Publishing

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Breaking the Page without Hurting the Reader

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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.

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They're Always After Me Red Lemonade!

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Richard Nash needs no introduction but if he does you can do no better than to tune into the talk he gave at the 2010 BookNet Technology Forum. Nash has been re-imagining the business of publishing for some time and, in fact, left his post at Soft Skull to begin building that re-imagining.

Red Lemonade, his new project, is all about connecting readers and writers and has that social community goodness baked right in. There are no walled gardens here.

Does this on its own reinvent publishing?

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E-Book Advertising Is Here

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There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Harry Hurt III’s upcoming e-book. Hurt sought out many sponsors for his book, which sounds like it involved a lot of travel (i.e., is expensive for the author to write). The sponsors gave him money, equipment and products in exchange for ads inside the book and “significant product placement woven throughout [the book’s] narrative.”

Will readers mind the advertisements in the book? Is it possible to work product placement into your narrative seamlessly?

Is Self-Publishing the Book Equivalent of Demand Media?

Demand Media is what most would describe as a “content farm”: It’s the equivalent of factory-farmed chicken. The content is created and put out as cheaply and quickly as possible, but the welfare of those involved and the nutritional content is questionable. I don’t want advice from that kind of content source. And yet I have a hard time not getting these sorts of results in my web searches. Parallels can be drawn between what’s going on in publishing and Demand Media’s invasion of the web content world.

 

 

BookNet Canada is a non-profit organization that develops technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. Founded in 2002 to address systemic challenges in the industry, BookNet Canada supports publishing companies, booksellers, wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, industry associations, literary agents, media, and libraries across the country.

 

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