Emdashery Blog

Sony Reader still winning customers--

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools has a write-up on the Sony Reader--Sony's electronic book device. The reader displays books that are in ebook format--specifically PDF, TXT and RTF formats.

The Sony Reader is a portable, unobtrusive paperback-sized handheld device for reading eBooks. I've carried it on several plane trips and car trips and have found it be quite convenient and functional. In fact, I generally have it with me all the time, so I'm never without a book (or 40). Having it has encouraged me to read the types of books I might not consider otherwise due to space constraints around my home or simply not wishing to carry around a physical book that could potentially get damaged during transport. The books I usually read tend to be technical or reference books, but I've particularly enjoyed reading some classics and contemporary fiction on the Reader.

An new electronic medium that creates new customers. That's often how it works. I'm still far too cheap to lay down the $350 purchase price. But I don't think this is a passing fad, so I know my time will come.

Read the full review here...

What will books look like in the future?--

A recent Shelf Awareness offers a summary of points made from the Making Information Pay seminary held by the Book Industry Study Group. As emerging technology continues to change the publishing industry, some people will bemoan that consumers aren't reading like they used to. In fact, consumers are not reading less, necessarily, but they are reading differently.

Although e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential, there are many other digital opportunities, mostly on the Web and cell phones and iPods, that continue to grow and evolve. Publishers who aren't ready for those and unforeseen opportunities--such as by not digitizing their books, for example--will lose out. As Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., put it: "The day will come when you should have done it last week."

Consumers are reading more and more online and want pieces of information, not full texts. As a result, making chapters and other parts of traditional books available is more important. "Consumers don't want to read a whole finance book when they're only concerned with mortgages," Nicole Poindexter of Hachette Group said. "New media is radically changing content. In the past, readers just took content as it was presented." Now, she added, "consumers create content."

Poindexter pointed out, too, that the next generation of readers are digital natives and to an extent will bypass books. "We'll have no chance to control our content unless we take action now to digitize it and be proactive."

As digital natives increase their share of the consumer marketplace, I wonder what new content products will emerge to serve their needs. What will books of the future look like? And how will we need to write them?

What to do during the long wait from acceptance to print--

The New York Times is writing again on the advantages of podcasting. I posted before on authors releasing their books straight to audio via podcasts. Now, authors are using podcasts to stay connected with "readers" while they wait for the book to come out.

When you are a budding author and you appear on television, it is sure to enhance book sales.

But what do you do if your book is not even written, never mind in stores?

For Mignon Fogarty, who is host of a popular podcast called Grammar Girl, the answer is to scramble to record a short audiobook in just a few days between the time the show tapes and is shown.

Waiting for her book to come out next year, Ms. Fogarty released an audiobook which climbed to the top of iTunes’ best-selling books list.

Ms. Fogarty’s feat comes at a time when Henry Holt and other presses are rethinking their audiobook divisions, which have negligible marketing budgets and typically ride on the coattails of the hardcovers. Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

Read the whole thing here...

Harry Potter and the Messaged Text--

When buying a book online is just too inconvenient, a company called ShopText is developing a way for customers to place impulse orders by text message. The equivalent of candy bars at the check-out counter, a NY Times articles explains that...

...ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone.

Consumers can already use text messages to buy some products. Ads for the new CD by singer Tim McGraw carry a texting code, as do magazine writeups for the new Harry Potter novel coming this summer...

“You’re sitting in Central Park reading a magazine, and you have your phone with you, and you want information on a product or you want to purchase the product,” he said. “The ability is right there.”

Most magazine and newspaper ads for books seem to be more about exposure and name recognition than making direct sales. However, the magazine/text messaging concept would be the equivalent of a blog-to-Amazon link.

If we're going to encourage impulse buying and consumer debt, books might as well get in on the action!

Read the whole article here...

Turning the pages online--

This is a cool innovation. Novelist Dale Moses is providing his horror novel, He Still Watches, online for free as he writes it. But it's not just any old e-book in Word or Adobe format, it's an actual book with flipping pages and bookmarks. And he's not going broke because he's giving away the book for free. He has sponsors who advertise at the bottom of each page.

Here's more:

This is a free online horror novel in progress, being created one page per day and posted once a week online in order to bring readers back repeatedly, and offering graphic advertising spots on each and every one of those pages. This gains wonderful exposure for the advertisers, and a free reading experience for the horror reading public worldwide. This is your chance to follow a novel being created! It's a revolution in self-publishing that is sure to change the way you view novels.

Check it out here...

Does self-publishing hurt your cred?--

Robert Bly asks the question and gets plenty of answers--most of which are "yes." Maybe that's still the case, but probably less so than in the past, and more so than in the near future.

Can you hear me now?--

I've spoken with several people recently who expressed an interest in distributing their book via a podcast--an audio book that would be disemminated through the internet. That's becoming more commonplace today, but what was significant was an audio podcast was the first step in publishing they were considering--before seeking a traditional publisher or even before self-publishing it in book or e-book form.

It turns out that "going first to podcast" is a growing trend. This New York Times article lists several examples of people doing just that. One example is Scott Sigler who writes science-fiction horror novels:

Several times a week Mr. Sigler, 37, steps into a walk-in closet in his San Francisco home. He reads into a microphone that connects to his computer via a sound mixer. Hanging shirts envelop him, masking ambient sound.

After being snubbed by publishers for years, Mr. Sigler began recording his first book, “EarthCore,” in 2005. He offered it as a podcast in 22 episodes (roughly 45 minutes each) that he posted online and sent free to subscribers for downloading. Before long, Mr. Sigler had 5,000 listeners; by the time he finished releasing his second novel, “Ancestor,” last January, he had 30,000, as he does for “The Rookie,” which is playing now.

By establishing a track record with readers listeners, Mr. Sigler eventually landed a publisher for several of his books.

Browse Inside -- Random House Version--

Last week, I posted about the new Browse Inside widget from HarperCollins. Now, Random House has also gone live with it's own browse widget. The book distribution program called Insight has more than 5,000 titles available and can be coded into most Web sites (although they're not ready for MySpace quite yet).

I actually like Random House's version much better. It seems to load faster and some books are available in their entirety. The browse window also offers a Buy button to promote online purchases.

Here's the Random House press release.

And here's an example using James Michener's Centennial... (click on the image to open a larger reader)

Just one more Mitch Albom post, I promise--

Author Mitch Albom made three stops when he travelled to Seattle on his current book tour. At those stops, he read from his book and answered questions in front of approximately 1,000 people. But the interesting thing about those stops? None of them included a bookstore. They did include a corporate headquarters (Starbucks), and coffee shop (ahem, Starbucks again), and a literary salon.

In the Seattle Times, Haley Edwards takes a look at the implications of the changes in book marketing. She says:

Albom's day of book readings...is emblematic of the way — for better or worse — that the bookselling world is changing.

In the article, Kim Ricketts, founder and owner of Kim Ricketts Book Events says:

"The whole way media is being marketed is changing dramatically and bookstores are scraping uncomfortably in the crevasse. It doesn't matter how you get your information anymore," Ricketts says, citing iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon.com as examples of new sources of media. "People want books, but they don't have to work to get them anymore."

There are a lot of potential readers who almost never enter a bookstore. They don't have the time. They are still willing to buy books, however, as long as they find out about them through non-traditional means.

Maple Macchiato and a whole lotta Mitch Albom's to go--

It seems Starbucks (earlier post) has been a tad bit successful in selling Mitch Albom's book: For One More Day. That's 45,000 copies in 3 weeks successful.

More here from Publishers Weekly.

Re: Maple Macchiato and a Mitch Albom to go--