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Archive for E-Book News
Hachette Launches ChapterShare Facebook App
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Hachette has just launched an innovative Facebook App called ChapterShare. This will allow you to read samples of upcoming books directly on the social networking website. You can then pre-order the books or share the books with your friends.
James Patterson and Michael Connelly are the first two authors that Hachettte is promoting with their new Facebook App. The samples are severely lacking at this point and only consist of two paragraphs from both authors upcoming books. The one cool thing about the samples is the direct links to pre-order the books. They have links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks and Indiebound.
I love seeing big six publishers try different things and this new program is the first of its kind on Facebook. The future of ChapterShare will be reliant on how many pre-orders and sales they get from the books.
Trajectory Launches 120 Graphic Novels for the Kobo Vox
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The Kobo Vox sure has been getting lots of comic book loving with the recent additions of Marvel and Darkhorse. Trajectory is adding more graphic novels exclusively to the Kobo Vox.
Classics Illustrated is the name of Trajectory’s new digital publishing initiative. The series features the world’s greatest stories by the worlds greatest authors including: “The Last of the Mohicans,” “War of the Worlds,” “The Pearl Princess,” “Treasure Island,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Alice in Wonderland”, “Jane Eyre” and hundreds more. Most people know these popular literary works by the books they read, but now people can read the comics!
We’re thrilled to offer Classics Illustrated titles to our customers around the world,” said Michael Tamblyn, EVP Content, Sales and Merchandising, Kobo Inc. “With the Kobo Vox multimedia eReader and the Kobo eReading app for iPad, we are opening up a new way to enjoy classic works of literature.”
Readlists Allows You to Make Kindle Friendly eBooks out of Blog Posts
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Readlists is a new online program made by Readability that allows you to do some amazing things with blog posts. You can now easily convert a number of your favorite blogs into an offline ebook that can be read on the Kindle and many other e-readers.
The new Readlists program gives you the unique ability to gather your favorite blog posts and save them on your e-reader. One of the more innovative features is that you can share the book you made with your friends or the general internet. When you are finished adding blog posts, you can use the “send to Kindle” feature or send it directly to your iOS device. If you don’t have any of these you can download it in EPUB format and manually copy it to your e-reader.
Sure there are programs out there like Zite, Pulse, and Google Currents, but they are designed with tablets in mind. Readlists plays well with your dedicated e-ink readers and gives you a better experience than just saving RSS Feeds. Check it out today and let us know what you think about it.
Overdrive Updates Their iOS and Android Apps
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The Overdrive Media Console has just received a major update to its line of iOS and Android apps. If you love getting ebooks from your local library, this is an app you would want to install on your tablet or smartphone.
The Android version of the updated app features dynamic home-screen widgets that let users play audiobooks right from the home screen or resume reading ebooks with a single tap. It finally gives you the ability to read books in landscape mode with multiple columns of text, offers bold font choices, and debuts an in-book image viewer. You can download it from our Good e-Reader Android APP Store or get the Playbook version.
The iOS version of the app incorporates several new e-reader features that give the user more control over text justification, line spacing, page margins, and font selection. Optimized graphics support the iPad Retina display. You can find OMC 2.4.2 for iOS in Apple’s App Store.
The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Is Down to the Final Six
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Amazon.com’s annual awards for new authors, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, have been carefully whittled away from the thousands of entries in each of the two categories—fiction and young adult fiction—to come to a final six submissions. Three authors from each of the two fields received word today that their entries had been selected for the final phase of the competition.
Initially, the entries were selected for advancement based on what amounts to the pitch, much like an author would use to attempt to hook an agent or publisher. After the first round, books were reviewed by professional reviewers before being chosen to go forward in the competition.
At this stage in the contest, which is sponsored by Amazon, CreateSpace, and Penguin Group, the three finalists from each category will be judged and voted upon by Amazon readers while a panel of experts in the fields will weigh in on the books, people whose own credentials include literary agents and widely recognized bestselling authors. The two winners chosen by the voters will each receive a publishing contract from Penguin and a $15,000 advance on sales.
“This year’s ABNA contest saw thousands of submissions from talented writers around the world,” said Nader Kabbani, Director of Independent Publishing, Amazon, in a press release today. “According to the judges and editors, the quality of the entries continues to climb, making the contest more competitive each year. The finalists this year are among the best yet and Amazon.com customers will have a challenge picking a favorite.”
