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Archive for Interviews
Print-On-Demand: The Future of Publishing? A Talk with Richard Curtis
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Richard Curtis, literary agent and founder of the oldest independent ebook publishing company E-Reads, recently posted an article for Digital Book World on where print-on-demand can potentially take the publishing industry and what price barriers are currently stopping it from faring as well as it potentially can. Curtis spoke with GoodeReader today about where POD can lead the industry as a whole.
“E-Reads has been using Lightning Source for its POD services since we began in 2000. LSI is the biggest in the industry, perhaps in the world, in print-on-demand. Because they are a division of Ingram, a book distribution company that has very successfully made the transition from a company that serviced print publishers to a company that now services the digital book industry, we feel that there are advantages to being with LSI that you simply cannot get with any other POD publisher. Among other things, their core source service enables us to reach indie bookstores, a great many of which we could not otherwise reach.”
One aspect of POD that Curtis mentioned in his recent blog post is the prohibitive cost per book when comparing a typical print run of a trade paperback with the cost of printing one title at a time per customer request. Lightning Source has countered that cost in a deal with EPAC, one of the largest POD suppliers in Germany.
“From speaking to executives at LSI and asking if there is any possibility in the future that the costs of producing PODs might come down, they have told me that there are developments that they cannot currently discuss that make them hopeful that the prices will come down.”
But why such a keen interest in print-on-demand? Isn’t the point of digital publishing and the surge in popularity of e-reading related to all the negative things that digital has stripped away, like eliminating paper and ink costs, shipping costs, and wait times to receive new books?
“Many authors want their books available in paper and many readers still want to read books in paper even though they are available in digital format. I’m considered somewhat of a trailblazer in the digital world but I still much prefer to hold a printed book in my hand than to read one on a screen. Even though POD used to represent about 50% of our income in the days when there were no Kindles or Nooks or viable digital readers, POD now represents about 8% of E-Reads revenue, the rest being from digital. Even though POD books are very expensive compared to those printed in the traditional way. A book that might have been $12 to $15 in a traditional print run might cost $20 as a POD, but people are willing to pay it.”
While POD might be a smart move for the indie authors and a certain demographic of readers, whether the publishing industry as a whole will adopt POD as a viable solution remains to be seen.
“I think the industry is being forced into it. The closing of Borders and of so many independent bookstores, the reduction of floor space in bookstore chains like Barnes&Noble, all point to a reduction to the space available to deliver printed books to the consumer on the street. This same segment of the population is going to have to turn to POD. The publishing industry for the last 100 years has distributed its books on a returnable basis. At the beginning of the industry 5-10% of books were returned; now we’re up to as much as 50% of books being returned by bookstores. It’s no longer possible for publishers to sustain 50% returns when POD is an alternative.
“My vision for POD is kind of the Espresso vision, where the Espresso Book Machine will come down in size and complexity to where it will be truly closer to desktop than refrigerator sized. When that happens, you’ll see bookstores with kiosks with thousands of books displayed where you can choose one, but they’re not on a bookshelf, they’re on a screen. You can browse electronically, pick one out, and have a cup of coffee while it prints. It may not be in the immediate future, but I would say within the next ten years you will be able to go into a space and print the book you want. Right now, you have that by simply going on Amazon, but if you prefer the experience of going into a store and browsing for a book that looks interesting, you will see that model evolving. And when someone predicts 10 years, it’s usually five.”
Booktype Launches Crowd-Sourced eBook Tools
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Booktype has just launched its free, open source platform for writing and publishing print and digital books. Why is it different from Apple iBooks Author or other platforms? It’s built for collaborative writing, is open source and free, can push to all channels including print, and it allows anyone to build an entire platform and community around writing, editing, and publishing.
This new project is flying under the Booktype banner, but the parent company’s name is Sourcefabric. The parent has been building open source tools for media organizations since 1998. Newscoop (open content management for newspapers and magazines) and Airtime are other free products currently on the market (each is downloaded over 10,000 times a year) and two further products will further extend the range of tools in 2012, including Superdesk, a digital workflow tool for newsrooms and Booktype.
The project lead is Adam Hyde, a well-respected expert in online publishing who has been exploring online technologies and methods for communities to collaboratively produce content for over 10 years. Most recently in this area he has founded FLOSS Manuals—a community of some 3000 individuals developing Free Manuals about Free Software. Booktype has evolved from Booki, a popular open source project for writing, editing, and publishing books online and in print.
