Ebooks

Reading for the Holidays?

BookNet Canada’s November 23 Code Meet Print session looks at the brave frontier of …reading! The session, called Reading Is Social, is timely as we move into the season that everyone in the book industry is pumped for—the holidays! Are people still going to buy that someone special a dead tree copy of that great non-fiction title, or are they thinking about how they can really show they care by getting involved in the latest greatest trends in e-reading? How are they going to decide what to pick up for their Secret Santa exchange? Where will they find out about new books?

Questions like these made us wonder: How is the book industry leveraging game mechanics, crowdsourcing, and social platforms to make reading even more attractive?

Bundle Up: It’s Cold Outside

Put the pumpkins away. It’s time to bring out snow pants and tinsel. As the weather gets colder we’re faced with the daunting task of buying presents for the holidays. Not surprisingly many of us will be giving and receiving e-books or gadgets on which to read them. Now to find the perfect e-books for the readers on your list. Many are planning on sticking to their tradition of gifting award shortlisted books. So why don’t e-book retailers capitalize on that with, for example, a Giller shortlist bundle of e-books? The answer is they can’t.

E-Book Tracking in the Canadian Market: What’s in the Works

Some of you may have seen the recent Quill and Quire article discussing the fact that BookNet Canada is undertaking an initiative to collect statistics on the sale of e-books in Canada. Right now BookNet actually has two e-book initiatives underway: e-book sales research and e-book SalesData reporting. Here are the details.

Breaking the Page without Hurting the Reader

Enhanced books are truly amazing. It seems like everyday a new kind of enhancement is announced or shown off. Videos and images can be embedded or made to pop up, text can be hyperlinked, music can be played, table of contents and indexes can be reinvented and repurposed. But while it’s fascinating to see what can be done, we need to ask ourselves should it be done. Developers can build just about anything, because they’re such a talented bunch, but that doesn’t mean the reader wants it in their e-book.

This is why it seemed like a good time to devote one of our conferences to enhancements and apps. Tech Forum West will do just that this fall.