Norwegian Help Desk Video

While I thought making that crack about scrolls-to-bound-books was pretty original, it turns out the Norwegian Help Desk got there way before I did (also courtesy Michael Holdsworth).

From the Mailbag

Michael Holdsworth writes in to say that it looks like E-Ink-type technology and laptops are not going to get along for quite some time. He refers to it as "Etch-A-Sketch" technology that isn't robust enough to run on Windows/OS platforms or via video/animation. Additionally, it seems the color E-Ink is quite a ways off - I thought I'd seen something in my Google alerts saying they were on the verge of a color display, but upon further research this seems not to be so. Furthermore, there's that page-turn "blink" that the machine does when you scroll to the next page.

So the idea of comfortably reading on a laptop with this technology appears to be still some ways off....We can add that to our list of "dream features" for a laptop/ebook-reader, then!

I do wonder, when the human race moved from papyrus scrolls to bound books, if anyone complained about having to turn pages instead of rolling them.

Bowker's Pubtrack Now Working with Online Retailers

Bowker announced yesterday that it has signed an agreement with Alibris, Textbooks.com, and a number of other online retailers of college textbooks:

The new agreements significantly expand the breadth of data collection for PubTrack Higher Education, Bowker's Web-based business intelligence tool for higher education publishing professionals. With the addition of the newest data partners, PubTrack Higher Education now includes textbook purchasing information from more than 11 million students nationwide, or roughly 65 percent of the total U.S. college student population.

PubTrack Higher Education is the only sales analysis resource for the higher education market that provides timely and accurate data regarding textbook sales, course books-in-use information on college campuses nationwide, and analyzes market share data in ways that matter to publishers.

Jack Romanos's Parting Words

Fooling Around With the Kindle

Jessica McMahon over at LibreDigital sent us this link, wherein the folks at Motley Fool re-think the Kindle (and mirrors the approach that Peter Brantley is taking on the O'Reilly blog as well):

Amazon's Digital Text Platform is in beta, but it's an open beta. Anyone can sign up. Anyone can be published. In fact, the only requirements to get an item listed on Kindle are a title, an author's name, and of course, content.

I wrote a cheesy coming-of-age novel called The Last Perfect Father's Day during my undergraduate days. It's not my best work. It might be my worst. I've let two people read it. OK, I've suckered two people into reading it. I had it lying around on my hard drive in MS Word, so I figured I'd serve it to Amazon's service as a guinea pig.

In seconds, Amazon chewed it up and spit it back out in Kindle's HTML-coded format. All that was left was to price the puppy, from $0.25 to $200. I chose the low end of that scale and clicked the Publish button.

Several hours later, it was up on the site, complete with an Amazon-assigned ASIN code. That was too easy.

Indeed. It disturbed me a bit that (a) it wasn't necessary for the ebook to have an ISBN (b) it didn't conform to the IDPF's .epub standard. And yet, if history is any guide, Amazon will set the de facto standard and all that .epub work will kind of fall by the wayside....

However - and this is crucial - so many more people are doing self-publishing these days that this capability to upload and download and distribute your own titles is pretty amazing. I mean, just load your book up on Amazon for anyone to find in their web search. Jaw-dropping!

Kindle talk

Over at O'Reilly's Radar blogs, Peter Brantley is leading a discussion of the Kindle - the comments are interesting, particularly Peter's most recent one about looking at the Kindle holistically (rather than merely "slamming the device qua device" - which, as he says, is "fun"...and it is!).

BAMM sales up

Books-A-Million third quarter sales were $117.7 million, according to a report in The Book Standard this morning. That's up 6.3% over last year at this time.

More Muzers

In an attempt to counter the torrent of departing Muze personnel, two executives have been added to the team in New York: Joslyn Lane, Managing Editor of Media Information (replacing Paul Parreira and Peter Krause), and Lee Ho, VP of Marketing (replacing someone whose name I forget because he wasn't there long enough for it to stick).

Meanwhile, Mike Pegan, former director of sales for Muze, is now back at AMG.

A Rising Tide...of Prices?

Galleycat reports this morning that Amazon has stopped discounting (at least some) mass market paperbacks...to pay for the $9.95 Kindle titles?

Giving E-books a bad name

MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles has a piece today on credit card theft and e-book companies. Apparently, there was strange coincidence of credit card numbers being used legitimately to buy Equifax jproducts, and then used illegitimately at a couple of disreputable companies who run e-book fronts...and false charges appeared on hundreds of credit-card statements. Small amounts - $4.95 on average - but nevertheless:

It's not clear when the e-book scam began. A few consumers say they saw fake e-book charges beginning in February, but it appears there was a flurry of activity in September.

Credit card thieves often create fake businesses to process bogus transactions -- that's much easier than using stolen cards to make purchases at legitimate retailers, and one of the quickest ways to turn stolen numbers into cash.

Meaning don't buy your ebooks from weird little stores you never heard of.

Downloadable audio in libraries

Audible, Audiofy, IDG, Overdrive: It's taking too long. People want to load audiobooks from their libraries onto their iPods yesterday. In fact, they are so over the novelty of that - now they want books from other countries.

I know you can do this.

"If Barnes & Noble were one set of buttocks, I'd kick them so hard right now."

A metadata rant from a self-published author. One that pretty well encapsulates the frustrations of dealing with multiple data vendors.

Pajama Party

Pajamas Media has a great piece by Richard Fernandez, their Sydney editor, on the unindexed web, particularly as it has to do with libraries:

Books are great, but digital storage is the wave of the future. Yet we cannot see the wave in its entirety. We don’t know where most of that avalanche of knolwedge is and how to easily find it. Most information on the Web is locked up in databases and cannot be “spidered,” a term used to describe the software indexing of Internet material. For example, web pages generated from databases only “exist” when a query is run, like online telephone directories which do not have a separate page for every person in the directory and only create a page in response to a request. Database generated pages have a transient existence and cannot easily be indexed. Password protected websites like locked apartments or private telephone numbers defy our attempts to see within them. Much information lives on the Deep Web. It is there but we cannot see it without taking special steps.

The immense size of the unindexed Internet has motivated consultants and online resources to offer help at finding information in the Deep Web the way traditional librarians guided scholars through the stacks in days gone by.

Scobelizing the Kindle

NYCIP this weekend

The New York Center for Independent Publishing's annual fair is on for this weekend at 20 W. 44th Street. Speakers/readers include Katha Pollitt, Ian MacKaye, and Amiri Baraka. Topics covered will be pitching your book, "authorpreneurship", and issues in translation, as well as an erotica workshop (oh boy!).

Pat Schroeder of AAP will also give a keynote address.

Tight Christmas

Consumer spending for the post-Thanksgiving three-day weekend was down by 3.5%, reports Bloomberg, and the hopes are that online merchants will be able to lure shoppers who are cautious about spending - it may be that comparison-shopping sites do quite well this season.

The conventional wisdom is that when the economy is down, book sales go up at holiday time, because books are a classy yet relatively inexpensive gift. This has been proven wrong in holidays past, however, so we'll just have to hang on and see where the current takes us....