A Kindle World blog How much should an ebook cost? Subscribe to our free email newsletter. We'll update you once or twice a week, and we'll never rent or sell your email address to anyone. Thanks. This is the wrong question. The right question is: How much will an ebook cost? Because the answer isn’t up to one author or one publisher or even a price-fixing cartel. On one hand, the marginal cost of delivering a single ebook is close to zero. (People who disagree with that statement don’t understand the concept of marginal cost and should look it up before participating in this discussion. In a market where the marginal cost is close to zero, prices tend to race to zero as well. Except when there are no substitutes. So our analysis begins with the notion that there will be at least two price points for ebooks. But what about books where there is no obvious substitute. Here, we need to take a moment and think about the nature of a substitute. That means that pricing of the future looks like: Zero: promo titles $15: current bestsellers
What makes a good-looking eBook: Tips on eBook design for standard titles While I was pleased to read about FutureBook’s first Digital Innovation Awards last year, I was disappointed not to see a category for ‘Best eBook’ alongside 'Best app/enhanced eBook/interactive book'. It would have been nice to have had a shout-out for perfectly normal ebooks, with no bells and whistles but intelligently produced and sensitively designed, in recognition of the difficulties of achieving the latter in the standard reflowable EPUB format. Of course, if FutureBook did create this category, it would probably have to take it down even by the next round of awards, as technology and standards are constantly improving and hopefully we will soon reach the point where there is no need to celebrate ebooks that have the functionality and design that we would expect from an HTML-based medium. So, what are the challenges of standard reflowable ebook design? Given the number of limitations, the concept of the ‘good-looking ebook’ might seem oxymoronic. Paragraph indentation. Styling.
Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? I received a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,” in addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded it with mysteries by my favorite authors. But I soon found that I had difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter. At first, I attributed the lapses to a scary reality of getting older — but then I discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read paperbacks. When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.” This seems like a particularly troubling trend for academia, where digital books are slowly overtaking the heavy tomes I used to lug around. VIDEO: Trippy Video: Inside the World Series of Memorization Kate Garland, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester in England, is one of the few scientists who has studied this question and reviewed the data. Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully.
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future by Jason Epstein The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect.
Are We Stripping Modern Books Bare? Reader Drew Turney wrote to me recently with an interesting question. There's so much advice, commentary, and opinion about stripping away anything unessential to a book's plot. Writing in the modern era emphasizes moving the plot forward at all costs, and everything else is "ruthlessly killed off no matter how darling." Digressions and detritus that might otherwise be compelling on their own are eliminated. Is this a purely modern phenomenon? My opinion: Yes to both. Yes, I do think it's a modern phenomenon. But it's complicated. We're living in a golden era We tend to view the present in a negative light, especially when it comes to books and literature. We always think things are getting worse relative to some golden era in the past. Partly this is because the only books we read from past eras are the good ones. And because we elevate whole eras above our own, we also tend to treat classics as sacred and perfect. We think of books like vegetables. That's the point, isn't it? And yet...
You Say Documents, I Say Source Files From Jaye Manus - I’ve been creating manuscripts for well over twenty years. I can rattle off the formatting in my sleep. Double-spaced, one inch margins, header with page number top left corner, drop to middle of page to start a new chapter, blah blah blah. It’s a manuscript. Please go read the whole thing on Jaye’s blog: You Say Documents, I Say Source Files. Although this is an excellent set of tips for the current state of the art in preparing source files for ebook formatting, reading this made me sad. When I look at the typical novel, I see something very simple. For the vast majority of “immersive fiction”, that’s it. Here’s why this should matter to you. Fundamentally, this is about the separation of the presentation of your content from the form of your content. -William Ockham (who intends to solve this problem) Uncategorized
Source Files Update | J W Manus So last week I talked about the importance of writers shifting their mindset from thinking “Print Documents” to thinking “Electronic Files.” Judging by the responses I got, I’d say I’m not the only one concerned with this subject. One of the problems is that the tools we use–namely word processors–are superb for producing printed documents, but frustrating, maddening and over-powered when creating electronic files. Currently, I’m in the process of creating a booklet/cheat sheet to help fiction writers who are NOT computer programmers to painlessly use the tools they have–and are comfortable using–to create electronic files suitable for e-queries, e-submissions and ebooks. You’d think this would be simple, but it’s not. In the meantime, I’d thought I’d show you what we’re up against. First, here is a document provided by a writer for whom I’m producing an ebook. The writer has created a document suitable for print. It shouldn’t be this hard. Woulda, coulda, shoulda… Watch this space.