Emdashery Blog

Harry Potter kills books?

The death of books. We've heard it before. Advancing technology will make the paper-based, hold-in-your-hand book a thing of the past. Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics takes a look at the effect of the last Harry Potter book showing up online for free four days before its official release. Is the end near?

"The pirating of a blockbuster novel onto the peer-to-peer networks is one of those seminal moments that is supposed to herald a new era, wherein the old way (books) is cleared out by the new way (computers, e-books) and the days of paperbacks and hard-bound volumes become marginalized to the sentimental periphery of culture along with vinyl records and postcards.

"But the book world is a hard target for digital technology. If anything, the Harry Potter piracy should serve as an interesting anomaly. Whereas digital music, mail and now cinema are quickly changing the landscape of communication and entertainment, digital books seem to have had a much slower evolution. If digital novel sharing marks the death of books, I assure you it will be a long, slow death."

Here's the whole article... Warning, however, don't even read the article's first sentence if you haven't finished The Deathly Hallows but plan to.

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?

Do you think the world is changing?--

Uh...yes would be the correct answer. This slideshow was picked as the world's best presentation by SlideShare. It demonstrates the fast-changing times we live in (times that writers need to be a part of).

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...

The look of books in the future--

Google's efforts to digitize every printed letter in the world--or something to that effect--has the Economist wondering what books will look like in the future.

IN SECRET locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world's largest web-search company...

...a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.

Google's is not the only project of its kind. The Internet Archive, for instance, is a non-profit organisation founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a San Francisco idealist who wants to re-create a modern Library of Alexandria containing all public-domain texts and videos. Amazon has been scanning books, as have Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's biggest rivals in web-search, and individual libraries around the world. Eager not to be left out, publishers are also doing the same. But Google's effort, in scale and ambition, is off the charts.

Our curiosity about the future of books leads to many questions--and ultimately to one final question: the last one below:

As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology "unbind" books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?

Most of us wonder what books will look like. But technology will explode the variety of delivery. The better question might be: what will commercial reading look like in the future? We can only begin to fathom the answers...

Here's the complete article...

Listening to Your High Calling--

Howard Butt, Jr. is a long-time advocate of Christian lay leadership. He has spoken about faith and work for over fifty years, first addressing this critical need through his preaching with Billy Graham Crusades. The High Calling Web site, which I posted about on Tuesday, provides one-minute audio clips of his messages.

They can be just what you need for a day of heavy writing...

On the Fast Track

Bailey's Blessing

Truth in Advertising

What We Do Every Day

Shackleton

You can listen to more clips here. As I also mentioned before, The High Calling is conducting a blog tour this week. You can find out what other people are saying about their new Web site at these blogs:

Gordon Atkinson, L. L. Barkat, Gina Conroy, Craver VII, CREEations, Milton Brasher-Cunningham, Mary DeMuth, Karl Edwards, Every Square Inch, Green Inventions, Amy Goodyear, Marcus Goodyear, Al Hsu, Jennwith2ns, Charles Foster Johnson, Mike McLoughlin, Eve Nielsen, Naked Pastor, Ramblin Dan, Charity Singleton, Stacy, Camy Tang, Writer… Interrupted

Audio Spotlight: Hearing voices (of advertisers) in your head--

"Pssst...hey you...yeah you...the one sitting at your computer reading Emdashery...have I got a book for you!..."

Maybe someday you'll hear a voice like that marketing a new book. Marketers are starting to use an innovative speaker system that sends sound in a narrow beam directly to the ears of individual consumers. You might be shopping the aisles of your favorite store and a voice just for you will say, "Pssst..."

The audio spotlight device, created by Watertown firm Holosonic Research Labs Inc., has been used to hawk everything from cereals in supermarket aisles to glasses at doctor's offices. The messages are often quick and targeted -- and a little creepy to the uninitiated.

Court TV recently installed the audio spotlight in ceilings of bookstores to promote the network's new murder-mystery show. A voice, whispering, "Hey, you, can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder?" was beamed toward customers as they browsed the mystery section in several independent bookstores in New York.

Creepy? Uh, yeah. This might be a good idea for the mystery section, but the mental health section? Not so sure.

Here's the full Boston Globe article...

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...

Today's book trailer: The Colorado Sequence

As a collaborator and ghostwriter, I have the pleasure of talking with many aspiring authors. Unfortunately, many of the people I speak with will probably never get published. But even those who have great ideas face the challenge of getting their ideas noticed.

Most people think of book trailers as a new way of promoting a recently published book. However, given that the concept is still in its infancy, book trailers also offer a way to rise above the competing clutter and get noticed while an author is still seeking a publisher.

Author Stacy Cochran offers an example of this. In his YouTube introduction for his The Colorado Sequence book trailer, he writes:

My explicit audience for this particular trailer is literary agents, editors, and publishers. The implied audience may well include anyone interested in action-adventure novels or in learning about new authors. Feel free to leave comments, and pass it on to anyone you think my find it interesting.

For some of the graphics, he uses the "book" he already produced through Lulu.