Today’s announcement of the Plastic Logic/B&N partnership was interesting.
Although it’s not mentioned iin the article, I see that they claim to support PDF.
these include such standard and widely available formats as PDF, ePub and Microsoft Office document types. Information on creating content that is optimized for easy viewing and user interaction on a Plastic Logic eReader will be available through our Publisher Program.
But experience is that “support” for PDF is a vague term that often means less than it appears.
I realize that the persnickety tech details of PDF support may not seem worth including in an article aimed at a general business audience, but let me try to explain why journalists should always try to get the exact details about PDF support in articles about e-book readers.
My view is that true, full-fledged support for PDF is the key step that will open the floodgates for an iPod-like transformation of publishing, for the simple reasons that 1) every publisher already has every book in their collection availablle in PDF and 2) PDF is the only choice for a no-compromises reading experience that takes full advantage of print’s 500+ years of readability testing (Gutenberg, Caslon, Goudy …) This is where Google is heading with Google Editions: PDFs on the PC.
A couple more of my assumptions:
- E-readers will always be a small fraction of the installed base of PCs.
- Smartphones and “handhelds” will always be a less satisfying reading experience than true “codex” book size, 5.5 x 8.5 ” or greater.
What this means, for a journalistic hook, is that the question whether the manufacturer truly supports PDF is a marker for whether they are placing their money on Google, or Amazon for the long run. (And as the WSJ article notes, even Amazon is preserving the option to bet against itself …)
Barnes & Noble Inc. stepped onto the nascent electronic-book battleground with Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. on Monday, saying it would launch its own e-bookstore with bestsellers priced at $9.99, in line with its rivals.
via Barnes & Noble Challenges Amazon’s Kindle – WSJ.com.
Quite a bit of chatter in the writing and publishing worlds about the demise of Amazon Connect. From my post to pod_publishing:
My more optimistic view on the demise of AmazonConnect is that everything about Amazon’s bookstore is a giant data mining experiment. If they remove a feature, or make it less prominent, it is because, over the whole store, it is not paying its way.
Now, this is from their point of view, not ours — so a feature could increase sales (good for us) but be extremely expensive (bad for them) and therefore be killed (bad for us).
The feature could also be good for some authors (maybe even including those of us who liked blogging to the detail pages) but not for most, and therefore be killed (bad for us).
On the whole, though, I think this is a place to apply the Copernican principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle
The most likely situation is that we do not occupy a privileged position in the universe, and that, in fact, Amazon Connect was not doing us much good, and has been replaced by a service, Author Central, that Amazon’s data shows to be more cost-effective on the whole.
This same chain of logic is why I always use SITB for my books. If a feature persists on Amazon over the long period, it is almost certain that their data shows that it drives sales over the whole store.
You are exactly right that “usually ships within” is an important variable in sales. The bad news is that this is something that is entirely controlled by Amazon, but the good news is that this is something that will resolve itself shortly without intervention from us.
The gory details: Amazon bases its availability times on a “feed” from the POD printer, Lightning Source. For b&w interior books, LSI always promises same day shipping (if you order before, IIRC, 2 pm PST). For color interior books, which are subject to a more exacting (and less proven) production process, at first they only promise 1 to 3 weeks shipping times.
The good news is that for any book that sells more than a few copies a month, Amazon orders a bunch of them to have in stock, and as soon as it receives those, the availability will become “ships immediately,” and after some number of sales, you will see the “countdown” begin — “only 4 left in stock,” etc. (I say “some number of sales” because I have a nasty suspicious mind and I am not 100% sure that Amazon doesn’t play games with the countdown numbers — I wouldn’t be surprised if they start showing it early because they know that it drives sales.)
There are some things that can disrupt same day shipping for a brief (but seemingly interminable) period. For sure, if we make any revisions to the book after publication, when the revisions go through, the same day shipping will be replaced by “temporarily out of stock.” (There’s a whole ‘nother issue to making revisions, but I’ll discuss that in another article…) Technical problems at Amazon and LSI can also disrupt same day sales. The good news is that although we are a little fish in a big pond, there are a lot of big fish who are also affected by the same problem, and you can be sure that any disruption to the LSI/Amazon shipping process is a major issue for both of those companies.
This is important because it is clever (and, unfortunately, rather evil) in that it creates a new and legitimate way of charging for something that has always been free. It is entirely within Amazon’s rights to charge for the infrastructure necessary to move content from RSS to the Kindle.
