somersault

Making ebooks just became easier (at least ebooks only for the iPad). That’s the outcome from today’s announcement at the Apple event in New York City (see the QuickTime video of it). Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says

Apple's event was first rumored to be a self-publishing venture then called an "education" venture. It turned out to be both. Apple is launching iBooks 2, a new multimedia textbook platform and iBooks Author, a shockingly easy authoring tool to create them – indeed to create any kind of book – and publish them instantly to the iBookstore. Both the new iBooks 2 app and iBooks Author app are free and available today.

On top of all that, iBooks 2 textbooks will be priced at $14.99 or less. The new iBooks 2 app will provide the usual access to the iBookstore but will also feature a new category: textbooks….They feature beautiful layouts, endless multimedia (audio, video, animation, animated 3D models, interactive quizzes, the list goes on). And iBooks Author makes it really easy--any author can follow the template or make up a new one and drag-and-drop prepared materials like text and video right into the new book. Once complete, a push of the button places it in the iBookstore in a digital marketplace holding hundreds of millions of credit card numbers....

In addition, Apple is relaunching iTunes University with a new free app. Originally focused on offering videos of university lectures, the new iTunes U app will make it possible for professors to offer full online courses, complete with assignments, notes and communications with the students, all situated on iTunes U and all for free. Several universities, including Duke and Yale, have already started posting courses.

Read it in full.

The Washington Post covered the event live, quoting Apple’s iWork vice president, Roger Rosner, “In like 5 minutes flat, we created an ebook and deployed it to the iPad. I hope you find that as inspiring and empowering as I do.”

Read it in full.

Lindsey Turrentine (@lturrentine), editor-in-chief of CNET Reviews, offers her commentary in “Apple iBooks in schools: Devil is in the hardware.” She says the high cost of outfitting classrooms with an iPad for each child and the blunt-force trauma students would inflict on the tablets, coupled with rapid advancements in technology leaving the school’s investment soon outdated, make her skeptical that today’s announcement is actually practical.

Read it in full.

Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid), editorial director, Digital Book World (@digibookworld), says of today’s event:

In a stunning display of ebook creation acrobatics, Apple executives dragged images and video into an e-book page and text wrapped seamlessly around it. 

The company also demonstrated completed textbooks, showing off interactive features, including: Images that come alive with explanations when tapped; fluid layouts that shift smoothly from portrait to landscape view; and index and glossary functions that are integrated directly into each page.

Read this in full.

As for the ease of creating ebooks, CNET’s (@CNET & @CNETNews) technology columnist Don Reisinger (@donreisinger) explains it in “Apple’s new iBooks Author targets ebook creators.” Also see "Apple revamps iTunes U, makes it class portal."

Other articles to read are "6 things we don't know about Apple's e-textbooks strategy" by CNET's David Carnoy (@DavidCarnoy) and Scott Stein (@jetscott), and "This is Apple At Its Absolute Worst: It Thinks It Owns Any Book You Make Through iBooks Author" by Business Insider's (@sai) Steve Kovach (@stevekovach). 

What do you expect today’s announcement will mean for your publishing plans? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you with your textbook and reference publishing. Veterans with more than 100 combined years of experience in the field, we eagerly embrace current technology and the revolutionary changes it’s making in the publishing world.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially see the list of self-publishers in the Publishers tab.

In Publishing Executive (@pubexec), Dianne Kennedy (@DianneKennedy), head of nextPub and Vice President of Emerging Technologies for IDEAlliance (@IDEAlliance, @IdeasINprint, @IdeasINemedia, @IdeasINcreation), writes a summary of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (@intlCES), especially as it pertains to publishers.

For publishers, last year the star of CES was clearly the "Tablet.” The tablet onslaught clearly had huge implications for publishers racing to deliver their content as widely as possible across the emerging tablet publishing channel. This year, while we saw refinements and hybridization in the tablet market space, the lack of overwhelming leaps in publication delivery technologies was good news. CES 2012 predicts we will have a year to refine production tools and workflows to deliver content to a relatively stable delivery platform environment.

Here’s what she predicts based on her observations:

·         Tablet display size seems to be standardizing at 7.7 inch and 10.1 inch This is good news for publishers who are designing publications for a target device size.

·         Tablet display resolution is increasing, and for these tablets battery life is decreasing.

·         The functionality of tablets is rapidly increasing while the price is dropping. Price point for new Ice Cream Sandwich tablets sets a new price point of about $250. This means a larger audience for content will be in place by the end of 2012.

·         Office Tablets are emerging to provide more PC-like interfaces and functionality while maintaining the mobility of Internet Appliance Tablets

·         Ultrabook PCs will begin to compete head-to-head with tablets.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the churning and fast-changing waters of 21st century publishing.

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

This article in GigaOM (@gigaom) by Trey Ratcliff (@TreyRatcliff), founder of FlatBooks and the travel photography blog Stuck In Customs (@StuckInCustoms), says, “The ebook business will grow faster than people think. Innovations from Amazon and Apple have increased the velocity at which we consume ebooks, but there are two emergent behaviors that will increase the rate of overall consumption.”

Emergent behavior 1: Ebooks are not 1-for-1 with the traditional book business.

Most ebook projections are wrong. They anticipate for every $1 billion lost in the traditional book business that $1 billion will be gained in the ebook business. This ratio is actually closer to 1-to-2 because people are collecting ebooks like nuts for the winter. They are easy to buy and download, much like music. And, frankly, it’s fun to fill up your iPad with a colorful, robust set of thumbnails in your library. I don’t know why this is a good feeling, but it is.

Emergent behavior 2: Social media is a marketing multiplier.

