Новости электронного книгоиздания

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students’ hands within five years.

План неплохой. Ещё бы стандарты были. А то K8 в лес, а iBooks по дрова.

We make a high-quality cloud-based e-book reader for publishers.

Вот ещё вариант: фирма предлагает издателям получить свою “собственную” облачную читалку, которая, естественно, будет работать во всех устройствах с современными браузерами.
Попросил прислать демо-доступ, посмотреть — как же это оно изнутри. Заодно поинтересовался и ценами. Жду ответа.

Смотреть, естественно, можно только в iBooks на iPad. Или как PDF ;)

Реклама новой книжки Feral House о масонской Америке.

Web users have been trained long enough to know what they want: everything.

That’s the promise of the web. Every book for sale at Amazon. Every search result visible on Google. Every auctioned item right there on eBay.

Not piracy. Availability.

The music industry got confused about this and decided that people merely wanted to steal music. What’s clear now from the rise of iTunes as well as ad and subscriber-supported services like Spotify is that people will happily pay as long as it brings most everything along for the ride.

And Netflix shows us that subscriptions are generally more welcomed than a la carte sales.

Into this world walks the MPAA, the movie business and the folks who make books.

And once again, there’s the same mistake: they think piracy is the problem. It’s not. The problem is that these providers are doing nothing to embrace ubiquity, because their heritage is all about scarcity.

When the VHS came along, the MPAA insisted that the movie industry would be killed by it. They finally listened to the market and made a fortune. And when DVD came along, the same thing happened. Form factors change and the business model that supports them must change as well. The business model for an ebook can’t possibly be the same as it is for a paper book, despite the best efforts and hyperventilation of a few overpaid book publishing executives.

When in doubt, move toward ubiquity. When wondering, favor subscriptions.

Readers will pay.

Moviegoers will pay.

If you give them what they want, which is everything, right now, easily found and discussed.

Finally, one of the biggest reasons why the Icelandic publishing industry is so vibrant is almost counter-intuitively that Icelandic authors are underpaid . . . and accept it. Before the translation boom, the only way even bestselling Icelandic authors could expect to make a (slim) living off of their books was through government grants and a day job.

К вопросу о голодных авторах.

Matt reported that the percentage of ebook sales to total sales on ABA member web sites rose from 0.7% to 5.2% in 2011. That’s a 750% increase, which is impressive even though the Google eBook capability kicked in during that year. But it is also actually understated, because the total volume of business on these sites rose by 82%. So the share increase of 750% is in an environment where total sales nearly doubled.

Онлайн торговля челнов Американской ассоциации проадцов книг выросла в 2011 году на 82%, при этом продажи ими электронных книг выросли в 7,5 раз и составили 5,2% выручки. Думаю, российским книжным магазинам, за исключением, разве что, «Москвы», до этого пока оооочень далеко. Хотя бы потому, что у них и онлайновых магазинов-то почти нет. Но почему бы не задуматься?

When I phoned Neil Gaiman last week to ask him about the stramash over Apple’s new iBooks Author app , he said publishing these days was like “the Klondike. Nobody knows what’s going on. All they know is that there’s gold in them thar hills and they want to try to get hold of it.”

Очень точное сравнение. Не потому что Нил Гейман, а потому, что ровно то же самое, только по-русски, сказал мне мой друг, издатель, который The Guardian не читает, несколько дней назад. Правда, он ещё пожелал не застолбить случайно «минусовый» участок…