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Bowker's Pubtrack Now Working with Online RetailersThe new agreements significantly expand the breadth of data collection for PubTrack Higher Education, Bowker's Web-based business intelligence tool for higher education publishing professionals. With the addition of the newest data partners, PubTrack Higher Education now includes textbook purchasing information from more than 11 million students nationwide, or roughly 65 percent of the total U.S. college student population.
PubTrack Higher Education is the only sales analysis resource for the higher education market that provides timely and accurate data regarding textbook sales, course books-in-use information on college campuses nationwide, and analyzes market share data in ways that matter to publishers.
Jack Romanos's Parting Words[T]he single most important task for the CEO of any publishing company will be to develop and implement the strategy to take their company into the digital age. The impact of digital publishing will be as profound as that of paperbacks in the 1940s and 1950s." There is a significant challenge, he conceded, in keeping younger generations interested in reading; "I don't have the answers, but I do think that digital publishing will offer some opportunities...But it's always been about the words, and new ways to package the words."
Fooling Around With the KindleAmazon's Digital Text Platform is in beta, but it's an . Anyone can sign up. Anyone can be published. In fact, the only requirements to get an item listed on Kindle are a title, an author's name, and of course, content.Indeed. It disturbed me a bit that (a) it wasn't necessary for the ebook to have an ISBN (b) it didn't conform to the IDPF's .epub standard. And yet, if history is any guide, Amazon will set the de facto standard and all that .epub work will kind of fall by the wayside....
I wrote a cheesy coming-of-age novel called during my undergraduate days. It's not my best work. It might be my worst. I've let two people read it. OK, I've suckered two people into reading it. I had it lying around on my hard drive in MS Word, so I figured I'd serve it to Amazon's service as a guinea pig.
In seconds, Amazon chewed it up and spit it back out in Kindle's HTML-coded format. All that was left was to price the puppy, from $0.25 to $200. I chose the low end of that scale and clicked the Publish button.
Several hours later, it was up on the site, complete with an Amazon-assigned ASIN code. That was too easy.
Kindle talk
BAMM sales up
More Muzers
A Rising Tide...of Prices?
Giving E-books a bad nameIt's not clear when the e-book scam began. A few consumers say they saw fake e-book charges beginning in February, but it appears there was a flurry of activity in September.
Credit card thieves often create fake businesses to process bogus transactions -- that's much easier than using stolen cards to make purchases at legitimate retailers, and one of the quickest ways to turn stolen numbers into cash.
Downloadable audio in libraries
"If Barnes & Noble were one set of buttocks, I'd kick them so hard right now."
Pajama PartyBooks are great, but digital storage is the wave of the future. Yet we cannot see the wave in its entirety. We don’t know where most of that avalanche of knolwedge is and how to easily find it. Most information on the Web is locked up in databases and cannot be “spidered,” a term used to describe the software indexing of Internet material. For example, web pages generated from databases only “exist” when a query is run, like online telephone directories which do not have a separate page for every person in the directory and only create a page in response to a request. Database generated pages have a transient existence and cannot easily be indexed. Password protected websites like locked apartments or private telephone numbers defy our attempts to see within them. Much information lives on the Deep Web. It is there but we cannot see it without taking special steps.
The immense size of the unindexed Internet has motivated consultants and online resources to offer help at finding information in the Deep Web the way traditional librarians guided scholars through the stacks in days gone by.
Scobelizing the Kindle
NYCIP this weekend
Tight Christmas
BoingBoing Says It Best
Leftover Kindle-ing As Good The Next Day?We're guessing it's called "Kindle" because soon all books will have to be burned, as we will no longer know how to interface with them without our wireless readers!...Kindle uses something called "electronic paper" to make the experience "nothing like reading from a computer screen." Except, of course, that it is exactly like reading from a screen.
Will Amazon's Kindle work in the future with .epub files, even without conversion, or will Amazon thumb its nose at the IDPF, publishers and us e-book readers who are sick, sick, sick of eBabel---all those clashing formats. Oh, and don't forget the DRM issue, too. Remember, if DRM systems aren't interoperable, the core e-book standards will mean squat in the case of "protected" books.
