this is a ridiculous notion. First of all, there’s an awful lot of schlock and not very good stuff which is published as books, and there’s an enormous amount of serious information that is on the web.”

To get at that serious information, read it and discuss it freely, McGuire thinks within the next five years, every page of every book will become its own searchable webpage with its own URL.

He also thinks nearly every book will come with an application programming interface (API), which is a sophisticated programming tool that will allow you to manipulate the information in weird and wonderful and highly informative ways.

The thought of new business models might scare some people, but also awaken curiosity in them. Some might embrace the change and like it, others will never adapt to it; only digital time can tell. To keep the subject alive, the author of “‘Social reading’ is the next phase of e-book revolution” Sean Prpick and his partner, Dave Redel’s CBC Radio documentary, Opening The Book, were aired on Ideas at 9pm on Feb. 25, 2013.

Transmedia Publishing

I started my publishing career in the print era. When I edited Berserkrgangr Magazine, paste-up was literal, done with actual scissors. At that time, the major technical limits to what I could publish were that color was too expensive, on the type of press I used black and white illustrations had to be actually black and white, not gray scale, and every added 4 pages added expense (because 4 numbered pages fit on one piece of 11” x 17” paper in a full format magazine).

Now I’m publishing the Time Yarns anthologies, which are eBooks, and the kinds of things I can put in what I publish has expanded extraordinarily. The anthologies have embedded color art, which was something I could only salivate over in the print era, and it doesn’t cost any more to publish an addition 3,000 word story. There are still technical limits, though, mostly related to file size.

The anthologies are coming out in 2012, but I’m publishing my own novel Punch, which is also set in the Time Yarns Universe, this year. Publishing Punch has shown me exactly where the envelope I want to push is. I’m publishing Punch on the Amazon Digital Text Platform, the Barnes & Noble PubIt! system, and Smashwords. Punch is intended to be a transmedia experience, and I’m cramming as many pictures in the Punch books as I can without tripping up on the PubIt! system’s memory limits, because I really want to have Punch be the same across all platforms, so I have to design to the most limiting one. There are two major decisions about Punch that I’ve made because of the memory limits. Firstly, when I put in a video, I don’t embed it into the text, I put in a hyper-link. This is not how I’d prefer to have it, but embedding long videos runs headlong into the memory limits. Even Amazon’s system has memory limits, though, they are just bigger than PubIt!’s. The most important decision the memory limits have caused is that I’m publishing Punch as a serial, in a total of 7 books. I could not possibly fit all the transmedia elements I want into Punch if I published it all in one file. If I tried to publish Punch as all one book, I’d have to take almost everything else out except the actual text of the book. And that would be just like a print edition except on your phone. eBooks should be better than print books; they have the capability of blurring the lines between what’s a book and what’s a film, music video, or graphic novel. eBooks should be giving us more, just like DVD Extras give us more than just the film.

EBook publishing hosts sites like Amazon have already brought about one revolution in publishing. Like the revolution in TV caused by the invention of cable, it’s a revolution brought about by a new technology that enabled niche programming to splinter the mass audience, thus decreasing the market share of the big 3 TV networks and the big 7 mass market publishers and opening up opportunities for small businesses. The ebook revolution was even more radical than the cable revolution, though, because in the cable market, very few individuals can own their own channels (OWN is the Oprah Winfrey Network— but not everybody is Oprah.) eBook hosts allow anyone to become their own publishing imprint, even people who are flat broke, and that has opened the publishing world to new voices.

But there is another revolution coming: the transmedia revolution. In the future, when all media are published on the same electronic platform, and the file size limit has been conquered, what sort of creator you are won’t be determined by whether you create your works on cellulose, celluloid, canvas, or tape. Writer / artist / filmmaker / designer will be obsolete categories. Everyone will simply be a creator.

Guest post by Erin Lale

The Best of both Worlds

By selecting and combining the best quality from both traditional and digital publishing world, E-book publisher Iguana Books is hoping to provide both the convenience of self-publishing, and the quality associated with traditionally published books. The new start-up’s focus on e-books will be more selective than many other self-publishing platform, and authors will be charged a fee for design and editorial work in advance of publication.

Greg Ioannou, the child of the Editors’ Association of Canada’s president, says: “We’re not going to put our name on [a book] unless it’s been professionally edited [and] professionally designed, [and] is the sort of thing one of the major publishers would put out.”

The newly redesigned website is expecting to launch later this week. It features includes:

- Author pages and e-commerce capabilities

- A platform where authors accepted for publication can pre-sell e-books to offset editorial fees

According to Ioannou, the publisher wants readers to tell them what to publish and what not to, therefore a book will go into production only once it has sold enough pre-sale copies; the ones that don’t sell won’t.

Similar to Smashwords, authors will receive a royalty of 85% of net proceeds from Iguana e-book sales. Titles will be available for sale through major e-book retailers such as Kobo, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Apple’s iBookstore.