Setup is extremely easy. I recommend to all my authors with blogs that they participate. Why not?
Kindle Publishing: Dashboard.
At first this sounded exciting, but on further inspection, not so much.
AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon websites to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors that show potential for greater sales.
[gamable?]
Amazon then partners with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.
[key question: Ingram?]
This summer “Legacy” will be revised by the [16-year-old] author and re-issued as an AmazonEncore edition in print on Amazon websites around the world, in physical bookstores, as a digital download from the Kindle Store in less than 60 seconds, and via spoken-word audio download on Audible.com.
[Sounds like a "point solution," not a global and generalizable method.]
Amazon.com — News Release
I’ve started working on a project called Book Kismet. The initial seed for the idea was this message I posted to a Google Group devoted to an innovative “social books” project housed at the University of Toronto, and it’s my hope that BK will wind up being a useful tool for them.
The functionality I want to see in version 1.0 is as follows:
user supplies author name, book title or ISBN
system provides list of ISBNs & titles from one of:
- Amazon API
- Google Book Search API
- LibraryThing API
- OpenBook API
user selects either author or book (by ISBN)
system provides (some of):
- cover image via one of {Amazon, LT, GBS, Open}
- link to Amazon detail page; link to Amazon reviews for boook
- link to GBS title page; link to GBS reviews for book
- link to LibraryThing detail page for this book (all ISBNs); link to LibraryThing book reviews
- link to Google API answer set on “author lastname” “author firstname” “discussion forum” “booktitle”
- embedded Google Trends widget with book title and author name as keywords
- Google Groups (old Usenet) search results
etc.
I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via [social books] and I have a suggestion. I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device.
Think about it this way.
Class of bibliographic entities:
- printed book (i think “codex” is too jargony)
- journal article
- report
- e-book
Class of physical Enablers
- CueCat
- Kindle 1 & 2, Kindle DX, etc.
- Sony E-Reader
Class of entity-level citation schemes, e.g.
- APA
- Chicago Manual
- BibTex
- EndNote
- Digital Object Identifiers
Class of “pinpoint” citation services, e.g.
- Legal standards (West, F.2d 1033)
- Scientific standards: Nature 355:321 12 October
- Paragraph and line numbering schemes
Class of web resources
- Single purpose websites (1 per book)
- Google Book repository
- Amazon catalog
- LibraryThing
Class of web services
- Annotation
- Discussion
- Recommending
Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler. the proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services.
What is really needed, IMHO, is an open, platform-agnostic architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS.
Pretty straightforward question, which I have posed on t he Amazon DTP forum and a couple of Twitter threads
Since Amazon hasn’t announced anything on this $64 million issue, I’m assuming the answer is either “no, never” or “yes, but not until after the textbook publishers finish their beta program this summer.” Why not just be transparent about it?
Yes and no.
Yes: I upload all books published by Nimble Books to Google Book Search, Amazon Search Inside the Book, and Amazon Upgrade. There is a lag of 1-4 months after nominal publication date before the book actually appears in those places. As you may know, once the Google author settlement is closed, Google will begin offering PDF downloads of “their” books.
No: my stance on e-books is that I am waiting until I can deploy my entire list (which includes many color books with high production values) to a device that can read and display near-full-size (~ 8 x 10) color PDFs. Tech-savvy readers will be aware that the Kindle DX claims to have a native PDF reader and a low-res (150 pixel per inch) grayscale display … but at this writing, Amazon has not yet answered the $64 million question: whether there will be a way for publishers to deploy their PDFs to Kindle via the Amazon DTP system or their Mobipocket subsidiary.
From an email to a guy who’s got a project to integrate the world of physical “codex” books with electronic resources.
I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via tools like the sBook and I have a suggestion. I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device.
Think about it this way.
Class of bibliographic entities:
- printed book (i think “codex” is too jargony)
- journal article
- report
- e-book
Class of physical Enablers
- CueCat
- Kindle
- Sony E-Reader
- the sBook enabler
Class of citation services, e.g.
- Legal standards (West, F.2d 1033)
- Scientific standards: Nature 355:321 12 October
- Digital Object Identifiers
Class of web resources
- Single purpose websites (1 per book)
- Google Book repository
- Amazon catalog
- LibraryThing
Class of web services
- Annotation
- Discussion
- Recommending
Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads or paths, e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler.
Tthe proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services.
What is really needed, IMHO is an open architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS.
Clear as mud?
Hastily,
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