So what exactly is Booktype? Adam Thomas told us in an exclusive interview that “The Booktype interface allows for simultaneous editing, live chat and internal messaging that allows notes, citations, urls, text and pictures to be easily exchanged between contributors, dramatically speeding up the production process. Booktype is also an out-of-the-box community platform. Users can create profiles, join groups, watch books, chat live and keep track of book activity. Working examples include http://www.booki.cc/ a community of over 2000 users writing books on anything from cooking to computer code.”
A crowd-sourced ebook authoring toolkit sounds very unique and I imagine many people clammering at the opportunity to collaborate with their friends and write together. How does this effect revenue sharing and actually selling the book? Who owns the rights? Adam explained it as ” Booktype allows to publish books under whatever license the author or multiple authors agree on. Once the book has matured to become public, it can be pushed directly to online print on demand platforms like lulu.com or the authors can take the book to any publisher they want. They can start their own publishing company and distribute the book themselves, too. ISBN numbers can be assigned inside Booktype. Regarding ‘selling the book’ it is important to note that using Booktype, no author is tied into a specific distributor or format. Booktype is the place where the book is being made. How and where it is being sold is entirely the decision of the authors. Books generated in Booktype are platform independent and free.”
Finally, what services does Booktype offer your books? Well, it’s up to the authors. Adam wrapped up the interview with saying “Booktype opens up publishing to allow people to sell books on whichever platform they feel suits them best. In the instance of iBooks, as with most ebook stores, they would need an account, an ISBN number and need to push the book through the submission process. Books can be pushed to lulu.com and archive.org from within the Booktype interface. Other services would require you to export the book and then upload – we’re working hard to make this process simpler and more direct.”
Pixel Qi Shifting their Business Strategy away from Consumer Electronics
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Pixel Qi is well known for developing a new breed of screens that deliver an unparalleled experience in direct sunlight and draw very low power. The company has seen their technology showcased in the early One Laptop per Child program in Africa, which initially drew industry wide attention to the company. In the last year their screens were featured in various ZTE Tablets in China and recently in the Notion Ink Adam. In the last six months 3M invested heavily in the future of Pixel Qi and has influenced the direction of the company away from consumer electronics to more specialized industries, such as the military
We have spoken with both the CFO and CEO over the years at various industry events and their decision to gravitate away from the fickle nature of e-readers and tablets was a wise decision. The company instead plans to focus their attention on specialized market segments that would benefit more from their technology and lead to more long-term contracts.
One of the first ways they will deploy their Pixel Qi technology is within the military and give soldiers a new way to receive mission data. If you look at your average paratrooper or ranger they are constantly receiving revised mission parameters and in harsh conditions like a dessert. Being in very bright environments or dark make no different with Pixel Qi, whose very essence is low-power no-glare technology which would make lives easier. Most military operations worldwide still employ maps and written communications, to receive updates to their mission requires many steps and circumstances change many times. The plan is for soldiers to have heavily versatile tablets that last for weeks and are wired into mission control to receive new updates on the fly. Another way their technology will be employed is with the hydro electric community where operators are frequently in high elevations in direct sunlight.
3M’s investment in Pixel Qi is allowing the company to deal with multiple fabs in Taiwan where the company is based and diversify their portfolio. Obviously when you receive a huge investment from a mega-corporation whose reach is all-encompassing you will receive a ton of connections within very specialized niches. 3M is found everywhere from cars, phones, hospitals, and tape. This will turn the company around and we were told in the near future their technology will be everywhere, but in products we will never see. Obviously Pixel Qi is not stepping totally away from the end user experience and they are currently dealing with a number of existing clients in future product launches. Check out our whole interview where CFO John Ryan talks to us in detail about the new direction of the company and demonstrating two new screens they brought with them to CES 2012.
Data Conversion Laboratory CEO Mark Gross on Poor Ebook Quality
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Data Conversion Laboratory issued a press release earlier this week that indicates that reading consumers are speaking out against poorly formatted and error-ridden ebooks, sometimes even those works that have been commercially produced through major publishing houses. In a survey conducted by DCL, over four hundred respondents cited quality as the number one issue of concern in digital reading. GoodEReader spoke with the CEO of Data Conversion Laboratory Mark Gross in an interview today.