The best way to successfully market something is to have true believers with big followings talk about it on the Internet. Since we have many authors who are socially popular, a multiplier effect begins to take place....The spread of good books has always been a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Now, with social media, ebooks are word-of-mouth-on-steroids.

Read this in full.

As ebooks grow, a concurrent problem will need to be addressed. Read paidContent's (@paidContent) "Why Amazon's Plagiarism Problem Is More Than A Public Relations Issue," by Jeff Roberts (@jeffjohnroberts) and Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you identify blue ocean strategy for your ebook publishing agenda.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, the online dashboard especially for marketing and publishing executives.

An article by Nick DeSantis (@njdesantis) on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s (@chronicle) technology blog Wired Campus (@wiredcampus) says, “Despite the promise that digital textbooks can lead to huge cost savings for students, a new study at Daytona State College has found that many who tried e-textbooks saved only 1 dollar, compared with their counterparts who purchased traditional printed material.”

The study, conducted over 4 semesters, compared 4 different means of textbook distribution: traditional print purchase, print rental, e-textbook rental, and e-textbook rental with an e-reader device. It found that e-textbooks still face several hurdles as universities mull the switch to a digital textbook distribution model.

Read this in full. Also see “A Study of Four Textbook Distribution Models” reported by Educause Quarterly (@educause).

Another article you’ll want to read is USA TODAY’s (@USATODAY & @USATODAYtech) “Technology, costs, lack of appeal slow e-textbook adoption” by tech reporter Roger Yu (@RogerYu_USAT).

With their promise of ubiquity, convenience, and perhaps affordability, e-textbooks have arrived in fits and starts throughout college campuses. And publishers and book resellers are spending millions wooing students to their online stores and e-reader platforms as mobile technology improves the readability of the material on devices such as tablet computers. Silicon Valley start-ups, such as Inkling (@inkling) and Kno (@GoodtoKNO), are also aggressively reinventing textbooks with interactive graphics, videos and social-media features.

Despite emerging attempts at innovation, the industry has been slowed by clunky technology, the lasting appeal of print books, skeptical students who scour online for cheaper alternatives, and customer confusion stemming from too many me-too e-textbook platforms that have failed to stand out.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you develop your ebook strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard for marketing and publishing professionals.

In New York magazine (@NYMag), Boris Kachka (@Borisk) writes that ebooks are more than a publishing platform — they’re a whole new literary form.

The great hidden virtue of ebooks — hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line — is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long — the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers....

From one angle, the short book might look like another manifestation of the shrinking American attention span. From another, it speaks to our longing for a lot more depth than shrinking periodicals can handle.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous post, "In the Year of the Ebook, 5 Lessons From - and For - News Organizations."

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you plan your ebook strategy.

Stephan Spencer (@sspencer), co-author of The Art of SEO, lists common SEO myths in an article for Multichannel Merchant (@mcmerchant):

·         Meta tags will boost your rankings. Fact: Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. They’ve been so abused by spammers that the engines haven't put any stock in them for years. In fact, Google never did support this meta tag. None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.

·         If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet.

·         Tweaking your meta description is the way to optimize the Google snippet's conversion potential.

·         Placing links in a teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site.

Read this in full.

Articles appearing in the media recently have both upheld the virtues of the independent bookstore and heaped disdain on it. In The New York Times’ (@NYTimes) Op-Ed piece, “Amazon’s Jungle Logic,” novelist Richard Russo lashes out against Amazon’s promotions as an attempt to squash local retailers.

....my writer pals and I took personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back before Amazon or the Internet itself existed. As Anita [Shreve] put it, losing independent bookstores would be “akin to editing ... a critical part of our culture out of American life.”

Read this in full.

But over on Slate (@Slate), technology columnist Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo), in “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you,” criticizes Russo’s argument.

Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm,...Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. With his creepy laugh and Dr. Evil smile, Bezos is an easy guy to hate, and I’ve previously worried that he’d ruin the book industry. But if you’re a novelist — not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry — you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner.

Read this in full.

And then, on Huffington Post Books (@HuffPostBooks), Hillary Rettig (@hillaryrettig), author of 7 Secrets of the Prolific, weighs in with an open letter addressed to independent booksellers.

As someone who likes indie bookstores a lot, and who always seeks them out in her travels, I feel bad that so many of you are going through such a hard time. And so I have a suggestion for a solid new book-related revenue stream that not even Amazon can touch. Before I tell it to you, however, I need to share a recent experience I had with a bookseller.

That experience was cold and disheartening for Rettig. She left with the feeling that many “booksellers remain mired in what indie publishing proponents...call the ‘legacy’ publishing world — and a fundamental element of that world is disrespect for, and exploitation of, writers."

Indie booksellers, you have a natural friend in us, the indie authors. Even though Manjoo is right and Amazon is a boon for us, many of us are also discovering, to our chagrin, that sales still often requires a personal touch — and we're also discovering that it's expensive and time consuming to enter a new market.

You've already got those personal contacts, and are in that market. So my humble suggestion is that, in 2012, you resolve to work with us — as equals.

Read this in full.

You may also be interested in visiting the American Booksellers Association (@ABCGroupatABA & @IndieBoundMeg).

For all book lovers, we (@smrsault) invite you to make our SomersaultNOW online dashboard your personal computer homepage (see instructions).

Almost 1 in 3 US TV households – 35.9 million – owns 4 or more televisions, according to a new report on media usage from Nielsen (@NielsenWire). Across the ever-changing US media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. Online Americans number 211, and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web.

See the charts of the State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report in full.

Infographic by Salesforce (@salesforce).