Magazine is flipping out in style with Flipboard

Flipboard is a social magazine application designed specifically for the iPad’s touch screen. It allows the user to flip through contents collected from social networking feeds, that has been transformed into a magazine format. Flipboard is only one of this new group of applications driven by social media content, others include Evri, Pulse, Zite, Editions, and Google’s rumored. One thing that I especially liked about Flipboard’s approach was described by Josh Qittner (Editor Director of Flipboard) in a recent interview as follows:

 ”I don’t even really see the competition because I think we are competing against ourselves. We’re aware of things that other people are doing, but it’s far more important to beat your own best. What we want to respond to, is what we have done. How can we make that much better? How can we reinvent that? How can we blow that up? And go exponentially further than we did the last time?”

 It seems like digital publishing is currently shadowing the traditional publishing of paper printing. Most of the messages I came across, so far, is that digital is better than paper. For me, it is not better but just different. Digital publishing gives readers a different experience. However, while the idea of a social media magazine is creative, I still prefer browsing my magazines in print, relaxed on a couch while browsing the pages, rather than hunched over a digital screen.

The picture is Flipboard Homescreen (credit: Flipboard)

Publishing Scottland announced the launch of its “Go-Digital-Fund”

With the funding help of Creative Scottland, Publishing Scottland will be administering 20,000 Euro to Scottland-based book publishers. However, the total funding will be spread over two periods of November 2011 and February 2012. Predictions are that the same amount of funding might occur again for 2012/2013. Each publishing company could claim up to 2,000 Euro for their expenses in training, consulting, digital book conferences and marketing effort for the digital contents.

The goal for the “Go-Digital-Fund” is to help book publishers in Scottland have a means to bring their books to a new digital audience. The fund could assist publishers in extending their capabilities of exporting books - by making it easier to access international markets.

In the press release:

Evaluation:

Each recipient of a grant will be required to write a report on the digital activity and the benefits gained. That report will be used as material for case studies, marketing etc. (Some material may be of confidential nature and, as such, the marketing material etc will not refer to specific companies.)

For more information and to apply, see the Funding page on the Publishing Information.

This is great, now where is the “Go-Digital-Fund” in the United States of America?

New Service for Authors to self-publish E-books

The largest independent publisher, Perseus Book Group, recently announced that they are planning a distribution and marketing service for self-published authors. This new service called “Argo Navis Author Services”. The one restriction to this service is that it is only available to authors who are represented by an agency who signed an agreement with the publisher, and currently Janklow & Nesbit Associates is the only agency that did sign it. However, Perseus are in the process of negotiating with twelve other agencies. At the moment, there are no authors signed up for it yet.

Perseus stated that the author remained the publisher even though Argo Navis is providing distribution and marketing services. By using the service author will be getting 70% royalty, and the distributor will be receiving 30%. Argo Navis will also provide basic marketing services, such as placing product pages on retailer Web sites, as well as more extensive marketing services for an additional fee.

Argo Navis E-books will be distributed to retailers including Amazon, BN.com, Google, Kobo, Sony and Apple. However, this service idea doesn’t sound like a new invention considering existing offerings in the market that already let authors self-publish their own ebook, such as Smashwords. The one thing that might set them apart is the addition of basic marketing services, and the limitation that the author has to make an exclusive arrangement.

Is it fair to expect all digital content for free? When it come to the Internet, we all love it! It is a great source of entertainment and information, and it contains so much knowledge that would be hard to gain otherwise; and best of all it is all free! While that is great in a sense of helping writers connect to readers and introduce their books to the world, it may also be a writer’s executioner. These days, readers expect digital contents to be for free and if it is not, then they move on to the next one that is.

 However, what people rarely consider is that no one works for free. If writers put time, effort and sometimes money into writing and publishing a story for others to read, then they want to be compensated in some way. It is true that publishing a book digitally may cost less than publishing a print book, but the work that goes into its creation is the same and sometimes even more.

I like to think when I pay for anything, I am showing appreciation to the person who created it; of course depending on how I value a given item, my willingness to pay for it will be different - such as $0.99 for a short story ebook versus $2.99 for a novel. In either case, consider that your purchase will encourage the author whose work you enjoy to keep on writing, instead of having to spend his/her time on a different job to maintain an income, leaving them no time at all to express the creativity we the readers enjoy!

Steps to my future  Photograph credited to MissUnfortunate

The autobiography of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is now published

The book name is “Julian Assange:The Unauthorized Autobirgraphy”. Why? Despite Assange’s request to cancel the contract in June, Cannogate the publisher, published it anyway. The reason was because Assange didn’t repay the advance to them-he already used it for his legal fees.

Cannogate stated, “We have decided to honour that contract and to publish. Once the advance has been earned out, we will continue to honour the contract and pay Julian royalties.”

Connecting authors to entrepreneurs and publishers to venture capitalists

It is an interesting connection when you think about it. In the article, What Startups Can Teach Publishers, Tod Sattersten - founder of BizBookLab, connected the dots and concluded, “There are many things we can learn from the world of startups, but they all funnel back to this insight: deliberate learning of what our customers want connects directly to the success of our startup.”

Art Connections  by ~ Dark-Blue-Odie