Электронные книги

Полный и абсолютный привет сразу нескольким нишам на рынке — детская литература, references, путеводители. К путеводителю DK Paris, по совершенно личным причинам, у меня особо трепетное отношение. Наблюдать его в таком виде — сложная смесь шока, восторга, досады и сарказма. А использование «дополненной реальности» в звёздном атласе — полный восторг! Если кто-то интересовался тем, что такое rich media content по отношению к книгам — вот прекрасные примеры.
Краткий обзор Frederic Lardinois тоже стоящий.

Earlier this week I attended the O%u2019Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference for the first time.  Over 1250 attendees gathered in New York City to discuss and network   about issues and trends in publishing, in particular, digital publishing.  While much of the information presented was for the publishing industry, I did manage to find several great ideas and concepts that relate to libraries.  I%u2019d like to share these with you, in no apparent order.

1.  Social Media Marketing is huge in the publishing industry and it should be huge in libraries as well.  The potential for building communities around the library is enormous.  Tim O%u2019Reilly, in his keynote said, %u201Cyou gain and bestow status through those you associate with in social media,%u201D and %u201Cdon%u2019t focus only on you and your product.%u201D  Is your library using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and other social media to communicate with your patrons and the greater community?  If not, you should be.    When you do get your plan in action, make sure you go beyond promoting library events and services.  If you are a public library, build your community around other organizations, businesses, and schools in the area and promote the groups who meet at the library, local authors or artists, and those groups that share the same values with the library.  Academics, the same goes for your library, focusing of course on the students and faculty and even other local colleges and universities. %u201CCreate more value than you capture.%u201D (O%u2019Reilly)

2.  eTextbooks are here, and there are more on the way.  Libraries need to do more to promote electronic textbooks to their communities.  Do you know about Flat World Books, Agile Mind and the CK12 Foundation?  All of these organizations offer open source alternatives for textbooks from Kindergarten through College.  CourseSmart offers digital textbooks and is now affiliated with 15 textbook publishers, offering over 10,000 titles.  Textbook rental is a growing market too with Chegg.com, Barnes and Noble, and Cengage all offering services.

3.  Keep your eyes out for the enTourage eDGe reader.  It%u2019s has a dual display to combine eReading with note taking, web browsing, or document creation.  It%u2019s large, like a notebook.  Could this be the future of eTextbooks?  Not at $499 a pop, but only time will tell.

4.  Going open access for monographs was the topic of a keynote speech by Frances Pinter of Bloomsbury Academic.  Frances discussed the endangered species known as the academic monograph.  She proposed a solution to this problem using existing library budgets and open access through an international library consortia for open access books (ILCOAb).  She thinks we can get the price of a monograph down to $2.00 with collaboration and open access.  Her idea is one worth considering.  I%u2019ve asked Frances for an interview and hope to post this soon.

5.  Libraries need to seriously consider digital printing or print on demand options as revenue generating sources.  All of us have unique archival collections (many of which are now digital), we all have access to public domain digital materials, and some of us may even host publishers ebook content on our own servers with the ability to POD titles or chapters.  All we need now is a POD machine, like an Espresso.  They aren%u2019t cheap, so what if we purchased these at the consortia level?  Member libraries could print and sell materials from their special collections, %u201Cchunk%u201D together a variety of public domain materials to create custom books, or create keepsake gifts by personalizing books. Why should publishers and search engine companies be the only ones bringing in revenue from library collections?

6.  Apps %u2013 everybody has an app, why not libraries?  It%u2019s a great way to take your products and services mobile.  Rana Sobhany conducted a workshop on selling in the mobile market.  She provided a long list of tips for folks considering the development of an app.

7.  Do you know what it takes to convert a print book to electronic?  I didn%u2019t either until I attended a workshop on practical ebook formatting led by Phil Frank and Joshua Tallent.  Both provided tips and tricks for those converting from InDesign to ePub and Kindle formats.  It%u2019s not an easy process folks and takes days to convert just one title.    Phil was cutting and pasting and zipping files all over the place, saving charts and images separately and anchoring them to text, and was doing lots of other things I didn%u2019t understand and was glad I didn%u2019t have to do!  I%u2019m going to remember this each time I see the price of an ebook.

8.  We all know there are tons of eBook readers out on the market, and more pop up each day.  No particular reader was designated the clear cut leader or winner, the message was rather %u2013 interoperability!  Liza Daly and Keith Fahlgren discussed the issues with interoperability and DRM in their session, networked, mobile and landlocked %u2013 current ereaders.  One thing was certain from their presentation, %u201Cin a cloudy world, networking wins; devices without web connections are not landlocked, they are landfill.%u201D  (check out slide #10 on Liza%u2019s presentation here)

9.  More and more authors are self-publishing, and making money.   When does it pay for an author to go electronic only?  Michael Mace in his presentation on the lessons learned from the failure of ebooks in 2000, discussed this vital tipping point.  He said when 20-30% of the public have ebook readers, book publishing will change dramatically.  The iPad, competition between Amazon and Apple, and rising prices of trade ebooks all bring the tipping point closer.  Libraries take heed, when publishing changes we will have to adapt.

