Apple’s iSlate Gives Book Publishers False Hope

Disney bought Marvel for over four billion dollars.

Four billion dollars!

In my lifetime I have seen a comic book company aimed at children go from being printed on rotten paper with the worst four-color printing and a rotten distribution system to something that became worth four billion dollars.

Marvel. Comic books. Adults were ashamed to work in comic books!

Marvel! Home of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Thor, Hulk, Man-Thing, Ant-Man, X-Men.

Think about those characters.

How Book Publishing Will Lose: eBooks Vs. Smart Digital Books

Two Major Publishers To Hold Back E-Books

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.“

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Carolyn Reidy, is it difficult to be this clueless?

Let’s see … not a single Harry Potter book has been released in electronic format.

Yet is every Harry Potter book available in every electronic format?

Yes.

All you’re doing with this delay is saying: “Hey, kids! Rev up your scanners and bleed our writers to death!”

Hybrid iPhone/Print Book Glimpse Of The Future

Thanks to the folks over at Vook who tweeted this to me:

What most people will fixate on is the paper.

Look beyond that.

With a 10″-screen tablet, there can be virtual pages bookending the interactivity in the center of the screen. In other words, imagine what you’re looking at above is a single screen.

I think Disney will be looking at this video keenly.

The 24hrBook Project

24hrBook Project

In collaboration with if:book, The Society of Young Publishers and CompletelyNovel.com, Spread the Word has commissioned The 24 Hour Book, a groundbreaking project to challenge a group of writers to write a new story about London in just 24 hours.

The project doesn’t excite me, but its web page does, hence this post.

Scroll down to see the FriendFeed widget, the Twitter widget, and the map.

I’ll have more to say about that in another post at another time.

Smart Digital Books Vs. The ePub FAIL Model

Post-Medium Publishing

Smart Digital Books:

When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner.

Axis of E (eInk, ePub, eBook) FAIL Model:

And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

The only thing the ePub FAIL model offers is to strip the words from the physical blocks of paper, period. And even that isn’t done properly.

Previously here:

The Coming Collapse Of eBook Prices
How The Axis Of E Is Killing Publishing
The Continuing Horror Of ePub
Would A US$50 eBook Reader Be A Disaster?
The Devaluation Of The eBook
ePub: The Death Of The Index?
The eBook Cover Scandal
He Understands Something Is Missing
Where I Stand Now
The Axis Of E Book Holocaust
English-Subtitled Editis Smart Digital Book Video
The Issue Of eBook Pricing
Why eInk, ePub, And eBooks Will Fail
Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live
ALL eInk Devices: BAD For eBooks!

RSSCloud: This Will Be Huge For eBooks

Tease! Tease! Tease!

WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud

RSS in the Clouds

Just two things right off the top of my head:

1) Being notified by a publisher when an eBook from an author you want to read has been put on sale (not everyone gets the months-in-advance Dan Brown hype treatment)

2) Being notified by your local library that an eBook you’ve been waiting to borrow has just been returned right now

Is Steve Haber and his upcoming 3G-enabled Sony Reader Daily Edition paying attention?

Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #6

ePub eBooks are a dead-end for all publishers.

ePub:

1) Standalone
2) Flat
3) Static
4) Unconnected
5) A pirate’s paradise

Smart Digital Books are what print publishing need to continue existing:

Smart Digital Books:

1) Nodal
2) Multi-dimensional
3) Dynamic
4) Connected
5) A pirate’s worst nightmare

In the above graphic of a smart digital book, I’m briefly illustrating the value of metadata connectedness to readers and especially to publishers. Axiom 3:

3 – Connections between books add value to all books

So a smart digital book from publisher A leads to two other books from the same publisher (A), as well as a book from two other publishers (B and C). (Note de Bono’s rule here, however: “Patterns are asymmetric. The route from A to B is not the same as the route from B to A.” So it might not be likely that the books on the right would lead back to the book on the left. This, however, is irrelevant in the overall network.)

The work of Dave Winer, father of RSS, is most likely important in all of this. Start paying attention to him, especially his rssCloud formulations.