“DCL has been around for thirty years. Our business is converting all kinds of documents so they can be used electronically. We have clients who are publishers, as well as the military, government agencies, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies. Over the last three to four years there’s been a movement to go into ebooks, but in the last year it’s become quite interesting to see what’s going out there and what our customers are thinking.”
Gross blamed the wealth of free converting software titles as well as the rush to get ebooks onto the market, even among bestselling titles, for the often poorly formatted ebooks.
“There are a few utilities out there that will convert books for free. A few months ago one of our staffers sat down with a document that contained novel-like text material to try some of them out. Even with the simple document, a lot of formatting errors came through. It’s something we’ve also seen in commercially produced ebooks.”
“There’s been a push in the last year or so to get as many ebooks out as possible and the quality shows. The survey that we did shows people’s attitudes towards this. The overwhelming thing respondents demanded in the survey was quality, even above cost of the ebooks. When a market first develops, the early adopters are willing to forgive things because they’re the techies and they know this is new, but as the market broadens the people who usually read print books aren’t going to stand for this. You’re going through a larger audience of people who aren’t just the early adopters. It’s also not just simple books any more, but also books that are mission critical. The publishers we’re working with produce textbooks and medical books.”
And those technical books are becoming very important to the market. The survey showed a surprising number of people—64% of those who responded—are interested in trade manuals and textbooks that have been digitally published. Non-fiction was included in that response number.
“The public will punish those ebook publishers buy simply not buying their titles. I’ve seen articles about people returning ebooks because of the errors in formatting, and you see blog comments and reviews on books that mention these mistakes. I’ve heard authors talk about a particular publisher they were using due to very low cost, but the errors made them rethink it. The market will dictate the readers’ demands for error-free reading.”
For indie authors interested in the findings of DCL’s survey and the steps that can be taken to ensure formatting quality, their site offers a webinar on the information and the following press release outlines the suite of tools available to authors and publishers alike. Most of the conversion applications being used today were developed by DCL in the course of its thirty years, although the company still relies on manpower to review its formatted content.
The Chief Marketing Officer of e-Ink Holdings Discusses Technology and e-Readers
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e-Ink Holdings is the company responsible for the technology found in some of the world’s most popular e-readers. If you have the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch, Kobo Touch, or most Sony devices, they have an e-ink screen. We caught up with the Chief Marketing Officer of E Ink Holdings Inc, Sriram K. Peruvemba, for a great discussion on the current state of affairs with their company and the e-reader sphere.
E-ink is doing record financial numbers due to the rising success of the screens used in Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Sony e-Readers. As a company how are you adjusting to the added income?
We are in the consumer markets primarily both with our FFS LCDs used in Tablet devices as well as our ePaper displays used in eReaders, such as the ones you mentioned. In the consumer world, we are required to constantly innovate and provide new technologies and features pretty much every year and this involves a lot of investment. In addition, predicting product volumes in the consumer space is non-trivial, so our factories have to flex its capacity to cater to peak months when the volume could be as much as 4x above average. Building factories to cater to cyclical demand has been a major area of investment for us. In a nutshell, our investments have gone into research, design, and manufacturing primarily, and we have also invested in all other areas of business from office buildings to new enterprise software systems. Most of our investment has been in human resources, meaning we added a number of scientists and engineers to various groups. In the area of manufacturing, apart from a lot of hires, we also invested in infrastructure.
E-Ink Triton had a ton of potential but we have yet to see a major company releasing a product. Of course we have Hanvon with their model and they made a deal with Ectaco to re brand it as the Jetbook color, why hasn’t it caught on yet?
E Ink Triton meets the needs of applications such as eTextbooks and eNewspapers and we have seen customers such as Jinke, Hanvon, Ectaco publicly announce products using our technology. Other customers are also working on designs that are not announced yet. This is both in the area of ePublishing applications as well as in areas such as signage. Triton does not support full motion video, we can only do animation at this point hence other mobile devices such as tablets use our FFS technology based LCD rather than our Triton displays. We are confident that Triton and further generations of color ePaper will play a significant role in the display space. What is interesting about Triton is that when you increase the pixel size the color is much more saturated and the display meets almost all color needs in various applications but the increased pixel size renders the display more suitable for viewing from 6 feet away (signs) than from 6″ away (eReaders). All the same, when the Triton eReader in Hanvon, Ectaco device is compared in a outdoor, high ambient setting alongside any tablet or laptop, the effect is remarkable.
