According to Quantcast, you are likely to be male, Caucasian, professional, and well educated; in a surprise, quite a few of you are teens!
daughter just dropped “Michigan represents” into conversation–new slang. Ok by me, I suppose.
agh. Tatianna just made it into the final 12.
reading WHIPPING STAR by Frank Herbert (Tor) — awesome — would be a Hugo nominee if 1st pub in 2009
watching American Idol — blind guy rules!
The immiment demise of Ann Arbor’s quirky, well-regarded Shaman Drum bookstore has sparked a very interesting thread over at the Ann Arbor Chronicle, which inspired me to write this about the future of e-books and publishing. The whole thread is worth reading.
(in response to post 28) Scott — I am well aware of Tablet PCs — I attended Microsoft’s alpha stage Tablet SDK meeting and had a first-generation Motion Tablet– but IMHO there is still a long way to go for Tablets to approach the readability and portability of paper. That is to say nothing of paper’s instant-on feature, complete absence of [electronic] bugs, and [sometimes literally] bulletproof security compared to Windows Vista Tablet PC Edition …
What I don’t like about the current generation of e-readers is that the e-book manufacturers are forcing major design and readability compromises on publishers–a classic example of technology-driven product development. What publishers want and need is to be able to display e-books using the universal publishing standard for high-quality design display: PDF. You simply can’t present a design-driven title likeTHE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF TORPEDO BOATS (for Anonymouse’s sake!) in device-independent dumbed-down HTML.
As you may know, the current generation of book readers uses the E-Ink technology, which currently does B&W 800 x 640 on a flexible substrate. They project that color E-Ink devices will become available no earlier than 2011. Hi-res is important: readability studies shows that paper with 600 dpi is the gold standard. a 600 dpi 8 x 10 page is 4800 x 6000 pixels, which is still a pretty big image even for today’s computers.
I suspect that E-Ink devices capable of displaying hi-res PDF will be ~ 2015.
What does this mean for publishers and booksellers? For publishers, it means a (losing) struggle with e-book manufacturers over their share of the revenue pie. For booksellers, it means less revenue from simply delivering physically encoded books to people, and figuring out a way to move up the value chain–which I think is what Karl Pohrt is planning to do. I like the idea of a bookstore as a salon, but if I look around at other industries it seems that continuous physical presence is a more difficult business model to operate than old reliables like personal appearances, training classes, and consulting services.
Awarded to friends of the company for outstandingly kind, thoughtful, helpful or heroic contributions to the cause. Today’s winner: Mark Safranski.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Napoleonic_Marshal_baton.svg
Michael Tanji and I exchanged our first email about THREATS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA on October 7th. It was in print (and as high as 3,727 on the Amazon bestseller list) 118 days later.
Side note: It’s been quite a thrill just to get this far. The team is spread across eight different time zones. Most of us know one another’s writings but only some of us have ever spoken live, much less met face-to-face. Welcome to the future of publishing.
via Mapping Strategy: Threats in the Age of Obama.
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