Google eBooks

Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere.

One Billion and Counting...

In 1993 Zahur Klemath Zapata developed the first software to read digital books. Digital Book v.1 and the first digital book is published ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS, by Thomas De Quincey

The latest report out by Forrester Research predicts that ebook sales will reach$966 million in 2010 and that by 2011, the amount will be $1 billion. In 2009, ebook sales were $169.5 million, a small portion of the $35Billion publishing industry. Forrester reports that as people get the hang of reading ebooks, they shift their book-buying from hardcover or paperback to ebooks.

James McQuivey of Forrester states that "the average eBook reader already consumes 41% of books in digital form." Those who've taken the plunge and gotten a Kindle or other ereader have an even higher percentage: 2 out of 3 books they read are ebooks. Amazon illustrated this in their announcement that in its spring quarter it sold 143 for every 100 hardcover books. Forrester found that only 7% of online adults who read books read ebooks, highlighting that there is room for growth.

The question for publishing is whether ebook sales will simply cannibalize current hardcover and paperback sales, or whether there might be a windfall of converting formats.  If people who have the paperback edition of "Twilight" buy it again as an ebook, publishing will profit. But if they skip it, and instead choose to buy Stephenie Meyer's next novel as an ebook instead of getting the hardcover, the bottom line shrinks and that billion looks less promising...

On Line Writing Groups

How many screenwriters does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Ten.
1st draft. Hero changes light bulb.
2nd draft. Villain changes light bulb.
3rd draft. Hero stops villain from changing light bulb. Villain falls to death.
4th draft. Lose the light bulb.
5th draft. Light bulb back in. Fluorescent instead of tungsten.
6th draft. Villain breaks bulb, uses it to kill hero's mentor.
7th draft. Fluorescent not working. Back to tungsten.
8th draft. Hero forces villain to eat light bulb.
9th draft. Hero laments loss of light bulb. Doesn't change it.
10th draft. Hero changes light bulb.

I am a big proponent of finding a writers or critique group -- it has a two fold benefit. First, it is key in helping the craft of writing - there is nothing better than having supportive colleagues review your work and provide constructing criticism. Second a writers group also provides a wonderful place to be with other writers who understand, emotionally, the writing process. My own critique group is invaluable -- I credit them with helping me hone my writing skills and getting me to where I am today.Writers groups can meet in the real world, as mine did, or can be virtual as well. I've also worked with writers, exchanging manuscripts via email, and that to can be very helpful.  

Two months ago, a new online writing community, based in the UK, was launched. Called Quillant, its aims, as shared by found Chris is to -

"recreate the classic writing group over the web. It is a different type of site for writers; it is about developing your work-in-progress with like-minded others and working together towards your aims."

"You create a profile in which you state the type of writer you are -– novelist, poet, playwright, 
etc. -– and the genres that you work in. Quilliant.com matches you with similar writers and you form a writing group together. You work collaboratively, exchanging feedback on your work line by line.   

I'm all for collaboration, and with technology, perhaps we can do more of it!

eBook Evolution Continues

NuroMedia released the first handheld ebook reader, the Rocket, which allowed ebooks to be downloaded from a PC via a serial cable.

According to the  technology gurus at GigaOm, the line between what we call a "book" and something that's just a really long chunk of published text—what you might call the "not quite a book" category—continues to blur in the electronic publishing world.

Borders has released, right on the heels of the Kindles Singles program, a service that allows bloggers or anyone else with an idea to publish what is effectively an e-book and get it distributed through all the major e-book platforms. They are doing this in partnership with Bookbrewer, a subsidiary of Boulder, Colo.-based startup FeedBrewer, Inc., which creates multi-platform publishing solutions for mobile devices. 

The service allows writers to upload their content, then publish an e-book in the open ePub format that can be downloaded for the iPad, the Kindle, the Kobo, or any other e-reader. The service has two tiers. One costs $89.99 and gives authors an ISBN, the universal book-tracking number used in the publishing industry. The advanced, $199.99 package also gives authors a master ePub file they can share or upload wherever they wish. Aaah, the changing landscape of publishing continues to morph...

Hint of the Future

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other - C.P. SNOW, New York Times, 15 March 1971

Reading publishers weekly today, I was struck by two pieces of similar news, dealing with the collision course of publishing and technology. Rick Richter, former president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, is now heading Ruckus Media, a company that specializes in creating high-definition animation apps for children aimed at the mobile computing market. The next piece of news was about Random House Children's Books entering into a partnership with digital developer Smashing Ideas. The company creates book-based children's apps for mobile devices. Perhaps its a premonition of things to come down the road...

