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In Fast Company (@FastCompany), NYU journalism professor Adam L. Penenberg (@penenberg) interviews self-published author Charles Orlando, who’s written two volumes of The Problem With Women… Is Men. Orlando has sold upwards of 15,000 copies of his work as a Kindle, iPad, and iPhone ebook, as well as a traditional paperback, generating around $130,000 since its release in November 2008.

Which self-publishing service did you choose?

BookSurge Publishing (now CreateSpace, @CreateSpace). BookSurge was partnered with Amazon.com, and once I was published, my book was automatically included on Amazon.com (this was 2007/2008, before there was a real ebook publishing effort). It was print-on-demand with really good quality, so I didn't need to hold an inventory and I didn't need to be part of the backend stuff: shipping, fulfillment, returns, chargebacks, etc. Plus, I would get all the benefit of being grouped with best-selling authors, receive reviews, and more. They had multiple levels of service – editing, marketing, public relations, custom covers, and much more – but I elected to go with a flexible offering (allowing me a custom interior, custom cover, and no more than 10 interior illustrations).

What did all this cost?

Editor: $500 (flat fee)

BookSurge publishing package: $900 (now priced lower)

Cover design and all artwork: $750

25 copies (for review): Free.

Total: $2,150

He goes on to explain how he marketed his book.

I started a blog: three posts a week. Simultaneously, I spun up my Facebook and Twitter (@charlesjorlando) efforts and started publishing my blog posts to my Facebook Page. But I could see that readers had to leave Facebook or Twitter to interact with what I had written. As a test, I just wrote on Facebook, using the Notes application on my Page. And... voila... increased engagement and interactivity; more comments, more sharing on individuals' Walls. I took down my blog at the end of 2009 and in an effort to meet my audience where they "lived" I transitioned all my efforts to Facebook (and some on Twitter). My Facebook Fan Page was now a few hundred strong.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you with your publishing, marketing, and branding needs.

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

In The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press), Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College (@WheatonCollege), is sanguine about the future of reading and the book, and positively seductive when he urges us to read “for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger.” Christianity Today’s (@CTmagazine) Books & Culture editor John Wilson talked with Jacobs about the distractions that beckon us, the virtues of the Kindle (and, by extension, similar devices), and the rewards of reading with concentrated attention. Here’s a portion of the interview:

There's a technology that we call the book, and many of us tend to assume that, well, everybody knows how to use books. Books are easy. It's the modern technologies that students need to be trained to use effectively. And I think, No, not really. A book is actually not that easy to know how to use well, especially for young people who haven't formed the habit of attending carefully to how they work.

So I tell my students, "Look, I want you to have the book in your hand. Take notes if you want to. I would prefer you to take notes in the book. Or if you don't want to write in books, get sticky notes, or do something. But I want you to be engaged with this technology." I want to be able to say, "Okay, put your finger there on page 36 and now let's go over to page 130." And I want to be able to go back and forth between the two. For many of them this is very unfamiliar. They're used to dealing with books in different ways. One of the really interesting things about getting them to work with a book is that it's a lot harder for them to get distracted, because I'm actually pushing them to make fuller use of this technology….

Read this in full.

If you’re a book lover like we are, be sure to bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) free online dashboard SomersaultNOW.

O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing (@ToC) (#toccon) was held in New York City Feb. 13-15. It’s the annual conference for professionals to discuss where digital publishing is headed.

Some sessions are available to watch on video; for example Andrew Savikas (@andrewsavikas), CEO at Safari Books Online (@safaribooks) gave a presentation on the growth of subscription-based access to books online.

Also see O’Reilly’s TOC 2012 YouTube channel.

In “TOC 2012: LeVar Burton, Libraries and The Bookstore of the Future,” Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) senior news editor Calvin Reid (@calreid) says,

Probably the most startling presentation of the day was “Kepler 2020,” a look at the efforts to transform the iconic independent bookstores into a new wave community owned bookstore that will embrace technology and a fairly breathtaking slate of new initiatives. Among them: split the store into for-profit sales and non-profit cultural foundation entities; diversify beyond the sale of print books to include services, subscriptions, memberships and corporate sponsorships, and aggressively adopt technology, including digital e-readers and e-books, perhaps even giveaway Kindles and Nooks!

Also see PW’s “TOC 2012: Executive Roundtable Debates the Way Ahead.”

Bob Young (@caretakerbob), founder and CEO of Lulu (@Luludotcom), spoke on “There Is No Such Thing As a Book, or Re-Thinking Publishing In The Age of the Internet.”

Other coverage can be seen at ePUBSecrets (@ePUBSecrets), “More ePUB Resources from Day 2 of TOC.”

Extensive TOC coverage is by Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) in “Writing on the Ether.” Also see his comprehensive Twitter stream aggregation.

Joe Wikert (@jwikert), general manager, publisher & chair of TOC conference, has coverage.

And see American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association (@amlibraries), coverage “Tools of Change Conference, Day 1” and “Tools of Change Conference, Day 2”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the swirling changes taking place in the book publishing industry.