10.  Cali Bush of O%u2019Reilly Media presented on ebook contracts.  Her presentation focused on the contracts between distributors and publishers, but it got me thinking about the contracts between publishers and libraries.  Of particular interest to me were her list of %u201Cgotchas%u201D and %u201Cgimmes.%u201D  What are the gotchas and gimmes in publisher/library ebook contracts?  Also interesting was her visualization of rights, starting with the complete pie for authors, 3/4 pie for publishers, and 1/2 pie for distributors.  Couldn%u2019t help but make me wonder where libraries and users landed in the pie (a small slice maybe?).

I downloaded the Logos iPhone app during Bob’s talk so that I could have a better feel for what he was describing.  You might think it’s nothing more than an ebook reader like Stanza but there’s more to it than that.  It comes with a number of books built in, including a few Bibles.  If you’re using one translation and you wonder what the same verse looks like in another translation, just touch the verse number, select one of your other Bibles and the app takes you right to that same verse.

Seems pretty simple, right?  That’s just the start.  Curious to learn more about a person, place or word in the Bible?  Just touch and hold and the Logos app lets you search for it throughout the Bible or in a seemingly endless list of other Logos products.

This is the “network effect” Bob referred to in his session’s title.  You start reading the Bible in the Logos app but before you know it you’ve hopped to several other resources, clicking from one link to the next, learning more and more along the way.  It’s similar to when you start researching something in Bing or Google and a couple of hours later you realize you’re 20 links deep; you have no idea how you got there but every link has added to the journey.

When was the last time you had that feeling with an ebook or app?  Have you ever had that feeling in an ebook?  I haven’t, and that’s because most publishers are just selling an individual ebook, not a network of content.  What makes the Logos product so powerful is that they’ve spent a lot of time curating their content, building links across products and thinking about how their customers can get the most out of it.  They’re not selling individual titles as much as they’re selling access to their larger service.

That brings me to “value”, the other key takeaway from Bob’s session.  It’s important to note that this isn’t just a bunch of related books that have been slapped together.  Logos has taken the time to leverage the content, add value and build on the network philosophy.  Most publishers are complaining about the $9.99 ebook model but Logos is doing something about it.  They’re offering their content in a manner where the total is far greater than the sum of the parts.

You might think this is a model that only works with reference content that doesn’t change over time.  You’d be wrong.  The “total-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts” model can be applied to just about any type of reference, how-to and even fiction material.  And when it is, the resulting product has far more value than what you get from a quick, standalone print-to-e conversion.

Download the Logos app, spend some time in it and see if you don’t agree.  It’s time to stop thinking about standalone ebooks and focus more on the larger network product opportunities.

Во исполнение мечты Александра Иванова.

The publishing industry’s alarm over the electronic book isn’t based on current use. Last year, less than 2 percent of all books sold were e-books, according to Bowker, which tracks the industry.

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By contrast, trade paperbacks and hardcovers made up approximately 35 percent each of unit sales, Bowker says. Mass market paperbacks came in at 21 percent.

But we all know how fast technology can take hold. Not long ago, e-commerce sites like Amazon.com were just a blip on the bookselling scene, and now they are major players.

Book chains still hold the lead in the percentage of books sold, at 27 percent, but they are now followed by e-commerce sites, at 20 percent. Independent booksellers, meanwhile, account for only 5 percent of books sold.

With e-books costing less to make but also selling for much less than printed books, it’s no wonder that publishers are anxiously eyeing the horizon.

Ебуки — 2 процента.

От Лайзы Дейли — главного специалиста по epub.
Функционально, кажется, ничем не отличается от Bookworm, — те же возможности для чтения из бразуера мобильных устройств. Но несколько проще по интерфейсу. На первый взгляд может показаться, что получить книги можно только с Feedbook.com, ан нет — после регистрации вы можете добавить книгу самостоятельно. На DRM пока не проверял. Десктопная версия уступает, на мой взгляд, bookmate.ru по удобству (когда ребята доведут этот сервис до ума — Лайза Дейли, наверное, обзавидуется, правда, только для десктопа). Но в любом случае — ура, коллеги!

“Apple has not licensed Adobe Content Server for their iBookstore,” Nick Bogaty, senior business development manager at Adobe, told Computerworld. “They appear to be doing something else.”

Пару слов о личном. В прошлом году я совершил в своей жизни научно-техническую революцию: перешел на букридер. Трудно было первые три часа: смена страниц в букридере происходит через черное поле, к этому надо привыкнуть. Зато в остальном — одни плюсы: в сто грамм веса помещается примерно этаж Публичной библиотеки, синхронизация проста, можно менять размер шрифтов, к тому же без подзарядки мой украинско-тайваньский Pocketbook 301 работает больше месяца. Он был выбран по совету специалиста за неприхотливость и форматную всеядность. Теперь читать обычную книгу мне труднее, чем электронную. Из своих 37 лет я провел в обнимку с бумагами 32. И это время закончилось.