Digital Publishing Trends - Semantic Press

To further reassure our vision of an OLED future presented at the Collision Conference on Saturday, scientist from the RIKEN center in Japan have made some wonderful new discoveries. According to Yutaka Yamagata of the RIKEN Center,

“We have discovered a range of conditions using a two-solvent method that can make extremely smooth thin films using electrospray deposition. Using this technology, these devices could be manufactured as inexpensively as printing newspapers.”

To dive into the specifics and technology of this discovery, head over to OLED-Info.

...In effect, Macmillan is trying to do exactly the same thing that many other media companies are desperate to do — from newspapers to music labels to movie companies — which is to replicate the pricing model of an analog, real-world business in digital form.

In other words, (windowing) tries to artificially reproduce the kind of scarcity (and thus pricing power) it used to have in one medium in a medium that doesn’t even know what scarcity is.

Sooner or later, that attempt will fail (among other things, iTunes appears to show that flexible pricing actually leads to lower sales).

For now, Macmillan and other publishers have managed to convince Amazon and Apple to accept the new agency model, but those sandbags aren’t going to last for long.

My take: "Macmillan, like most publishers, is attempting to protect their existing printed business long enough to readjust their production, sales and distribution model to digital media, rather than print media. Until then, their pricing model for eBooks and print media will be closely related and will walk in tandem towards a new model; at least in theory."

"What we are seeing is a change in the business model of content distribution. There are simply more efficient and effective ways to subsidize the cost of transporting information."

"Content is a service and a book is the conduit and container."

According to Mobclix, which does mobile advertising for apps, the number of books in the iTunes store now exceeds the number of games for the first time since the device was launched, making books the largest category in the store. The numbers from Mobclix, which keeps a regular tally on the most popular apps and downloads, show that there are more than 26,000 books in iTunes, compared with a little over 24,000 games.

This fits in with something Om wrote recently based on data from Flurry, which also showed a substantial increase in the number of books being downloaded to the iPhone.

In many ways, the popularity of the iPhone as an e-book reader has created a ton of momentum for Apple when it comes to launching the iPad

ALAMEDA, CA -- 02/19/10 -- Vook today announced it has secured $2.5 million in seed funding from an impressive syndicate of Silicon Valley technology and New York media investors, including Ron Conway, Kenneth Lerer, chairman of the Huffington Post, Maples Investments, Baseline Ventures and Founder Collective. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate growth in all areas of its business and to support its plans for massive scale in 2010.

Vook is pioneering a new form of media and reinventing traditional book publishing. A vook is a mixed-media form that blends video, text, images and social streams into a single, integrated experience.

Since its formal launch in the fall of 2009, Vook has experienced impressive momentum, forming strategic publishing relationships with Simon & Schuster, HarperStudio and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. and announcing vook titles with bestselling writers, including Seth Godin and Anne Rice. The company recently announced an exclusive partnership with online video experts TurnHere while also announcing its MotherVook digital publishing tool, which will ultimately allow Vook to publish hundreds of titles each week.

"Vook has an opportunity to become synonymous with a new form of media, which is something that doesn't happen very often," said Ron Conway, independent angel investor and advisor to the company. "Brad knows how to turn a big vision into a great business and it's clear with Vook that he has an opportunity to shake things up in the world of publishing."

"Three trends are driving our business," said Brad Inman, founder and CEO of Vook. "First, traditional book publishing is going through a radical transformation just as music, film and print news have in recent years. Second, consumers are engaging with media in all sorts of new ways. And third, new devices such as smart phones and tablets are creating a huge surge in creativity and possibilities for mixed media brought together in a single form to tell a story, entertain or show us how to do something. We believe we are bringing Vook to market at the exact right time to help transform an industry, drive creativity and create a whole new media experience for consumers."

About Vook

Vook is a digital publisher that mixes media including text, video, pictures, social media and links to create new experiences of the books and authors that readers love. Vook's publishing tool, MotherVook, provides publishers with the ability to quickly and cost-effectively produce high quality mixed media e-book titles. Vooks are streamed to the browser-based Vook Reader and are also available on-the-go as a unique mobile application. Vook is based in Alameda, CA with offices in New York. For more information about vooks, visit www.vook.com.

Note: Brad Inman, founder of Vook, also co-founded TurnHere "online video experts" which is mentioned in the press release.