And stay current with news about the publishing world by bookmarking our SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing (@ToC) (#toccon) has begun in New York City. It’s the annual conference for professionals to discuss where digital publishing is headed. Some sessions will be live-streamed; also see the program schedule.

According to ePUBSecrets (@ePUBSecrets), the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) (#idpf, #epub), the group responsible for the ePUB specification, chose the launch of TOC to announce its new ePUB 3.0 reader Readium (@readium), “a new open source initiative to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the IDPF EPUB^® 3 standard.”

This vision will be achieved by building on WebKit, the widely adopted open source HTML5 rendering engine.

“Adobe has been a strong supporter of EPUB 3 and we look forward to continuing to provide our customers with the ability to create and render rich content experiences and compelling eBooks with this format, which enables enhanced interactivity, rich media, global formatting, and accessibility,” says Nick Bogaty, Director, Business Development, Digital Publishing, Adobe Systems Incorporated. “Adobe welcomes the Readium project as an important step to help foster increased consistency across EPUB 3 implementations.”

Others supporting the IDPF EPUB^® 3 standard are ACCESS, Anobii, Apex CoVantage, Assoc. American Publishers (AAP), Barnes & Noble, Bluefire Productions, BISG, Copia, DAISY, EAST, EDItEUR, Evident Point, Google, Incube Tech, Kobo/Rakuten, Monotype, O’Reilly, Rakuten, Safari Books Online, Samsung, Sony, VitalSource, Voyager Japan.

Noticeably absent is Amazon and its Kindle ereader, which uses the proprietary digital format AZW based on the Mobipocket standard.

Read the news release in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you with your digital publishing needs.

Stay current with news about the publishing world by bookmarking our SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

How do people discover books in the digital age? Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) reports that, according to a survey presented at the Digital Book World conference (#dbw12) in New York last month, nearly half of readers discover new books through the recommendations of family and friends, and nearly a third discover them at bookstores.

·         49% - Family and friends’ recommendations

·         30% - Bookstore staff recommendations

·         24% - Online and print advertising

How will readers discover, buy, and read new books as e-reader and tablet ownership increase and traditional books sales channels are challenged?

See this article in full.

A new service that wants to help in this regard is Small Demons (@smalldemons). It takes all of the meaningful data from all favorite books and puts it in one place. Small Demons collects and catalogs the music, movies, people, and objects mentioned in books and makes those details searchable, creating a universe of book details, or as the service calls it, a storyverse.

Book Baby (@BookBaby) says Small Demons CEO Valla Vakili was so intrigued by the description of Marseilles in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos that he replaced the Paris leg of his trip with Marseilles, an experience so inspiring that the concept of Small Demons was born.

In a recent interview with GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), Small Demons VP of content and community Richard Nash explained: “If you are an author, we are going to create verified author pages. You’re going to be able to add biographical information, information about your own books and other features. You will also get access to the editing tools that we are using to fix the computer’s mistakes. We know algorithms can’t get everything right and even when they get something right, they can’t necessarily provide the nuance that a human being can.”

Nash continued: “A computer can tell us how many times a song appears in a book. But it can’t tell us that it is the song that the couple dances to at the wedding reception or the song the jilted lover plays after being dumped. It can’t tell you the emotional resonance of it. So we are going to be relying on librarians and authors and gifted amateurs to come in and help us fix and add and weight and evaluate all the data we are generating. Individual authors will have that ability over an extended period of time.”

Read this in full.

Other services that aids in discovering new books are Rethink Books (@RethinkBooks) and its FirstChapters (@first_chapters) platform, and Findings (@findings), a tool for sharing clips while using Amazon Kindle.

Other articles about the challenge of finding books:

Enhanced Editions (@enhancededition), “On Book Discoverability, Discovery, and Good Marketing.”

Austin American Statesman (@statesman), “‘Discoverability’ key in publishing industry's transformation.”

AARdvark (@digitaar), “The Key to Saving Publishing and New Writers — Branding the Publisher to the Consumer.”

GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), “Amazon's Book Search Visualized: Check out this nifty, homemade book recommendation engine.”

The Digital Shift (@ShiftTheDigital), "Libraries Still an Important Discovery Source for Kids' Books, Says Study."

Also see our previous blogposts, “BookRiff (@BookRiff): A Marketplace for Curators” and "How Ebook Buyers Discover Books."

Along these same lines, you’ll want to read StumbleUpon’s (@PaidDiscovery) “Creating an Infectious Brand” and “Recapping the 5 Keys to Brand Discovery.”

Stay current with publishing news when you bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard., especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Education Week (@educationweek) reports that US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled the new Digital Textbook Playbook, a resource designed by the Digital Textbook Collaborative to help guide educators in their transition to electronic resources, as the pair headlined a national online town hall meeting for the inaugural Digital Learning Day (@DLDay2012) Feb. 1. Specifically noting that South Korea plans to use only digital textbooks by 2013, Chairman Genachowski declared,

If we want American students to be the best prepared to compete in the 21st century global economy, we can’t allow a majority of our students to miss out on the opportunities of digital textbooks. Today, I want to challenge everyone in the space – companies, government officials, schools and teachers – to do their part to make sure that every student in America has a digital textbook in the next 5 years.

