Amanda Hocking, the writer who made millions by self-publishing online. When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians may omit to mention is the crucial role played in her rise by those furry wide-mouthed friends, the Muppets. To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work.
To make matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can't afford to make the trip. Then it comes to her. To which Eric replies: "Yeah. Let's jump to October 2010. Stephen Leather. Biblioteken och e-böckerna: två modeller, lika orimliga. Om ett bibliotek ska “låna ut” e-böcker – vilket visserligen är omöjligt, men ändå – finns det i grunden två sätt att betala bokförlagen. (Vi utgår nu för enkelhets skull från att alla e-böcker kostar pengar, trots att detta är ett oerhört inskränkt synsätt.) Enligt den ena modellen betalar biblioteken för varje simulerat utlån. Varje gång en e-bok görs tillgänglig till en låntagare betalar biblioteket en summa. Enligt avtalet som ett stort antal folkbibliotek har slutit med Elib betalas 20 kronor per “utlån”.
Enligt den andra modellen betalar biblioteken för varje simulerat exemplar. (Jag skriver även om detta i Biblioteket, andra kapitlet som har rubriken “Det digitala biblioteket”. Sannolikheten ökar nu för att Sveriges folkbibliotek kommer att övergå från den första till den andra modellen. Anders Mildner och Daniel Åberg gick genast till motangrepp mot Författareförbundet och Förläggareföreningen. Båda betalningsmodellerna ställer biblioteken i en märklig sits, fast på olika sätt. Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook. I spoke earlier today at Tools of Change in Frankfurt. The short version is that many of the things we think about ebooks are wrong: but they are very interesting.
The future of the book lies in its aura not in its copies, and that’s why I’m launching Open Bookmarks. For the longer version, read on… (As ever, far more was said on stage than these notes, but there you go). 4 things: introductions and what I do; the form of the ebook; bookmarks etc.; and an announcement. Regular readers will know my history. CompSci / AI degree, into publishing to avoid it, but then gradually made the two things, literature and tech, come together. When I first started talking about eBooks six, seven years ago, the general attitude of the publishing industry was: No. The above image typifies the arguments back then, and still to some extent now: people don’t like reading off a screen, people like the shape and size of books, you can’t read ebooks in the bath, they don’t smell right.
Like appropriation. Hur åldras en e-bok? | Biblioteksbladet. Det är många som går runt och funderar på bokens framtid nuförtiden. De som imponerar mest på mig är knappast de stora förlagen, nog inte heller biblioteken… Erik Stattin …utan snarare de formgivare, kodare och innovatörer som försöker förnya vad boken är hur den ska se ut och fungera när den går från att vara cellulosabaserad till att bli evigt kopieringsbar. En av mina favoriter på området heter James Bridle. Bland annat har han låtit trycka upp 50 versioner av Charles Dickens Hard Times, alla med sina individuella egenheter, många av dem resultatet av maskinella översättningar, andra av misslyckade digitaliseringar där sidor fattas eller text är oläslig. Han har också i bokform tryckt hela versionshistoriken för uppslagsordet ”The Iraq War” på Wikipedia. 12 tjocka volymer blev det. Men vid sidan av sådana här mer konstnärliga experiment ägnar han sig åt att arbeta för att i praktiken upprätthålla bokens aura i digitaliseringens tidsålder.
Doppletext unites original text with a literary translation – available on the web or on your ereader. Ladda ner gratis böcker på bookboon.com. Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers | Technology. At the end of April, Tor Books, the world's largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital rights management (DRM) from all of their ebooks by the summer. It was a seismic event in the history of the publishing industry.
It's the beginning of the end for DRM, which are used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content after sale. That's good news, whether you're a publisher, a writer, a dedicated reader, or someone who picks up a book every year or two. The first thing you need to know about ebook DRM is that it can't work. Like all DRM systems, ebook DRM presumes that you can distribute a program that only opens up ebooks under approved circumstances, and that none of the people you send this program to will figure out how to fix it so that it opens ebooks no matter what the circumstances. What's more, books are eminently re-digitisable. It's a solved problem. Bad for business. Gör egna böcker med iBooks Author. Går du och drömmer om att publicera en egen bok men har dragit dig för det eftersom det verkar så krångligt?