PR Agent: Launch Squad
Peter Evers or Chris Schreiber
415-625-8555

This 2 minute video demystifies ebook production and highlights the five things publishers must get right to profit from ebooks.

The video was created by digital publishing solutions provider, Aptara, a firm that helps publishers — and today, that’s basically every organization on earth — distribute content in any format, to any device or platform, including ebook readers like the ipad, Kindle and Sony ereader as well as on smart phones like the iphone and Android.

You can learn more about Aptara here: aptaracorp.com

Looking to turn its e-publishing expertise into a new business, O'Reilly Media is launching O'Reilly Digital Distribution, a new division offering publishers a complete e-book publishing service. Starting with text conversion, O'Reilly Digital Distribution can output files in any format for any device or e-reader and market and distribute the e-titles though an extensive and growing network of e-book retail channels.

In an interview conducted at O'Reilly's annual Tools of Change conference in Manhattan, Laura Baldwin, chief operating officer of O'Reilly Media, said the new service will offer free conversion as part of a comprehensive program that will secure and store a publisher's digital files and market and distribute them into 24 digital e-book retail channels (with 40 more under development) and in every format. ODD can turnout e-books for any format--from Kindle to iPhone to Stanza and Android readers like Aldiko. Publishers pay a fee of 25% of sales--no fees, she emphasized, until the e-books are in the sales channels. "We've automated the process of digital title conversion and production and for us this is all about sales and marketing," Baldwin said. "It's about getting e-books into the retail channels and there are more channels coming online all the time."

Baldwin said the service grew out taking over the distribution of Microsoft titles last year. "We won the bid because of our sophisticated digital infrastructure. It took us seven weeks to go live with 200 Microsoft titles and make them available as e-books and apps." A longtime champion of the e-book category, O'Reilly has seen its own e-book sales rise steadily and the publisher has been aggressive in offering e-books in all formats as well as bundling e-books with print. Andrew Savikas, O'Reilly's v-p of digital initiatives, has said that O'Reilly's Safari Books Online, a subscription service that gives it client access to library of digital titles, is its second largest sales channel.

The new division will be directed by O'Reilly Digital Distribution general manager Pascal Honscher and Baldwin said the company would be hiring new workers as well as promoting from within.

Baldwin said they were marketing the service to all kinds of publishers, not just technical houses. "We're looking beyond technology books to poetry and fiction," and she said the services and pricing can be customized to what a publisher needs. "If a publisher only needs conversion or only wants marketing and distribution support, we'll work with them to come up with a different price."

Baldwin compared the new service to the annual TOC conference: "The TOC is designed to help publishers and this service has evolved out of that. We know technology is driving the publishing business now, but people shouldn't have to deal with technology issues. We want to take the technological confusion and ambiguity away and help publisher get their books to readers."

You can find O'Reilly Digital Distribution here:
http://oreilly.com/digital-distribution.html

Elizabeth Weiss: "Look, this is nothing less than a revolution. This is going from an analogue world to a digital world. To think that we will reinvent ourselves once and that will be that would be an illusion, this is going to happen many, many times and the only thing that's constant is rapid change."

Elizabeth Weiss is Academic and Digital Publishing Director at Allen & Unwin. Allen & Unwin is considered one of the leaders in digital publishing in Australia.

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Stephen Page: "We will have 1,100 e-books available by June. Why? Because now the window has opened, we cannot pause; we cannot be slow because we can see that if we don't make our books available, someone else will."

Stephen Page is CEO of the literary publishing house Faber and Faber which is embracing the digital future of electronically published books. Stephen is credited with dragging Faber and Faber into the modern age. The firm has an impressive history publishing literary giants like T.S. Eliot, and novels that we've all read like Lord of the Flies.

via abc.net.au

The International Digital Publishing Forum and Association of American Publishers have released stats for December 2009, and sales set the bar for E-Books' greatest month ever, $19,100,000. That figure more than doubles the previous December's mark and tops the best month to date, October '09 at $18,500,000.

The industry reported more sales in the fourth quarter of '09 ($55,900,000) alone than the total sales for all of '08 ($53,500,000).

Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF reminds us that:

• This data represents United States revenues only
• This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
• This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
• This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
• The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
• The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices"

 

http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm
http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Press_Issues/press_Issue.htm#industryStats