What are some of the hurdles you have to overcome to offer companies who want to use Triton the kind of end costs found in e-ink pearl?
Since Triton uses the same chemistry as Pearl, the cost of the base materials are not different, the color filter does cost extra, but as a percentage of the cost of the end device, the cost of the CFA is not as significant. The color ePaper devices will cost more than the monochrome devices not mainly due to the display but due to other features that can be enabled in the software and UI that were not possible in case of the monochrome device. We are confident that our entire eco-system (the display is probably one of about 100 sub components in a eReader as you know) will work towards finding competitive cost structures to make the Triton based devices suitable for consumer applications. And yes, we want it to happen sooner, our customers such as Ectaco and Hanvon are leading the way in the eReader space.
What is in development right now. Things from e-ink has been rather quiet lately, are you doing something new?
We have actually been busier the past two years than ever before. We have alots of projects in the pipline. We typically release a major platform once every 18 –24 months and in between we release a number of smaller innovations.
Pearl went into production last year.
Triton went into production this year.
In the meanwhile we have worked with our semiconductor partners to transform dedicated display controllers plus memory into System-On-Chip products. This resulted in increased speed and performance of our existing products (See Bookeen video using E Ink/TI jointly developed SOC as well as the E Ink/ Freescale joint collaboration SOC in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24srQXX81Oc )
At the same time the SOC partners – Freeescale, TI, Marvel, Epson, Samsung found ways to reduce the overall cost, which benefitted our end customers. In each case E Ink has a joint development agreement with the respective semiconductor company that allows for collaborative design activity.
Another area where we made great progress during 2011 was in the area of touchscreens. Last year, the majority of E Ink displays on eReaders had no touch screen. This year almost all of them do. This required a lot of close coordination and work with touchscreen companies as well as our end customers. You will notice that, unlike in the case of LCD, when you use the touch screen on an E Ink display, chances of accidentally pressing an adjoining key or button is minimized. You feel like you are touching the actual image rather than a surface high above the image.
When we first started, our designs had a power management circuit that had about 40 discrete components – E Ink designed, we have worked with Maxim and TI to create PMIC chips that replace those 40 components and increase reliability, reduce a lot of board space and take out more than 50% of the cost. A huge benefit for the end customers
A not so well known fact is that E Ink also makes software that accompanies our product – its a suite of software options- and our customers have recently used these features to enable faster page turns among others. If you look at the top three benefits offered by a number of eReader customers of ours (see http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/nook-simple-touch-barnes-noble/1102344735), all of these are due to the display. This is a fairly large undertaking within E Ink.
You’ve no doubt noticed that we have been showing demos of flexible displays for the past 2-3 years and that we are working with nearly a dozen companies to get this to market (Our publicly announced partners include Epson, Sony, Plastic Logic, HP, Flextech, LG Display, Samsung). Recently our customer Plastic Logic launched a fully functional device in the Russian market (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAv4XFiPDB4&feature=player_embedded#! And I had the chance to toss it around recently, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvCS4v8XMYQ ) This project has been a multi-year effort at E Ink.
In the area of segmented or what we call SURF displays, we’ve made great progress. We’ve designed dozens of new products from watches to indoor and outdoor signs, secondary displays on mobile phones, battery and memory indicators etc. Our customers Neolux and Motion Display both delivered dozens and dozens of new products to end customers using our product line that we refer to as Ink-In-Motion. These are essentially used in retail signage applications. If you need more details about the SURF products, let us know, we can even ship a few samples to you.
With our matrix displays, we have launched into non-publishing applications in partnership with a company named Pervasive Displays (spun out from ChiMei/ChiLin) and created several designs for industrial, medical and consumer applications. We have already won business using these designs and the products are in mass production. See http://www.pervasivedisplay.com/home
We had been working with Ricoh for a number of years to create and launch this unique design called eQuill see: http://www.ricoh-ews.com/ricoh-equill . The product just launched and we are excited about the prospects.