The nominees for the finalists spots are as follows: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill, Grace Humiston and the Vanishing by Charles Kelly, A Chant of Love and Lamentation by Brian Reeves, Dreamcatchers by Cassandra Griffin, Out of Nowhere by Rebecca Phillips, and On Little Wings by Regina Sirois.
Scholastic’s Digital Apps Bridge Summer Academics
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One of the great educational concerns with the upcoming summer vacations months is the amount of knowledge that students lose during their time off from school. Teachers have often bemoaned the loss of instructional time at the beginning of each school year to trying to bring the students back up to speed after so much time away from the classroom.
Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s reading content, is working to bridge the end of one school year with the beginning of another by offering free reading apps and digital learning games aimed at providing an incentive for students to self-teach during their vacations. Deborah Forte, President of Scholastic Media, spoke to GoodEReader about the importance of this kind of content for younger readers.
“Scholastic has always been about being relevant and supporting the needs of our customers. We offer through all of our digital content and physical content experiences that promote literacy. It could be through an app or a game or by way of a book,” explained Forte. “We’re coming from a different perspective [than other digital publishers] because we’ve always been coming from a digital space with apps, games, and software, in addition to the publishing. When we see some of these apps that say that they are book apps but they have nothing to do with reading, that’s a concern. We don’t want the market to get confused, particularly for younger children’s digital experiences. There is a lot of confusion given the amount of content out there for children about what is truly a book for reading and what is a game.”
Some of this summer’s highlighted offerings include the Storia digital reading app, an all-inclusive marketplace for children’s content that carries the Scholastic brand. It works across the different platforms as a curation process for finding and enjoying digital app books.
“Storia is a very useful tool to help connect the right book with a child. It’s not the only tool that Scholastic has, because for ninety years we’ve been curating books for different ages, interests, and reading levels. We’ve been doing that largely in print, but now we’re doing it digitally. Storia is connected to a robust digital ecosystem that will provide that kind of access in a safe environment for parents, teachers, and kids to be able to match the right book with the particular child.”
Scholastic recently hired a larger ebook editorial staff and brought on Jenny Frost in the position of senior vice president of ebook strategy, a move that Forte cites as more evidence of Scholastic’s commitment to digital content development to improve reading ability and encourage a love of reading in students.
Digital Textbook Isn’t Taking Off, So Let’s Force Students to e-Read?
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Tom Malek, Vice President of Learning Solutions for textbook publisher McGraw-Hill’s higher education division, wrote a thought-provoking guest post for Forbes.com, which columnist Janet Novak shared with the full-disclosure statement that she is, herself, the mother of two college students. Malek’s post is an explanation of why he believes college students should be required to purchase digital textbooks.
Wait. Required? That’s interesting, since this post was published almost simultaneously with the news that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt may be filing for bankruptcy. Requiring college students to use ebooks is going to save the textbook industry?
Actually, that’s not Malek’s point. His post is actually exploring the conundrum of digital textbook adoption: if college students are so technologically inclined and are in the generation of students who grew up with computers in their classrooms from preschool and up, why do they still prefer print?
Many people have speculated that it comes down to price, and for many college students it does. Print textbooks can be resold after the semester for even a few dollars and used textbooks can be a huge savings. Other thrifty student simply loan and share textbooks between classmates and roommates, a system of, “You buy the math book, I’ll buy the English book, and we’ll share.”
But what Malek is suggesting is taking away the option to purchase anything other than ebooks; he’s also suggesting removing the option to share a textbook with a classmate by having the bursar’s office automatically bill the students for their digital textbooks when they enroll in the class (although the charge won’t appear until after the deadline to drop the class). Malek’s stance is that not enough students are purchasing ebooks to make it worth the publishers’ while to produce cost effective digital editions, so the only way to give publishers the incentive to produce lower cost ebooks is to force students to purchase them. He states that in the pilot programs where this has been implemented, the faculty members have been very pleased because now they know that all of their students have access to the book.
“While it’s taken significant advancements in technology to make the idea of an e-book even possible,” stated Malek in the Forbes post, “it’s taken similar amount of innovation on the part of many to bring them into the hands of students. Publishers and bookstores have done much to make this happen by switching to more flexible business models, but this shift really would not be possible without universities recognizing the incredible value that e-books can provide. By working together, we’re making progress toward a goal that’s far more important than driving adoption of e-books: making college more affordable and improving student performance.”
