Jun 08

Digital book “ecosystem?”

Here‘s a story at Top News about Google’s plans to get up in Amazon’s grill and offer a sales and search platform to eBook authors, publishers and stores.

I’m cool with it. Competition is good for business. My only concern is we’re really talking about an online marketplace for digital books, aren’t we? It worries me when a mammoth corporation like GOOGLE starts making up names for things that are shared by all. It’s rather presumptuous and denotes ‘ownership.’ This one’s got focus-group all over it too. Ecosystem is a green-friendly and touchy feely name. I can just see the silly buggers passing that one around the boardroom. Gag! Google should know better, yah?

Jun 07

It’s a good day to read…

Okay. A slow eBook news day is a good day to read an eBook. Check out these collections and free offers. The libraries and web sites in the list are constantly adding new titles and different editions so it’s always worth going back to download something to read, or to grab eBooks old or new to add to your own digital library. Enjoy!

Project Gutenberg – Their mission statement: to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. “Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.” Read the full scoop at the above link. Tons of reading there, you could browse all day. Classics and public domain material for obvious reasons but here’s their explanation. They offer many formats but prefer “open” and “editable” varieties.

Free-eBooks.net: “Download unlimited eBooks for FREE – anytime.” Looks like they’ve got a backlist of public domain works, old classics, i.e. Carmilla, and other various author-direct releases. Also advertorial and how-to books available. Worth a look see, especially if you’re curious about author-direct releases or you’re building an eLibrary of your own.

G. Wells Taylor is giving the first book in his Apocalypse Trilogy away. Get it here. It’s a horror mystery adventure called When Graveyards Yawn. Multiple formats now available.

Jennifer L. Armstrong hosts Free Online Novels where she’s posted an impressive list of free online novels along with her own. Various formats. Huge Selection!

Feedbooks.com allows you to select free eBooks in various formats for download: Mobi, Pdf, sized for iLiad, Sony etc. That means you’re getting public domain material, but there’s a growing list of Author Direct eBooks too. It also offers some cool free online publishing options for writers.

L. Lee Lowe’s free novel Mortal Ghost is available here in various formats for a range of devices and handhelds: iPod etc. It worth a read. It’s also available in podcasts here.

Author Susan Crealock has several hundred FREE eBooks available at her blog: Online Novels. We’re talking about some 500 titles in a wide selection of genres written by both traditionally published and Indie authors. Check it out.

Suggest a Link here.

Jun 06

CrunchPad is very cool…

CrunchPad seems to be out-tableting Apple’s rumored multi-purpose machine. (That’s supposed to have a fall release.)

Billed as a doorway to ‘couch computing’ techcrunch’s CrunchPad is a slick and sweet little ride. Check it out here. They’re offering conceptual drawings now, and a first working prototype in weeks.

With a rumored $300 admission, this is an eBook Reader that could be a Kindle killer, justifying its price with multi-function and multi-purpose. (Doesn’t Kindle just read eBooks?)

My hope is devices like this will become available for people who want the bells and whistles, and the rest of the eBook Reader world can focus on a eBook Reading device that will just read eBooks without breaking the bank. There is room for both yah?

Jun 05

More signs of the change that’s coming…

I’ve mentioned the Espresso print-while-you-wait book machines before. It looks like the traditional publishing industry has heard about them too. Read the article here at Graphic Arts Online about a traditional paperback printer cutting staff in response to “the economic downturn…and technology innovations.” It seems like a no-brainer now, but a few of us have been predicting this for years. It was just a matter of time before the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ publishers quit trashing print-on-demand and embraced the print-only-what-you-sell economic model. It should only make sense to the corporate slaves of quarterly profits, yah? Think about it: no start up, no stock, no storage, no shipping, no RETURNS… This marks another shift toward digital that runs parallel to the adoption of eBooks and eBook Readers. (Now they’ve got to realize that consumers are hip to the lower costs associated with producing print-on-demand paperbacks and eBooks. Publishers should drop their prices and expectations accordingly.)

While it’s sad for the employees who are losing their jobs, one has to accept that the eBook (digital) Revolution is going to continue to demand adaptations from all of us. You’ll notice in the article that prepress work at this Offset Paperback Manufacturer’s Laflin, PA, location will be outsourced. Well, that outsourcing represents shifting job demographic in its purest form. One door closes another opens.

Jun 04

iRex Technologies Developing a High Quality, Full Color Digital Reader.

I don’t often direct link to press releases but everyone goes on so much…to a fault…about Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader that we kind of help set the stage for their posturing. There are lots of competitors out there, like iRex Technologies who brought the popular iLiad Reader to the European market. They’re now announcing the upcoming release of a Full Color Digital Reader. Read the release here. We know it will be expensive, with the grayscale display iLiad Book Edition ringing in at a whopping $599…or the iRex Digital Reader 1000S thundering in at $899…. but those prices will only come down if iRex Readers are acknowledged as open competition to the the self-declared American front runners.