Is It Really As Drastic As All That?Following is a link roundup for Kindle, but I have to say that when Publisher's Lunch hit my inbox, I was sort of taken aback at this quote from OUP's Evan Schnittman:
The risk here isn’t just to Amazon. If Kindle fails, the ebook is over, the theory of the “iPod model” is wrong for eBooks, and publishing must face the reality that consumers just don’t want to read immersive content on electronic screens of any sort…
You know what? No. I just don't believe it's as drastic as all that. We've been living with books for 500 years, people! To expect us to wake up one day and start reading them on screens - or it's all over, we'll NEVER read them on screens - is a little much. The comparisons/expectations regarding the music business are just not apt here - in listening to music, we've been accustomed to changing devices every generation or so - from wax cylinders to wax records to vinyl to 8 tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s - and the history of listening to personal music (as opposed to the history of reading, for God's sake) is a lot shorter. Innovation is expected there. But the runway for changing reading formats is a lot longer. Longer than any of us can see. To say it's now or never is...hysteria.
Which means, of course, that Bezos wins, in terms of whipping some of us up into a frenzy.
Roundup:
Don't Everybody Plotz At Once
Even having Toni Morrison shill for this thing doesn't make it any prettier.
Juicy Juicy JuicyThe wires are abuzz with Judith Regan, who has little to do with what we cover. Everything's more or less drowned out by the shocking accounts of how she was asked to withhold information from federal investigators about her affair with Bernie Kerik, in a Murdochian scheme to pump up Giuliani's credibility to take the Republican Party nomination. In addition to Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, all of Fox News, Jane Friedman, and a host of others, Sara Nelson of PW is also implicated, along with the writer Michael Wolff. She's not going down alone, people.
Link roundup:
Cindy Cunningham now at OCLC
Credo Reference adds Greenwood titles
Bloggapedia in Against the Grain
BISG Annual Meeting presentations online
Now You Can Create-A-CookbookAllrecipes.com users can choose from more than 40,000 recipes to include, and can complement them with notes, stories, photographs and their own recipes. Family and friends can also be invited to submit their own comments, photos and recipes.
Diller Doubles Down"While we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors,” Mr. Diller, IAC’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
NYT: New Media is complicatedScreenwriters argue that their labors generally create programming that has very high value — value that would seem to multiply as it spread over more platforms.
Media companies have a story to tell as well: If they are about to make jillions on new media, the markets don’t seem to think so....Writers, still smarting from giving away the store in terms of video and DVD before the true value of those businesses became apparent, are not about to cave in. Producers, who have yet to find a revenue model for digital content, do not want to be hamstrung by a costly deal with writers while they try to figure it out.
Audible sales up
Mobile Houghton
Across-the-Border DiscountThe US dollar is so weak now that Canadian bookstores are selling books at US prices, rather than the higher-marked Canadian ones. Reports Earth Times:
The retail prices printed on book covers are determined by the publisher often six months before a book appears on store shelves and often do not reflect the current exchange rate, said the Toronto-based chain, which also runs Chapters and Coles bookstores.
Okay, people, this is just embarrassing.
And the Kindle is...where???The "Bits" blog at the New York Times points out:
According to publishing industry executives...Amazon had promised delivery of its keyboard-equipped electronic book reader during the second week of October. Now, those same people say that the company has pushed back that date and is aiming for a launch by the end of this year. Take that with a grain of salt. Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, are notoriously persnickety. For example, they delayed their digital music service for two years, trying to find the best customer proposition in a rapidly changing competitive environment, before launching the DRM-free store last month.
But what I love are the comments:
If the picture I just saw on Engadget is correct, Amazon delayed the ‘Kindle’ because someone there took off their dark sunglasses off and noticed what was sitting in front of them. Readers living in 2007 would not go near “that thing” with a 10-foot pole.
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