Unfortunately, forcing supply-and-demand by requiring students to buy a product isn’t the way to increase digital sales. If that were the case, all citizens could be forced to read on an e-reader and there would be no need to print a book ever again. The only honest way to encourage adoption of digital textbooks is to make e-versions superior to their print counterparts in terms of price, searchability, and annotation, something the publishing industry hasn’t done yet.
Esquire to Release “Fiction for Men” eBooks June 12th
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Esquire Magazine is branching out from its monthly publication into the world of digital publishing. Open Road Media will be helping out with the digital aspect of the business and share their knowledge of distribution channels. The main premise of this new venture is to write books strictly for a male audience. You can expect the first book to be released on June 12th and new books every few months.
The first ebook being released is a short story compilation by authors Aaron Gwyn, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jess Walter. The launch of this new venture is coinciding with the companies June and July issue of the magazine which features stories by Stephen King, Joe Hill, Lee Child, and Colum McCann. These issues will be on the iPad and print version of Esquire.
Esquire is basically looking to expand into a new digital venture due to the success of their iPad application. The magazine world is stagnant in the dwindling number of subscribers and the slow exodus of advertising partners.
The digital version of their ebooks, according to David Granger (editor-in-chief of Esquire) will be “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another.” Plus, it also deals “with passages in a man’s life that seem common.”
Some Hope for Library Digital Lending
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One of the most frustrating aspects of digital publishing is the current sad state of affairs in ebook lending. At a time when libraries are already struggling to survive within the confines of dwindling budgets and patron apathy, the Big Six publishers haven’t been very supportive of library lending, at least in their actions if not their sentiments.
All this time, Random House is the only Big Six publisher who makes its bestselling titles available to libraries without restrictions—such as HarperCollins’ 26-checkout-limit—but even that company came under fire last year for artificially raising the price on ebooks for libraries by nearly 300 percent.
Now, Hachette Group is experimenting with a limited population of libraries and patrons being allowed to have lending access to its titles, although it hasn’t disclosed where and which libraries.
“These pilot programs will help us learn more about library patrons’ interests, usage, and expectations,” Hachette said in a statement that was published on paidContent.org. “This information will help HBG devise the best strategy to reach the widest audience of e-book readers in libraries. We’ll have more to say once we have looked at the data from the pilots.”
ALA president Molly Raphael and several board members held a series of meetings with publishers at the beginning of this year, but this is the first great news for library lending to come about. Last week, Raphael met with several executives from Hachette Group, so hopefully this signifies that the talks are helping publishers overcome their fears of piracy and stagnant book sales in order to move forward on a larger scale.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Files for Bankruptcy Protection
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing has officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today. This company published seminal authors such as Mark Twain to J.R.R. Tolkien and is currently over three billion dollars in debt.
Boston based HMH in documents filed today listed $2.68 billion in assets and $3.53 billion in debt. Under the proposed recovery plan, Houghton’s long-term bank loan and bond debt would convert to all of the equity in the reorganized company, according to a May 11 statement. Existing shareholders would receive warrants for 5 percent of the new stock if they voted in favor of the plan.
So what went wrong for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing? William Bayers, company general counsel said today that “The global financial crisis over the past several years has negatively affected” Houghton Mifflin’s financial performance, in a business that “depends largely on state and local funding” for the schoolbook market.”
The company is certainly not without revanue streams in marketing their books via the traditional bookstore channels. They managed to garner a respectable 1.2 billion dollars in sales last year. HMH provides educational products and services to about 60 million students in 120 countries. They also formed an agreement with Amazon in January to distribute electronic books. The partnership allows Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, to market books to people who don’t visit its site and provides Houghton with a new source of revenue.
The essence of why HMF failed was due to their digital book strategy and offering digital textbooks. These are two of the most emerging digital trends that contributed to their demise and was the main reason why Borders failed last year.
Overdrive introduces new International Language Package
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Overdrive is the leading company that facilitates the digital eBook lending process from your public libraries. The company today announced their new Foreign Language Packages that will allow your library to have options to get eBooks in different languages.