Future of Children's Books

Nielsen BookScan reported that sales of juvenile books were the strongest of any category in 2008, rising 6 percent from 2007. In 2009, Nielsen reported, sales held mostly even. By contrast, last year adult hardcover and mass market paperbacks both declined nearly 4 percent, and trade paperbacks fell 2 percent - Washington Post

I never like such encompassing titles of articles as The Future of Children's Books. Its sounds so penultimate, as if the writer had a crystal ball and was making definite predictions. But, the Washington Post, with the aforementioned title, does have some interesting revelations about combing technology and literature.

The fact that Jeff Kinney worked full-time for a decade designing popular kid-friendly Web games before writing his best-selling series, DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, originally published online, was a revelation. The online, free online version regularly gets 70,000 hits a day. What this thankfull illustrates that teens and tweens on the internet, with access to content online, will still go out and buy his book. 28 million copes of DIARY OF A WIMPY KID are in print in the United States, according publisher Abrams.

So Publisher are now playing an expensive balancing game, getting kids to read books by offering companion Web sites that are graphic-rich and able to plunge young readers into the story. Along with the tale on the page, kids can dip into online videos and games, win prizes, create Internet identities and get into social networking.

Several publishers are getting into the fray Scholastic launched a 10-book international mystery series called THE 39 CLUES in the fall of 2008. Much of the action takes place online, however, where kids amass hundreds of collectible cards and compete for prizes. According to Scholastic, they have 760,000 registered users. Disney recently started an online book subscription Web site, Disney Digital Book, with hundreds of titles available, in hopes it will cast a spell over kids and their parents. You use a "magic pen" to turn each digital page.  Last fall, HarperCollins published a missing-girl mystery, THE AMANDA PROJECT with a major online social networking component. And Simon & Schuster is getting into the game this June with its multimedia venture SPACEHEADZ Written by Jon Scieszka, author of THE STINKY CHEESE MAN.

The question remains whether all these multimedia add-ons to the reading experience will pay off... we shall see.

Hiding with Harry

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, dragon blood is revealed to be an effective oven cleaner (I just cleaned my oven and wished I had some)

I, like countless millions, loved the Harry Potter series and one of my favorite magical objects was his Cloak of Invisibility. The cloak had the power to shield the wearer from sight, and could not be worn out by time or spells. Invisibility cloaks are not a new concept and have appeared in literature since the days of Brothers Grimm. 

When I read about it, I wanted to go out and get one for myself and now it looks like they may be within our grasp! Scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it into reality. Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies. The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold. In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.

In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it, a researcher stated. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible. DARN. But I'll keep hoping.

MobiStories

In 1919, the Macmillan Publishing Company hired the first children's book editor in the United States - eHow

Move over ebooks, enter Mobi Stories by Still Motion Media. They take existing children's picture books and repurpose them for the digital screen. Their books are professionally narrated, have sound effects and original music, kind of like a a mashup of eBooks and audio books with a dash of cartoons to create children's picture books. It is viewable on iPhones, iPods, computers or other digital devices that play audio or video.

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Inkpop

Since its soft launch in 4th quarter 2009, inkpop already has more than 10,000 members and nearly 11,000 submissions, including novels, poems, essays, and short stories. The visitors are teens ages 13 and older, from 109 different countries and territories.

Boy, I wish I had this when I was a teen...

I started my first novel in Mrs. Cochran's Novel Writing Club, back in middle school. The only resources we had at our disposal (remember, we were living out in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia)  was Strunk & Whites ELEMENTS OF STYLE, a prodigous school library, our teachers and our imagination for ideas. Now look at the resources available to young writers fingertips...

Inkpop, from HarperCollins Publisher's teen publishing unit, is a platform aimed at young readers and writers. It's a a combination of community publishing features, user-generated content, and social networking elements. There are thousands of young writers out there (Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon at fifteen) who now have the opportunity to showcase their work.

The launch of inkpop continues Harper Collins overall digital strategy designed to build and expand its direct-to-consumer business. Inkpop will be the anchor of HarperCollins's ongoing teen strategy, enabling the company to have a continuous dialogue directly with its audience to determine what the community cares about, as well as an unfiltered look at what's in and what's out.

Publishing A'mazoning

Kindle Currently has 90% of ebook Market - TBI Research

Amazon is launching a new "70% royalty option" for the Kindle. Under this option, Amazon will pay authors and publishers a royalty of 70% of the list price of Kindle books, which is a far higher per-copy royalty than most authors receive on physical book sales (including the standard Kindle book royalties).

This new plan will encourage more authors to "go direct" to Amazon (or at least force their publishers to sell ebooks at a substantial discount). This, in turn, will increase the pressure on traditional publishers to cut prices on wholesale Kindle books. And that, in turn, will transform the Kindle business from a big money-loser into a very profitable business for Amazon.