Finally, in partnership with Epson, we have developed a 300 dpi display (current shipping 6″ eReader displays are 167 dpi) that looks better than ordinary paper. Epson makes a semiconductor chip that drives our high res display. We are in the process of working with customers in various sub market segments to get these designed into actual products. If you are at CES, we can show this display to you.
There are many other promising technologies being worked on and I will let you know when I am able.
What is your relationship with Freescale, since many companies using your e-ink screens use Freescale processors to power their devices?
We have a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with Freescale where we license technology, patents and have a collaborative effort to develop new products. We think Freescale has done a fantastic job with their new SOC products, which enables new features on the E Ink Pearl and Triton displays.
Are you guys coming to CES? If so, what will you be showing off?
We are but we typically don’t exhibit at CES. We will have several E Ink display based devices being exhibited by our customers and industry partners.
I was speaking with a e-ink Representative at the 1st annual e-Readers Conference in San Francisco a few months ago and they mentioned e-ink clothing, that would change color, what news do you have on that front?
This was a research project we worked on with a government customer and therefore samples are not available to send. As such, the pruduct is not yet commercialized though there is market interest.
Mirasol recently released their first color e-reader in South Korean with Kyobo, how is your company responding to that new technology and what do you think about it?
We admire their technology, it’s quite fascinating. They have been working on this for a long time, we know how hard it is to take product from lab to fab, we wish them the very best.
Shop e-Readers and Vancouver Community College bring e-readers to the classroom
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Shop e-Readers has struck a new deal with Vancouver Community College to bring e-readers to the classroom. Starting in a few weeks at the Broadway and Downtown campus will begin to sell Kindle e-Readers in the student bookstores.
The Kindle e-Reader continues to be one of the most dominant e-readers in the market and has great relevance for the overall student body. Not only can you read books purchased from Amazon such as Fiction and Non-Fiction but also course material. There are many textbooks that are part of various programs that be purchased or loaned directly from Amazons new student textbook store. You can save up to 65% on your remedial reading for your various courses, so it pays to go digital.
Not only will Shop e-Readers be providing various Kindle devices to choose from, but you can actually get some hands on time with it. The company has developed really nice display cases that give you all of the specs and key features on the devices. There is also a working unit built right into the display unit so you can check out how textbooks and other books look.
Kelly Hannah of Shop e-Readers told us in an exclusive interview that “We are very excited about our 3rd major school carrying our e-readers in their student bookstore! In the last few weeks we got Simon Frasier University and Blackberry Books on Granville Island carrying our devices. Digital eBook Readers in the classroom just make sense and many students find its easier to carry a device that weighs less then a pound vs. carrying 3 or 4 books and your notes. The Kindle allows you to make your own notes and make annotations that save right to the cloud. Be on the lookout for our display stand in both VCC schools for the next semester.”
We asked the company what their overall strategy was with E-Readers in Canada and in other international markets such as Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Kelly mentioned that “We are a Vancouver based company and e-readers in Canada are often in short supply and we have a very limited selection. Really your only choices in the retail sphere are Kobo, Sony, Pandigital and the older Kindle models. We really get the short end of the stick sometimes when it comes to current technology getting here, if it ever does at all. We made it a point from day 1 to import into Canada all of the latest devices like the Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet, Kindle Fire, Pocketbook 912 and other popular devices. We give Canadians the choice now to deal with company with a great culture and who know their stuff, instead of dealing with EBAY or other graymarkets.”
I think Shop e-Readers is doing e-reader sales right, the company specializes in the devices and nothing else. Most retail companies carrying e-readers often only has 3 or 4 models and the sales staff normally does not know much other than whats on the box. The cool thing about this company is they give a free DVD with video tutorials on how to use it and 100 free books to get you reading right away.
Ebook of the Week: Susan Wingate
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This week’s GoodEReader.com Ebook of the Week, recently named the 2011 Forward National Literature Award winner for Drama, is Drowning by Susan Wingate. She is also the author of the bestselling Bobby’s Diner (2010 International Book Awards finalist) series.
“Drowning is a story about mothers and daughters and those who have loved them,” says the author of this title. “It’s a great read for women who have tumultuous relationships with their own mothers or daughters, but it’s a good read for anyone who’s ever loved those people who don’t get along. The problems usually start after adolescence, but it takes somebody growing up to heal the relationship.”