Jun 03

More interesting moves in the eBook Revolution

The Financial Times reports a story here about the Taiwanese screen-maker for Amazon’s Kindle, Prime View International, cutting a check to buy E Ink, the US company that owns key tech for making the screens. The $215 million purchase is going to get North American and European publishers howling about monopolies…especially since they’re all seeing a digital future as the only future. This will get the pot boiling, yah?

And Google’s jumping into the game as a direct competitor to Amazon.com, now opening up its services to publishers for direct sales to consumers. They’re not interested in controlling format (like Amazon’s Kindle-only reads and purchases) and are leaving the pricing open to the individual publishers. (Something analysts say will get more publishers into the game because they can start jacking their prices up again). Read the full story here.

Again, I hate to say it, but all of these players keep leaving the key component of new (digital) market forces out of the equation. The article suggests Google’s move will start a pricing war that will force the price of eBooks up. Perhaps, in the beginning, as greedy publishers try to force the digital world to accept their old bricks and mortar business model. But we know that overpriced digital content just encourages piracy and diminishes sales in the long run. The true nature of these digital market forces, as has been proven with digital content like music, is to drive the price down while  pushing product availability and market size through the roof.

That’s good for readers and authors. (Especially those who communicate directly.) And it will be grand for publishers and resellers that have the vision to leave the past behind and embrace the broad scope of the digital age. 

This is going to be brutal but fun to watch.

Jun 02

Not exactly news but…

Lance Whitney of cnet news has laid it all out there nicely for us, with a graph and everything. Read the article here. More talk about what seems fairly obvious now. Amazon and Sony can’t just declare themselves the winners in an evolving marketplace. And as long as their eBook Readers (Kindle & Sony Reader) do not offer enough to justify netbook or iPhone prices, they’ll leave gaping holes for similarly priced machines with more to offer or for low-priced competition to fill.

I’m in full agreement but will add this to the mix, something I find noticeably absent from the discussion. They talk about publisher’s percentages and Amazon’s big bite of the profits, but analysts keep leaving out the obvious. Writers and readers can communicate directly through the Internet.  When writers and readers realize that they do not need all these middlemen, then we’ll see some drastic changes to eBook and eBook Reader prices, yah?

I mean, with a bit of technical know-how and minimum start up money, a writer can finish a book, pay someone to edit it, lay it out and design a cover. Then all he/she needs to do is open his/her own eBook Store. Writers have already been forced to take a big hand in their own promotion anyway (and the smart ones have established themselves on the net), so this should be a no-brainer. In a case like that, it’s just pure content delivered to the consumer from the creator. Then all the creator has to charge is enough to cover his/her royalty, and maybe a bit more for production costs.

How’s that going to change eBook pricing? And here’s another one. What if Stephen King did that with his eBooks?

Jun 01

$199 eBook Reader coming from BeBook.

GalleyCat and TeleRead enjoyed an exclusive first look at BeBook’s $199 Mini Ebook Reader slated for release June 30, 2009.  Read the full article and specs here.

They call it perfect for the businessman to “stuff” in a pocket and journalists on hand found it easy to use. The price is getting into range for mainstream adoption. (I’m thinking the average household will need at least two eBook Readers per…) I’ll predict the $149.00 eBook Reader will be the start of the end for traditional book reading, yah?

May 31

Printing Moves Closer to the Readers

We’ve been waiting for print-on-demand kiosks to break out, and it looks like it’s finally happening. The Ingram publishing services on-demand book printing unit has started delivering digital books for printing on compact Espresso digital printing machines at retail centers and libraries.

The machines are being called the “ATM” of on-demand book printing. (I knew the traditional publishing industry thought they were printing money, but I never thought they’d come out and say it. You can see where their heads are at.) Others of us call the machines the still exciting “print-a-book-while-you-wait” device, yah?

Read the full story here at Graphic Arts Online. As I’ve said before, this is what Amazon and other book resellers and publishers should have been worried about, not Kindle competition.

Watch this story develop.

May 29

More interesting deals…

I thought I’d add this item to my conspiracy theory of yesterday, where I intimated questionable integrity on the part of the New York Times’ coverage of the Kindle phenomena.

Here we have a well-written article in  Wednesday’s (May 27/09) online edition of the New York Times called: “Don’t Quit that Kindle Just Yet” by David Pogue that starts as a fair and detailed appraisal of the up and coming $250 Cool-er e-book reader by British company Interead. Read it here.  Honestly, it’s an excellent article and gives the complete lowdown on this new device, clearly designed with the common reader’s budget in mind.

Now, to draw your attention to the fact that the New York Times has a content deal with Kindle, it isn’t surprising when this article begins to focus on the Cool-er’s deficits or, the very qualities that make it affordable.

I wish I could read that article and not wonder if the NewYork Times had an ulterior motive for publishing it, yah?