The traditional publishing industry feels that cuts in ebook prices will wipe out what little margin the publishers have left, thus preventing publishers from paying authors big advances and, thus result in fewer good books being published. But, as ebook prices drop, unit velocity will increase, leading to higher revenues. So this is where the book industry is headed, whether traditional publishers want it to or not. Amazon's new plan should help shorten the time it takes to get there. The plan should also solidify Amazon's already tremendous dominance of the ebook business.

Survival of the Fittest

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change – Charles Darwin

When talking of changing publishing paradigms I mentioned independent booksellers and how the rapidly morphing publishing industry is affecting their business. I ran across a very interesting article, Evolve or Die: Why Reinvent Independent Bookstores? by Praveen Madan and Christin Evans, proprietors of the Booksmith in San Francisco. He relays some sobering statistics:

In 1993, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) had 4,700 member stores. By the start of 2009, the number had fallen to 1,600. We are seeing an average of about 200 independent bookstores close every year.

In order to compete in the new age of publishing, Indies need to evolve, as Darwin states, to survive with the times, or go extinct. Indies must struggle with key questions as they look to the future -- What business are they in? Who are their customers? and What are they competing for? Many indies are stuck in a time warp – quaint, dusty, technologically stagnant shops that haven’t changed much in decades (many, sadly to say have not utilized the internet wisely). While Indies have become frozen in time, consumer tastes, market realities and the competition have been marching on at warp speed.

Praveen and Christin are hopeful though – they feel that this is this is a time of great opportunity for Indies, in five key areas: Building literary communities and providing author services for writers; Enhancing the browsing experience of customers; Making print on demand books available; and by Tapping into new markets since only ½ of adult Americans read, that’s half the market left! So for Indies, Carpe Diem – do or die!

Changing Publishing Paradigms

U.S. publishers had net sales of $24.3 billion in 2008, down from $25.0 billion in 2007, representing a 2.8% decrease. Association of American Publishers (AAP)

I tend to keep my “other” work life separate from my writing life, but increasingly, I’ve find the two coming together. I live and work in Silicon Valley, surrounded by technology. During the day I look at patents, inventions and technologies covering a huge array of industries – Increasingly I’m watching how technological innovation is bumping up against traditional publishing.

Ten years ago, there was no Google, no iPod, Kindle, Fastpencil or Smashwords -- Amazon had only been in business for 5 years. A lot has happened in the last decade that is compelling the publishing industry to take a look at traditional ways of doing business in an increasingly digital age.

Technology today, more than ever, has a disruptive impact on publishing. The Internet, print-on-demand and ebooks are some drivers for change. They impact multiple points of the publishing value chain—from the way books are published (authors can go direct to the reader), distributed (electronic marketplaces), sold (e-tailers) and read (ebooks). This is an interesting trend where technology is enabling increased number of books, but fewer bookstores – Independent Booksellers are in trouble, as are the big guys (Borders closing UK stores)

There have been massive lay-offs at major publishing houses, including my own, Simon & Schuster. S&S recently reduced its sales force, and I was sad to see our field rep in California, to Independent Booksellers, let go. Even book reviewers are facing extinction, such as Kirkus, which nearly hit the chopping block. But this is the world we live in – change is needed for survival. Many have prophesized the end of the printed book, but I don’t know – I own a kindle, but I still love to pick up a paper book, crack it open and inhale the fresh paper smell. Let’s see what the future brings…

Nook n’ Kindle

The first eBook readers, Rocket eBook and Softbook, were launched in 1998

Sounds like a picture book about kittens! But no, it is the latest salvo into the eBook wars!

Competition has heated up with Barnes and Nobles Nookish entry! (The business side of me wonders if they whether the folks cooked up the name internally or hired a naming firm). More the better I say; the publishing industry is changing by starts, leaps, fits and bounds and eBooks are not only an environmentally friendly option (less dead trees), but they allow a new channel for book delivery (the author in me likes that).

My husband got me a Kindle, from Amazon, for my last birthday – I was sucked in by its aesthetics, ease of use and the fact that I could download a book in less than sixty seconds… like getting your reading fix instantaneously. (I will say that holding a real, dead tree utilized book is psychologically comforting, reminiscent of childhood and good reads.) The new Nook has similar features to the Kindle with a couple of additions – it has a color LCD mini touch screen (Kindle is black and white) and a unique feature called LendMe which allows the purchaser of a BN eBook to share that file with someone else. There’s no limit on how many times an eBook can be lent--only that you can lend an eBook to one person at a time, and just for up to 14 days. It's priced to match Kindle at $259, but unfortunately will not ship until November 30, cutting it close to the holidays.