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The management team of Family Christian (@FCstores), the nation's largest Christian retail chain with 280 stores in 36 states, has partnered with a group of Atlanta-based Christian businessmen to acquire the company from its private equity owners. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Under the new ownership, Family Christian's pledge is to contribute 100% of its profits to Christian causes and, specifically, ministries serving widows and orphans both in the USA and abroad. Family Christian has always been committed to providing resources for the Christian community, but the new ownership structure will allow the organization to not only equip Christians in their daily walk, but to increase the organization's impact by providing substantial financial support to faith-based causes.

Read the news release.

Additionally, Family Christian president and CEO, Cliff Bartow, told Publishers Weekly the company has decided to drop its own e-reader – the edifi, launched in June – “because the technology is moving so rapidly, and this is not our core competency.” Instead, Family will work with Kobo (@kobo), carrying four of their color devices and three of their black-and-white devices for the Christmas season. “We definitely believe in the future of ebooks,” Bartow said. (Also see PW’s earlier article, “Family Christian Chain Launches E-Reader.”)

As for the future of brick and mortar, Bartow said, “We believe our stores are a viable concept. Today customers want to be served through multiple channels. Look at Apple--they do business online but their physical stores are also important. Our customers want the store experience. They want a place they can come for inspiration and interaction with our staff.”

Also see Christianity Today’s coverage.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the fast-changing environment of today's book publishing world.

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The above Chart Of The Day (@chartoftheday) depicts a portion of the Pew Research Group’s (@pewinternet) survey of people’s e-reading habits. The most popular way for people under 30 to read ebooks is on their desktop and laptop computers, surpassing e-readers, smartphones, and tablets.

Among the survey’s other findings:

·         83% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year. Some 75% read a print book, 19% read an ebook, and 11% listened to an audiobook.

·         Overall, 47% of younger Americans read long-form e-content such as books, magazines, or newspapers. E-content readers under age 30 are more likely than older e-content readers to say they’re reading more these days due to the availability of e-content (40% vs. 28%).

·         60% of Americans under age 30 used the library in the past year. Some 46% used the library for research, 38% borrowed books (print books, audiobooks, or ebooks), and 23% borrowed newspapers, magazines, or journals.

·         Many of these young readers don’t know they can borrow an ebook from a library, and a majority of them express the wish they could do so on pre-loaded e-readers. Some 10% of the ebook readers in this group have borrowed an ebook from a library and, among those who have not borrowed an ebook, 52% said they were unaware they could do so. About 58% of those under age 30 who don’t currently borrow ebooks from libraries say they would be “very” or “somewhat” likely to borrow pre-loaded e-readers if their library offered that service.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your ebook publishing and marketing strategy.

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LifeWay Christian Resources (@LifeWay) has launched a new ebookstore and a new mobile ebook reader.

The LifeWay Reader app is now available as a free download from the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad and from Google Play for Android devices. LifeWay's new app allows users to build a personal library from a growing list of ebooks and resources from the same Christian publishers found in LifeWay Christian Stores and at LifeWay.com. The LifeWay.com ebookstore currently offers more than 8,000 titles.

The LifeWay Reader app comes with a free pre-loaded copy of the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). Other free content also is available online.

Read this in full.

LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention (@SBCLife), established in Nashville, TN, in 1891, is one of the world's largest providers of Christian products and services, including Bibles, church literature, books, music, audio and video recordings, church supplies, and Internet services through LifeWay.com. The company also owns and operates 160 LifeWay Christian Stores across the US, as well as one of the largest Christian conference centers in the country.

Read our previous blogposts:

·         "Family Christian Stores Now Selling Its Own Tablet"

·         "Parable, Mardel Latest to Launch Ebook Sales; Ebooks Now at 500+ Christian Stores"

·         “Ganxy Offers an 'Easier Way to Sell & Market Ebooks'”

·         “How Ebook Buyers Discover Books”

·         “Sites That Facilitate Book Discovery”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically plan your book’s disoverability.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Laura June (@laura_june), features editor for The Verge (@verge), observes that “ebooks are apparently lousy with typos.”

Many of the typos — the letter "c" in place of what should be an "e" — appear to be the casualties of a hasty OCRing of some actual text of the work. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process of scanning a book and using software which recognizes the scanned words as words, rather than merely as images, converting the images into text files. Anyone who has ever used OCR software knows that the process is far from perfect and always demands a serious attention to detail in the copy editing phase, once scanning is done, because the software doesn’t "read" the text perfectly. This seems to be at least partially what is happening in my Kindle edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, and it’s unacceptable....

[P]ublishing is changing very fast, and to keep up with that pace, publishers are moving quickly to get their books into stores like Amazon and iBooks. That’s great, I want as much content available as possible. But I also demand, and believe that all readers should demand, the high quality that book publishers have always offered to their customers....