@doctorlaura will probably again wonder about metadata versus marginalia in this example, but I’m blunting her objection here. I am not parsing out the underlying metadata that would make this connection. I’m saying this is the type of connection metadata will make possible.

The following statement made by a noted criminologist illustrates the point: “When men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it.”

— Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, published 1937

And:

But you don’t think about these trade-offs anymore. You’ve already made this decision many times in the past, so you now assume that this is the way you want to spend your money. You’ve herded yourself — lining up behind your initial experience at Starbucks — and now you’re part of the crowd.

— Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, published 2008

I grant 99.9% of people will find this connection to be too obscure. That’s because the Predictably Irrational story is too long for a Fair Use quote, so I’ve cut to the end of the tale. Also, people looking at this are seeing it from the outside, unlike someone — um, me — who has recently read both books and can see how they fit together. (While reading PI, I immediately thought of that passage from T&GR.)

The point is metadata will allow conceptual linking. Anyone interested in concept “A” will be able to extract that concept from within other books.

This is a knowledge cascade effect that adds value to the original book and opens the way for sales of other books for everyone.

To bring up Outliers once again. It has a chapter about the 10,000 hours required to achieve distinctive mastery. There is an entire book about that subject alone. How many people reading Outliers as a print book or as an eBook know that or would bother to find out? Such a connection would be possible with smart digital books, eliminating the friction current print and eBooks create for such discovery.

It’s this connecting of smart digital books that will save publishing. It will lead to on-the-spot discovery for readers, it will require human expertise, the metadata and connections become a new capital asset, and all books increase in value to readers because new connections are being added all the time.

That race to the bottom pricing with flat, static ePub eBooks comes to a halt with smart digital books.

Moving on …

A good overview of HTML5.

XML is being used for voice applications: VoiceXML at 10: Fueling Growth in Voice Apps and Hosting.

Previously here:

Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #5
Metadata Is Money
Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #4
Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #3
Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #2
Smart Digital Books Metadata Notes #1
Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live

He Understands Something Is Missing

Don’t book in a revolution just yet

Jose Borghino, from the Australian Publishing Association, said the industry was currently in discussion to develop a unified system to deliver book titles.

“The publishing industry is very ready for this, it’s just the matter of finding that killer app which will shift people’s understanding of what a book can be and can do,” Mr Borghino said.

Emphasis added by me.

Unfortunately, the context is that of the Axis of E: eInk, ePub, and eBook.

But just his phrasing there makes me hopeful that he senses the Axis of E is not there, not good enough, and will not succeed.

Someone else grasps that:

Dr Jason Sternberg, lecturer in media and communication at the Queensland University of Technology, said he didn’t think the industry in Australia should brace itself for a revolution in the consumption of the written word .

“These things have been around for a while, one of the initial predictions was how we would get digital newspapers on these tablets but the internet kind of killed that,” he said.

“I just do not see these replacing the book on a mass scale.”

Emphasis added by me.

Exactly.

The Eleven Axioms of 21st Century Book Publishing

1 – All publishers are information engines, not producers of objects

2 – A book is no longer a thing in itself

3 – Connections between books add value to all books

4 – A non-fiction book is only the beginning of its story

5 – Even fiction books connect to all other books

6 – A book’s deep metadata is worth more than the book itself

7 – Every dollar invested in deep metadata is worth a hundred dollars in future sales

8 – A book’s function dictates its file container

9 – Readers are no longer passive customers

10 – Readers sell more books than any publisher

11 – To see only today is to forfeit tomorrow

English-Subtitled Editis Smart Digital Book Video

Twitter Follower @DoctorLaura actually did an English translation transcription of this video for me, but I was swamped and never got around to posting it here.

In the meantime, a Comment was posted here today informing me of a new English-subtitled version of the Editis video, which I analyzed in a prior post.

Here it is.

I’m at a disadvantage here. I can’t watch the video as it’s presented on YouTube because XP updates have crippled video playback on this PC. I must rip and convert the video to watch it. So all of you are seeing it well before I will.

Now you know why dumb eBooks must die and the Axis of E (eInk, ePub, eBook) will fail.