Wingate co-hosts a weekly program at BlogTalkRadio with fellow Ebook of the Week author Joshua Graham entitled Dialogue: Between the Lines, a program which focuses on writing and the publishing industry. Wingate’s other works are for sale on Kindle and Nook, but she has made her recent title, Drowning, available for free by clicking HERE and entering the following code at checkout: FY25Q
The First-Ever Good e-Reader Online Ebook Signing Was a Success!
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GoodEReader & Autography with author HP Mallory at the ebook signing event
Over one hundred fans attended the online ebook signing with author HP Mallory, thanks to Autography’s ebook signing software and Spreecast, the social video platform. Fans were able to ask questions live, receive their signed ebooks instantly via email, and interact with the author as she answered interview questions from our members of the Good e-Reader community.
Many of the readers and participants in the discussion were reluctant to join on video, or in many cases, lacked the necessary enabled equipment to participate on camera, all of the fans were able to type questions to the author using the video chat feature. Their questions were then answered by the author, covering topics ranging from Mallory’s writing style and publishing experience, to what can be expected from her books and her characters in the near future. Fans really responded to the intimate feel of the event, as the author chatted with them from her own living room. Moreover, unlike at rushed events where a reader may get to exchange only a few words with the author at the signing table, many fans stayed for the entire hour-long event and talked intermittently.
“This is really cool format – I feel like I am in the same room as HP – best book signing ever,” posted one reader at the event wrap-up.
While Mallory would pause from time to time to sign more ebooks, Tom Waters, co-founder of Autography, would interject information for both readers and authors interested in more options for ebook signing, explaining both the process of actually signing digital editions and how it can benefit both bestselling authors and indie authors alike.
The link to the recorded event can be found HERE and includes the audio and video of the ebook signing. For those readers who were unable to attend the signing, HP Mallory can still send an autographed ebook. Simply send your email address (or the recipient’s, if this is a gift) to info@autography.com and be sure to include the name for which the book is to be personalized.
Be sure to check out future editions of the Good e-Reader live ebook signing. We will profile some very well-known bestselling authors very soon and give readers a chance to interact with these favorite authors.
Live Online Ebook Signing via Spreecast Tonight
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We are only hours away from GoodEReader’s first-ever live ebook signing via the world wide web. Urban fantasy author H.P. Mallory will be signing digital copies of her recent release, Great Hexpectations, using Autography’s ebook autographing capability.
Autography, a development that GoodEReader first covered at BookExpo America in May of this year, allows authors to incorporate a personalized page into digital editions of their books. This software also allows authors to incorporate photographs into the ebooks, a feature that is especially popular with fans who attend authors’ live signing events at conferences and book parties.
For this ebook signing, Mallory will be greeting fans via Spreecast, a new social connectivity platform that allows users to have up to four guests on video chat at one time. Spreecast allows users to maintain a channel on the site, thereby recording and storing their previous Spreecasts and assigning those recordings a URL for sharing at other outlets.
The GoodEReader and Autography ebook signing with author HP Mallory will begin at 9:00pm EST/6:00pm PST today. Fans are invited to join this free event, but note that in order to participate online a webcam and the latest edition of Flash must be installed. Readers who do not have those options can still join in the event through the chat feature and their questions will be answered by the author.
The following LINK will direct readers to the Spreecast, although the video feed will not begin until the appointed time.
First-Ever GoodEReader Live Online Ebook Signing via Spreecast
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Tomorrow at 9:00pm EST/6:00pm PST, GoodEReader and Autography will host a live ebook signing event via the new social connection website Spreecast. The event is a first for both of the sponsors, bringing the personalized capabilities of Autography ebook signing software to readers who don’t have access to their favorite authors.
For this event, author HP Mallory, whose title To Kill A Warlock was featured as GoodEReader’s Ebook of the Week on Tuesday, will be signing copies of her newest title in the Dulcie O’Neil series, Great Hexpectations. This title joins two previous books, To Kill A Warlock and A Tale of Two Goblins, in her series. Mallory has an additional series with the protagonist Jolie Wilkins, whose third installment is due out from Random House in February 2012; additionally, Random House will be releasing a novella in the Wilkins series this December.