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you achieve editorial excellence in your published content.

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Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Writing / Editing tab.

Reporter Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) writes on paidContent (@paidContent) about the new ebook selling and marketing Web service launched today, Ganxy (@Ganxy). She says, “In just a few minutes, anyone can create a “showcase” for a book that includes its cover, description, video and other marketing materials, and purchase options.”

Authors and publishers can sell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website, or Facebook page, or can just stand alone as a website....

It’s free to create a showcase, but Ganxy makes money in two ways. The company takes 10% of each sale when an ebook is sold through a showcase (authors and publishers can choose whether they want to sell ebooks directly). Ganxy also makes money through the affiliate links to retail sites that are embedded in the showcase. An author can also request to use his or her own affiliate links in the showcase; in that case, Ganxy displays its affiliate link 25% of the time and the author’s 75% of the time.

Ganxy also wants to appeal to readers. When someone buys an ebook directly through a Ganxy showcase, it’s added to his or her library and can be downloaded in any format (EPUB, iOS, Kindle and so on). All the ebooks Ganxy sells directly are DRM-free. (Publishers who don’t like that can just display retail links and not sell ebooks directly.)

Read this in full.

Read the news release.

And read our previous blogposts:

·         “How Ebook Buyers Discover Books”

·         “Sites That Facilitate Book Discovery”

·         "Family Christian Stores Now Selling Its Own Tablet"

·         "Parable, Mardel Latest to Launch Ebook Sales; Ebooks Now at 500+ Christian Stores"

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically plan your book’s disoverability.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

US Dept. of Education (@usedgov) Secretary Arne Duncan is calling for America to move as fast as possible away from printed textbooks and toward digital ones. “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete,” he declared last week at the National Press Club (@PressClubDC).

Referring primarily to grades K-12, but having implications on the college level as well, Duncan says he’s concerned about competing with other countries whose students are academically leaving behind their US counterparts.

South Korea, which consistently outperforms the US in educational outcomes, is moving far faster than the US in adopting digital learning environments. One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea has set a goal to go fully digital with its textbooks by 2015....

The transition to digital involves much more than scanning books and uploading them to computers, tablet devices or e-readers. Proponents describe a comprehensive shift to immersive, online learning experiences that engage students in a way a textbook never could.

Read this in full.

The Secretary has made the call before, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle in September.

Read Hack College’s coverage, “Education Secretary Calls for Print Textbooks to Become Obsolete.”

Also see our previous blogpost, “USA Goal: A Digital Textbook for Every US Student.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your textbook publishing and marketing strategy.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Above Infographic is by Aptara – Transforming Content into Knowledge

The above Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday) graph depicts research by Kontera (@Kontera) to determine when people use their PC (stationary) versus smartphones and tablets (mobile).

PC usage is strongest from 11 am to 5 pm (the work day while in the office) and mobile usage is strongest from 6 pm to midnight (the leisure hours at home).

The research also finds that 22% of all Internet content consumed in the US is on mobile devices.

Here’s another chart, showing how people are using their smartphones and tablets.

How might this influence your digital publishing strategy?

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you think through your mobile content effectiveness.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

During the Victorian Era in England, the trend of publishing the stories of novels in installments helped propel Charles Dickens to fame.

Publishing reporter Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) asks in The New York Times Media Decoder (@mediadecodernyt) blog, “Could serialized fiction finally force the ebook to evolve?”

Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about ebooks: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced ebooks, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers.

But serialized fiction, where episodes are delivered to readers in scheduled installments much like episodes in a television series, has been the subject of an unusual amount of experimentation in publishing in recent months. In September, Amazon announced Kindle Serials, stories sold for $1.99 and published in short episodes that download onto the Kindle as the episodes are released....

In August, Byliner, a digital publisher, announced that it would begin a new digital imprint devoted to serialized fiction....

One of the most talked-about new experiments is taking serialized fiction a step further. It’s a novel called The Silent History that’s available on the Apple iPhone and iPad. It includes interactive, user-generated elements.

Read this in full.

Also see USA TODAY’s article, “Will 'The Silent History' change the way we read?”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you think through your mobile content effectiveness.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

We held an open house this week and invited friends to come see our office in downtown Grand Rapids (@ExperienceGR), MI (@PureMichigan). Also going on downtown (until Oct. 7) is Art Prize (@ArtPrize) (#ArtPrize), where 1,517 pieces of art are scattered throughout the city for people to vote on; the top award is $200,000.

We were thrilled so many came to help us celebrate the beginning of fall in the Midwest. Our general manager, John Topliff, and his wife Debby even joined us via Skype from St. Andrews, Scotland, our international office. (Thanks to Bill Oechsler (@billoechsler) for his photos!)

We asked some of our guests if they’d like to answer the question, “What are major challenges facing Christian publishing today?”. Here are their answers:

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the turbulent waters of today’s publishing world.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.