The new Language Package, containing Overdrives top titles in Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. The new collection takes the guesswork out of choosing non-English titles by only including the most popular throughout all of the OverDrive libraries. Patrons can enjoy classics in Russian by Anton Chekhov, Hans Christian Anderson, and Leo Tolstoy. They can also borrow new works in Spanish, like “The Night Circus,” Ted Dekker thrillers, and Karen Kingsbury novels. In big cities where there is a large demographic of Russian, Chinese, and Spanish speaking patrons, this new program really makes sense.
CourseSmart launches new eCommerce Platform in the UK and Europe
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Coursesmart recently debuted in the UK last month and has been steadily gaining traction for their partners September back to school semester. There is lots of excitement for students to save up to 60% on digital textbooks and have an alternative to the bulky ones they have known all their lives. CourseSmart announced today their new eCommerce platform in the UK and Europe.
“The world of textbooks is changing. Through the proliferation of tablets, handheld devices, laptops and computers, the academic world is moving online and engaging with students like never before. We are very excited to be at the forefront of this evolution,” said Fionnuala Duggan, Managing Director of CourseSmart International. “The eCommerce platform will help students to save money, instructors to engage online, publishers to access a developing market and booksellers to be part of this significant development in publishing.”
Basically the new platform actually allows students to buy the books they had free samples of. The Online Sampling Platform allows you to instantly preview and select eTextbook titles for use in specific courses. With the advent of the new eCommerce platform students can now buy the books they want and read them on on a myriad of platforms. You can read the books online directly from the CourseSmart website or their various apps for mobile devices and tablets.
Students can make highlights and annotations on the books they buy and the books actually maintain the page fidelity and preservation, mirroring the print edition’s page numbers, full text, diagrams, illustrations and charts. You also gain the ability to ability to cut and paste as well as email sections, notes and highlighted text.
eBook Review: City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare
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Verdict: 3 Stars
This fifth installment of Clare’s tremendously successful and well-loved series, The Mortal Instruments, has all that the first books have to offer: demon slaying, love triangles, evil super-villains bent on destroying the world, and boyfriends who have been possessed and turned into aloof clones of their former selves. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the premise of all The Mortal Instruments books.
The previous installment left off with an epic battle between the young Shadowhunters and the demon mother Lilith, who was trying to bring the evil Valentine’s son Sebastian back from the dead. She apparently succeeded only in dying but took both Sebastian and Jace with her, leaving the remaining Shadowhunters bewildered. Lost Souls picks up with the Clave’s decision that looking for Clary’s hunk boyfriend Jace is not a priority because finding Sebastian and stopping his reign of destruction is more important. It’s therefore up to the young Nephilim to find Jace, but they discover his soul has been irreversibly joined with Sebastian’s by Lilith’s pre-death ritual and that Sebastian is now controlling Jace; to up the stakes, killing one means killing the other.
How many times is Clary’s boyfriend supposed to become cold and distant only to reveal later that he was under a spell? More importantly, how many times is this supposed to happen before she dumps him? And really, Isabelle? You’re the hottest girl on the planet and a kick-butt Shadowhunter, but you’re STILL too scared to tell the geeky little vampire Simon how you feel about him? And would someone please stop letting these kids play too close to the spell books?
It seems kind of ironic that Clare’s career originally began with writing fan fiction; she was well-known for her Harry Potter fanfic and even some unfortunate resulting plagiarism accusations. But the point of fan fiction is that the characters from one literary world are so well-loved that the readers take it upon themselves to begin to write new story lines for the characters, presumably because they could not get enough from the original author’s own creations. I have to wonder if there isn’t a host of Mortal Instruments fanfic circulating under the radar in which readers have different story lines and plot twists for these characters because the author hasn’t yet filled the void for the readers.
Lost Souls did have its awesome moments and the dialogue is every bit what we’ve come to expect from a writer like Clare. It’s witty and edgy without throwing around tired, stereotypical teenager-speak. I loved the conversation in which Alec reveals his personal pain: His father actually asked him to explain what exactly had “turned him gay,” to which Simon offers, “Bitten by a gay spider?”
The writing is first-rate, but it would be great if something new would happen for once, especially since the author has left the door open for a book six that I vehemently hope is not just an even bigger helping of more of the same. The City of Lost Souls ebooks are available HERE for Kindle and HERE for Nook, as well as for other devices through various channels.