He and Secretary Duncan plan to meet with CEO’s of relevant companies to spur movement toward this objective.

Read his remarks in full.

Read the Education Week article in full.

What do you think? Is a digital textbook for every US student in 5 years a realistic and helpful objective? What will it mean for your textbook publishing agenda? Write your comments below.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you in your textbook publishing and marketing needs.

Bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created especially for marketing and publishing executives.

Image: Byook.com

In Salon (@Salon), writer Laura Miller (@magiciansbook) discounts the idea that fiction ebooks must be produced with more and more enhancements to attract and keep readers. In fact, she says those enhancements are distractions to the enjoyment of a well-written book.

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over….

Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced ebook publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions….

For the most part...fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements.

Read this in full.

For a counterpoint to this article, see our blogpost “How to Build the Pixar of the iPad Age.”

Bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) free online dashboard for booklovers.

Their first project, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (@MorrisLessmore), was released for the iPad last May. It recounts the wondrous adventures of a book lover who dotingly cares for a living library before writing a book himself that tells of “his joys and sorrows, of all that he knew and everything that he hoped.” Gorgeously illustrated, Lessmore breaks new ground in the way that it incorporates interactivity. Each page has a wormhole of interaction. Read about a song and perhaps a keyboard will pop up and guide your fingers to plunk out "Pop Goes the Weasel." When Morris Lessmore hand-feeds alphabet cereal to his books, the reader gets a bowl too, with letters that can be dragged along through the milk to spell out words. Each page holds its game like a secret and puzzling out what to do encourages the reader to look harder, knowing they'll be rewarded. The games pull the reader deeper; the narrative pulls the reader farther. The tension between lingering and racing is potent.

Morris Lessmore may be the best iPad book in the world. In July, Morris Lessmore hit the number one spot on Apple's iPad app chart in the US. That is to say, Morris Lessmore wasn't just the bestselling book, but the bestselling *app* of any kind for a time. At one point or another, it has been the top book app in 21 countries. A New York Times reviewer called it “the best,” “visually stunning,” and “beautiful.” Wired.com called it “game-changing.” MSNBC said it was “the most stunning iPad app so far.” And The Times UK made this prediction, “It is not inconceivable that, at some point in the future, a short children's story called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore will be regarded as one of the most influential titles of the early 21st century.” ....

....But what is it? It's not just a book, nor wholly a movie, nor fundamentally a game. Maybe we can call it a story that's reenacted live by whoever is holding the iPad. It makes parents cry, kids laugh, babies stare, and artists drool.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “William Joyce’s Children’s iPad Book Embraces the Future.”

For a counterpoint to the above articles, see our blogpost “Can Bells and Whistles Save the Book?.”

Bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) free online dashboard for booklovers.

Since 2002, the United States has lost roughly 500 independent bookstores — nearly 1 out of 5 — due in many instances to the dominance of the Barnes & Noble (@BNBuzz) bookstore chain. Now, however, it’s B&N that’s fighting for survival.

Julie Bosman (@juliebosman), book publishing reporter for The New York Times (@nytimesbooks), writes a behind-the-scenes look at Barnes & Noble, a company that started in 1873 by Charles Barnes in Wheaton, IL.

In March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought, and read: ebooks and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook (@nookBN), a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

The article goes on to say B&N plans to unveil another e-reader soon.

At its labs in Silicon Valley last week, engineers were putting final touches on their 5th e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring.

Read this in full. Also on CNBC.com (@CNBC).

Bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) free online dashboard for booklovers.

Hilary Greenbaum (@HilaryGreenbaum) and Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) write in The New York Times Magazine (@NYTmag) about the history of the highlighter.

Before the rise of the highlighter, says Dennis Baron (@DrGrammar), a University of Illinois professor and the author of A Better Pencil, attentive readers relied on “a combination of underlining and marginal notes.”

Like so much else, that began to change in the 1960s. It was then that the Japanese inventor Yukio Horie created a felt-tip pen that used water-based ink. The following year, in 1963, the Massachusetts print-media giant Carter’s Ink developed a similar water-based marker that emitted an eye-catching translucent ink. They called it the Hi-Liter.

... The highlighter’s appeal has flourished in the digital age. Most word-processing and e-reader software products have a highlighter function. And the hand-held highlighter continues to evolve, too....When the highlighter business saw that it wasn’t being embraced by holdouts who preferred pens, it made the dual highlighter/pen. There are now retractable highlighters. And flat ones. And ones that smell like pizza.

...Due to the thin paper used in most Bibles, typical highlighters often bleed through. For that reason, G.T. Luscombe (@GTLuscombe), a distributor of Bible-study accessories based in Frankfort, Ill., got into the business of Bible-paper-friendly highlighters. John Luscombe, the president and chief executive, explains….

Read this in full.

Bookmark and daily use SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) free online dashboard for book lovers.