Tack vare Apples nya program iBooks Author är det möjligt för nästan vem som helst att skapa och publicera e-böcker för iPad. Tidigare lösningar för att skapa e-böcker har antingen varit på tok för krångliga eller för dyra. iBooks Author är både enkelt att använda och kan laddas ned helt gratis från Mac App store. Programmet är dessutom på svenska och finns på: Installera programmet För att komma igång krävs det egentligen bara två saker. Det går att skapa böcker för iPhone med iBooks Author, men på den begränsade bildytan fungerar inte alla interaktiva element. När du startar iBooks Author möts du en Mallväljare som ber dig välja en mall för din e-bok.
Vill du inte använda någon av dem väljer du enkel och ställer in bakgrunder, färger och typsnitt själv. Vi börjar med att skapa ett omslag till boken genom att klicka på boktitel högst upp i det högra fönstret. “Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out. Calls for big-six publishers to drop DRM have increased in recent weeks, coinciding with the DOJ price-fixing lawsuit. Many observers fear that the lawsuit will actually reduce competition in the e-book marketplace by cementing Amazon’s (s AMZN) role as the dominant player — and they wonder whether DRM is simply another weapon in Amazon’s arsenal, keeping customers locked to the Kindle Store.
Here at paidContent, independent e-bookstore Emily Books‘ Emily Gould and Ruth Curry have argued that DRM is crushing indie booksellers online. And Hachette VP, digital Maja Thomas recently described DRM as “a speedbump” that “doesn’t stop anyone from pirating.” Still, it may be a long way from this discussion to the first big-six publisher’s actual removal of DRM from its e-books. For now, many readers know they can download free tools to let them read a Barnes & Noble (s BKS) Nook book on a Kindle, or an Apple (s AAPL) iBookstore book on a Nook, or a Google (s GOOG) book on a Kobo. Why smart authors are cutting Amazon out. The recent anti-trust suit against the big five book publishers reminds me of the scene in the movie Titanic where the lifeboats are pulling away from the gasping survivors in the water. We all know what’s going to happen and it’s painful to watch. What surprises me is how little discussion there is about what happens to the authors in all of this.
For sure, advances are going down. Way down. But that has been happening for a while. Even before the Kindle, Amazon was dominating print sales, which meant the publishers had a lot less control over how their book sold. Publishers have no idea how drive online sales For years, as book sales moved increasingly online, the responsibility of the sale has increasingly moved to the author. Publishers have resorted to un-trackable promotion such as print ads, and television. I know this because my personal blog gets about a million views a month. The list matters more than the advance So here’s what happens. Pro tip: Go around Amazon. It's Not About Libraries, It's About Amazon. When Douglas County (Colorado) Libraries decided to put "Buy this book" buttons on their online catalog pages (example), the response was strong. In just 11 days, the buy buttons had garnered almost 700 clickthroughs. According to Library Director Jamie LaRue, the library is putting buy links direct to publisher-supplied urls when they are provided (often to Barnes and Noble).
Of the 700 clickthroughs, 389 went to Amazon and 262 to Tattered Cover, the independent bookstore with 3 locations in the Denver area. In isolation, this data seems to be strong support for the notion that a digital presence in libraries can support sales of books. The withdrawal this week by Penguin from library ebook lending platforms (such as Overdrive) would seem to be a profoundly shortsighted move. Viewed from a big six publisher's point of view, the situation looks different. To those patrons and then effectively owns their book consumption. The recently announced Kindle Owner's Lending Library. The Myth of the Bookless Library. Ten years ago, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper published a nifty book about how and why people use paper in their workplaces. The Myth of the Paperless Office reported ethnographic observations of people struggling to do things with computers that they were used to doing on paper; sometimes there were good reasons why paper was so persistent.
The title reminded us that the “paperless office” we were promised decades ago is a joke - on us. We use more paper than ever and manage to have disorderly desktops both literally and digitally. That's a funny kind of progress. Now we have the bookless library. What is it about the concept of a library without books that is so sensational? The Cushing Academy got a lot of ink in 2009 when the Boston Globe quoted its headmaster as saying “when I look at books, I see an outdated technology.” Here are some more recent examples: Time magazine: Is a Bookless Library Still a Library? In fact, going bookless is not particularly popular. Digital Underclass 2: The future of books and libraries (PODCAST) Click to listen to the related podcast with Jason Perlow and Andy Woodworth (45 min.) A year ago, I wrote an article entitled "Digital Underclass: What Happens When the Libraries Die. " The article had a wide-ranging impact on the library community, and brought in opinions from both sides of the spectrum.
