As a Tastebook Customer

I fell for Tastebook. I uploaded all my recipes. I organized them into breads/brunch dishes, appetizers, fish, poultry, meat, pasta/rice/grains, soups and salads, desserts, and of course the ever-necessary "other stuff". I chose a cover image, a title, and placed the order: three copies shipped to me, three to my brother (Uncle Pete, of the House of Technological Wonders).

A week later, the order had weirdly cancelled itself. I placed a re-order. Suddenly, the order doubled itself. I called the helpdesk. They'd mistakenly cancelled the order, then un-did it themselves, then my re-order doubled the order. They cancelled the second order.

Two weeks later, Uncle Pete received six cookbooks and had not the foggiest idea what that was about.

Three weeks later, in several deliveries, I received six cookbooks. My account was only charged for one order.

The books themselves were gorgeous.  The exact cover I'd selected. Delectable illustrations. Awesome layout. Nice paper stock, tab dividers between sections. Inside, however, were 12 pages of advertisements (masquerading as recipes from Bertolli olive oil), which I removed from each book.

Would I do it again? Probably. As a gift item to friends and family. Would I use Tastebook as a POD? No. At $35/pop, it's tough to recoup cost plus profit. But as a vanity project, a gift of my kitchen to my friends and Uncle Pete, it's a great idea. 

Larry Kirshbaum Joins Overdrive Board

"During my career, I've seen the publishing industry evolve with the adoption of new book formats, business models, and sales channels," said Kirshbaum. "Today, eBooks, audio books, and digital media markets are exploding, and OverDrive is uniquely positioned as a global leader in the value-added distribution of digital books and other content."

News Slows To A Crawl: We Got Nothin'

Times Discovers Blogging-to-Books Trend

Credo Reference Expands Customer Base

Overdrive's .epub is ready for download

The new "epub" standard for eBooks and other digital publications was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.IDPF.org), a non-profit standards and trade association, and unanimously approved by IDPF member companies. Publishers benefit from "epub" as it allows them to produce a single digital publication for all distribution channels rather than producing multiple formats for competing reader applications. OverDrive, an IDPF member, joins Hachette Book Group USA, Adobe Systems, Sony, and others in actively supporting the new format.

Hacking the Kindle

Hacker Igor Skochinsky has reversed engineered the DRM of the Kindle to allow Mobipocket books to be read on Amazon'e eBook device. It works by actually changing the DRM of the files to be compatible with the Kindle.

More Muzing

How Can They Have A Layoff If There's No One Left At The Company?

"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company....Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.

Teaching the "Facebook Generation"

Students coming up in today's academe are "not bound by traditional modes of research exchange," notes a program description, and are "using all the technologies at their disposal to engage in scholarly discourse," including blogs, wikis, and tagging tools.

Institute for Future of the Book gets genius grant

[The grant] will facilitate the completion of the long-awaited Sophie, a set of digital authoring tools. Stein told the LJ Academic Newswire that Sophie 1.0 could see a release as early as February '08. The grant continues the MacArthur Foundation's support of if:book. MacArthur helped found the institute with a 2004, $500,000 grant to its parent institution, the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Communication.

Sophie is designed to enable people to create "robust, elegant rich-media, networked" documents. "We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats," notes a Sophie product description. "Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people."

Publishers Lunch gets all digital on digitized digits

Google's corporate philosophy is based on the model which brought them success: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process. The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing.

Oxbridge Ebooks

New Board Candidates for IDPF

Ebooks succeed in niche markets

Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It's fiction, but it's more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you'd find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.

"In general, it's not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen," said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early 90s....

The nature of game books as reference material rather than pleasure reading isn't something that's easily applied to mainstream books, except for school and college textbooks, where e-books have some traction as well....

[One publisher's] bread-and-butter sales come from short PDFs, some with as few as five pages, and commensurately low prices, at $1 or $2. That's something that doesn't really work in the print world, but is perfect for electronic distribution...The same move toward shorter fare is noticeable in another market where e-books have done better than average -- romantic fiction. Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold as e-books. But it's also started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, selling them for 89 cents.

Satan buys Beliefnet

We were in no rush to sell but I've always believed that Beliefnet would fully blossom with the help of a major media partner. In assessing acquirers, what did we look for? Though we wanted to obtain a fair price, as big a factor in our deliberations was whether, by selling, we could better meet our mission. We created Beliefnet primarily to make a difference, not a killing. As I explored the possibilities with News Corp., it became clear that, with their help, Beliefnet would be able to take quantum leap in what we can do.  The best spiritual and religious teachers – from Rick Warren to the Dalai Lama -- pass through News Corp doors (through Harper Collins, Zondervan, Harper One and others). News Corp's reach is enormous. Its proficiency in the areas of video, social networking and media in general is unsurpassed.

Want to stop blogging on the Kindle

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek is convinced the Kindle changes everything

It's not hard to see how Kindle will take off. Business travelers, I predict, will be the first to embrace it. Having a device with multiple books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs to travel with, which also has a long battery life, beats wrangling a laptop, magazines, and papers in an airline seat. The next market will be university students, undergrad and grad. With such a nifty application and the tension over ridiculously high prices for textbooks, going digital is a brainy way to deliver textbooks to an audience that is already used to digital consumption.

Chipp Kidd on Kindle: *shrug*

"I've been asked to comment on what effect I think [the Kindle] will have, if any, on book design as we know it," Kidd wrote last Wednesday. "Here goes. None."

Wal-Mart to record labels: Quit with the DRM already