In honor of this first-time event, GoodEReader will be giving away an e-reader to a randomly selected participant during the live event. In order to be eligible, enter a valid email address in the chat window at any time during the Spreecast. Readers who do not have a webcam and Flash installed can still participate in the event through the chat feature and their questions for Mallory will be addressed; they will also have the ability to purchase signed copies of Great Hexpectations. For those who wish to speak with the author during the signing, make sure a webcam is enabled and the latest version of Flash is installed (version 10.3 or higher).
To attend the live event tomorrow, go to Spreecast.com and locate the specific event at the top of the screen. The event can also be accessed by clicking HERE during the event.
Interview with Dan Poynter the father of Modern Self-Publishing
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We were on location at the SelfPub BookExpo this weekend in New York City. The first interview subject we had lined up was Dan Poynter, who is arguably the father of modern self-publishing. With his first self-published title in the early 80s, through his continuing works that detail the technology and the options that are available for authors, he may know more about indie publishing than anyone other professional. Mark Coker from Smashwords is one of his biggest fans and always speaks very highly of him. Dan spoke with Good e-Reader about the terminology involved and the stigma that both the industry and the authors themselves still place on the independently published author.
Zinio talks future of digital Magazine Publishing and relationship with Apple
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Zinio is one of the most successful online digital magazine companies in the world! We caught up with Matthew Davis the VP of User Experience at the recent E-Reader Conference in San Francisco! At Zinio Matthew is principally charged with evolving the utility, form and beauty of Zinio’s international newsstand and bookstore. Matthew served at Zinio from almost the very beginning and was instrumental in the inaugural iPad launch that substantiated the company and thrust it into the limelight.
Zinio is one of the preimier magazine companies and they have relationships with some of the largest companies such as Conde Nast. The success of Zinio is attributed to the sheer amount of iPad sales which propelled the app into the top selling news app on the App Market. The entire time is passionate about the art form of the magazine and Matthew has been a fan of magazines and used to decorate his walls with clippings from old skate zines.
Before the iPad launch the company had a few early prototypes of the tablet that were chained to the desk and surrounded by indestructible glass to protect them and prevent theft. The challenge facing the company in February 2010, six weeks before the iPad launch was to build a fully functioning app, port over 2400 titles and make 7 of them flagship quality. The initial team of 24 people had their work cut out for them and the entire team lived in a small office for the duration of the entire six weeks.
Some of the early challenges the company faced was a common language barrier so the programmers could understand the designers and everyone could be on the same page. There is a deep lexicon of jargon in both the magazine and publishing world and it was a challenge getting everyone to speak the same language. After this process they had to laugh at big companies and publishers such as Wired where the coders and designers have never even spoke before.
Designing the application was fraught with challenges because it was a new frontier and the entire gesture system had to be done from scratch but also be intuitive and beautiful. There was a new paradigm with touchscreen navigation with both portrait and landscape mode. Some magazines wanted different ways to scroll through the magazine. For example for Wired they wanted to scroll down to go through different pages within the same article and to gesture left and right to go through the different articles.
During the conference speech Matthew talked about some of the challenges the company has faced during the entire iPad process and how it has changed the company. They went from a small design firm to having 2 major company headquarters in North America and Satellite sales offices all over the world.
Qualcomm talks about future of Mirasol based screen technology
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During the e-Readers 20111 Conference in San Francisco we met with Cheryl Goodman, a self-proclaimed surfer girl from San Jose! Cheryl is the Senior Director of Publisher Relations at Qualcomm. In this role she is responsible for forging connections in the publishing industry. Primarily she is trying to secure content for a new breed of Mirasol based technologies.
She gave an overview of what Qualcomm was doing with Mirasol based screen technology and gave a general overview of what it is all about. She went on to give us some great indications on how it looks on e-readers and tablets! She finished with giving us a timeline on when the first Mirasol based devices are going to hit the market in 2011.
Americans Love E-Readers which creates a global trend
• Distinct markets for e-readers, tablets – Just as Video didn’t kill TV, tablets won’t kill e-readers
• US adult e-reader purchases doubled (Pew) – a trend that is projected to continue.
• All devices will be connected, content is key but publishers must retrofit to the new medium and manage the sustainable of their strategic digital bets ( apps development, revenue sharing with digital partners with broad channels)
• It’s a Reading Revolution! Digital Books sale are up
%60 says the Korea Publisher Association – reconfirming
the global trend.