Some library scientists agreed with me that the eBook is indeed threatening the existence of the Public Library, while others such as notable library blogger Andy Woodworth were in firm disagreement, that libraries were still alive, but were entering a transformative phase. I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at the situation a year later. Since that article has written, the eBook as a book distribution medium has utterly exploded. And while it has not immediately contributed to the fall of libraries, it has almost certainly been a contributing factor in the demise of regular bookstores and independent booksellers.
Also Read: This raises a number of issues. Welcome to Open Library. The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated. Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015, inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached? I’m calling the peak of inflated expectations now. Get ready for the next phase of the hype cycle - the trough of disillusionment. The signs of a hype bubble are all around us. In Clearwater, Florida, the principle of the local high school recently replaced all his students’ textbooks with latest-gen Kindles - without, apparently, any awareness that formal trials of the Kindle as a textbook replacement led universities like Princeton and Arizona State University to reject it as inadequate.
Then you have pundits like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, making statements to the effect that the physical book is dead in 5 years. Many tech pundit wants books to die. Lend Me Your E-books (Part 2) Yesterday, in Part 1, Erik Christopher looked at the e-book models offered to librarians by the United States’ two largest e-book retailers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Today, he considers the model offered by Overdrive and the future of lending as seen by the Open Book Alliance’s Peter Brantley. By Erik Christopher Despite the user-friendly devices and what they can offer from the e-book retailers, when it comes to the academic market, Amazon and B&N would do well to look at what the vendors and aggregators are doing if they wish to streamline their systems to work more closely in tandem with the systems already in place for libraries.
An example of one such company is OverDrive, which works with a variety of library systems, most notably in the public library arena, as well as with K-12 and higher education. OverDrive offers this functionality for Sony Reader lending setup. In regards to the current model in place he said: “OverDrive is trying to play Switzerland in this scenario. Lend Me Your E-book (Part 1) The line between book and Internet will disappear.
A few months ago I posted a tweet that said: The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now. The tweet got some negative reaction. But I’m certain this shift will happen, and should happen (I won’t take bets on the timeline though). It should happen because a book properly hooked into the Internet is a far more valuable collection of information than a book not properly hooked into the Internet. And once something is “properly hooked into the internet,” that something is part of the Internet. It will happen, because: what is a book, after all, but a collection of data (text + images), with a defined structure (chapters, headings, captions), meta data (title, author, ISBN), and prettied up with some presentation design?
An ebook is just a print book by another name Defining a book by what you cannot do This will change, slowly or quickly. What lurks beneath the EPUB spec An API for books For instance: Related: Blogg og bibliotek » Blog Archive » Om å bevare ebøker. Om å bevare ebøker For to år siden ga Samlaget ut boken Veslebror ser deg av forfatteren Cory Doctorow. Cory har den svært hyggelige innstillingen at alle tekstene han skriver også gis ut som ebøker under en creative commons lisens som gjør at alle som ønsker det kan laste ned og lese bøkene gratis. Dette ser i og for seg ikke ut til å ha skadet salget av bøkene hans, og han har garantert skaffet seg svært mange lesere på denne måten. Samlaget, ved forlagsredaktør Ragnfrid Trohaug, var svært modige og på oppfordring fra Cory ga de samtidig ut både papirboken for salg i bokhandler og en gratis ebok. Eboken var ikke like tilgjengelig som Corys bøker vanligvis er.
Man måtte laste ned en del og sende en epost til forlage for å få resten av boka. Så kommer den litt triste delen av denne historien. Så nå er det ikke lenger mulig å laste ned eboken fra et offisiellt Samlag-eid domene. Her ser vi konturene av framtidens bokbransje og problemstillinger som angår bibliotek. The seven secrets to ebook publishing failure. The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated.
Fixabook. Norske klassiske verk som har falt i det fri. An Optimist-Pessimist’s Guide to Avoiding Ebook Armageddon. Bokstigen. E-böcker på bibliotek blir kostsamt - Kungliga biblioteket. Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote? Libraries Got Screwed by Amazon and Overdrive | Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton. The Book Cover Archive. Project Runeberg. Sony to link Readers with libraries, allow e-book borrowing - Ars Technica. Barnes & Noble Adopts ePub Standard; Aligns With Adobe.
LibriVox. Eiriks forfatterblogg :: Kulturrådet om eboka. Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM) « Gyrovague.