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In this article, Wired’s (@wired) Angela Watercutter (@WaterSlicer) writes how “with tablets selling at mind-boggling rates, book publishers are scrambling to figure out how to bring their ancient medium into the digital realm.”

Though the rewards promise to be great, the adaptation book publishers must make is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies — creating audio, video, and interactive components for their immersive, built-for-tablets offerings.

They also face a dizzying array of decisions brought on by evolving standards and platforms: Should a certain book come to life as a dedicated app, an approach that, until iBooks 2 was released, offered more flexibility in terms of features like video and audio on the iPad? Or should it be turned into an “enhanced ebook,” which will work on Apple’s tablet as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and other devices, but must be re-created several times over to meet each device’s specs?

Read this in full.

Therein lies the rub: are enhanced ebooks a profitable return-on-investment for publishers? This is explored by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) in Andrew Rhomberg’s (@arhomberg) “Some Tough Questions for Enhanced Ebooks.”

Also see our previous blogpost, “Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading” and Mike Shatzkin’s (@MikeShatzkin) analysis, “A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks.”

And then there’s the article, “A Billion-Dollar Turning Point for Mobile Apps” by New York Times (@nytimestech) tech reporter Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) that, even though it focuses on the Web strategy of entrepreneurs and start-up companies, may have implications for publishers preparing ebooks and ebook apps for tablets.

The path for Internet start-ups used to be quite clear: establish a presence on the Web first, then come up with a version of your service for mobile devices.

Now, at a time when the mobile start-up Instagram can command $1 billion in a sale to Facebook, some start-ups are asking: who needs the Web?

“People are living in the moment and they want to share in the moment,” says professor S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Mobile gives you that immediacy and convenience.”

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

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

This article by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) on GigaOm (@gigaom) summarizes author and Internet technologies consultant Clay Shirky’s (@cshirky) interview with Findings (@findings), a site for collecting, sharing, and discussing clips people find when using their Amazon Kindle and from any website. Shirky pronounced publishing itself is no longer a job, “it’s a button.” He said, “We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.”

His point is the same as the one [technology journalist] Om Malik (@om) made in a post about what he called the “democratization of distribution” that social media and other Web tools have created: namely, that publishing is now something anyone can do. You no longer have to be part of a priesthood or guild of professionals, whether it’s the book-publishing industry or the traditional newspaper business, in order to create content that can (theoretically at least) reach tens of thousands or even millions of people.

And what are publishers to do amidst this kind of disruption? The unique control publishers once had in owning a publishing platform or distribution system “— and the ability to manufacture demand or create information scarcity that came along with it — is effectively gone forever.” Shirky says publishers need to add value where it’s now required:

The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet.

Read this in full.

Depend on Somersault (@smrsault) to add value to your publishing needs, from ideation to editorial development to market research to book packaging to marketing strategy to publication to social media marketing to distribution and anywhere in the middle.

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

The wonder, the art, the magic, the work of creating a printed book  — often forgotten in this digital age  — is demonstrated in the above video. Filmmaker Glen Milner (@glen_milner) visited Smith Settle bookbinders near Leeds, England, where the owners, Don Walters and Tracey Thorne, allowed him to film the making of the 17th Slightly Foxed (@FoxedQuarterly) book, Suzanne St Albans’ memoir Mango and Mimosa, from start to finish. The Telegraph (@Telegraph) reports:

Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the printing plates, the stitching of the “signatures” (folded sections), the pressing and gluing, the adding of the ribbon bookmark and head and tail bands, the making of the final hardcover in green linen cloth and the numbering of the copies. All of it done with great care, much of it by hand.

The video below on Kottke.org (@Kottke) shows that back before print on demand, laser printers, and the Internet, even machine printing and binding was a time-consuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book.

Just for fun, here’s a video of what the help desk would look like back in the day when print books overtook scrolls.

And, one artist looks at print books and sees a canvas from which to carve art.

See all the amazing photos.

Also see our previous blogposts “The Technology of Storytelling” and “Introducing the New Book.”

Whether pbook or ebook, contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you pursue publishing in this digital age.

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

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s (@pewresearch) Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet), 43% of Americans age 16 and older read long-form digital text such as ebooks and magazines, and many say they’re reading more because books and other long-form material are in a digital format.

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report they’ve read an ebook in the past year; this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and ebook reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an ebook in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The average reader of ebooks says she’s read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-ebook consumer. For device owners, those who own ebook readers say they’ve read an average of 24 books in the previous year (vs. 16 books by those who don’t own that device). They report having read a median of 12 books (vs. 7 books by those who do not own the device.

·         30% of those who read e-content say they now spend more time reading, and owners of tablets and ebook readers particularly stand out as reading more now.

·         The prevalence of ebook reading is markedly growing, but pbooks still dominate the world of book readers.

·         People prefer ebooks to pbooks when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others.

·         Ebook reading happens across an array of devices, including smartphones.

·         Those who read ebooks are more likely to be under age 50, have some college education, and live in households earning more than $50,000.

·         11% of all Americans age 16 and older – or 14% of those who have read a book in the past year – consume audiobooks.

·         The majority of book readers prefer to buy rather than borrow.

·         61% of e-reading device owners said they purchased the most recent book they read, compared with 48% of all readers.

·         Owners of e-reading devices are more likely than all Americans 16 and older to get book recommendations from people they knew (81% vs. 64%) and bookstore staff (31% vs. 23%).

·         26% of those who had read a book in the past 12 months said that what they enjoyed most was learning, gaining knowledge, and discovering information.

Read this in full.

Also see Mike Shatzkin's (@MikeShatzkin) analysis in "A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

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

E-readers may soon be thinner, lighter, and supple. LG (@LGUS) has just announced it’s beginning mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024x768 and is 6 inches across the diagonal, comparable to the Kindle and Nook.

The LG display is half the weight and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing ebook readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG says its display is more rugged. The press release says the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it's flexible up to 40 degrees from the midpoint.

Read this in full.

Also see USA TODAY's article, "Flexible displays bend what's possible for computers."

And see our previous blogposts, “Why Your Next Phone Might be Bendable” and “Revolutionary New Paper Computer Shows Flexible Future for Smartphones and Tablets.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for 21st century digital publishing.

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

This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) explains how Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon (@amazon), values innovation and risk-taking. It begins with the example of Bezos’ major investment in “a gargantuan clock” being built inside the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in Texas by The Long Now Foundation (@longnow). This 10,000-year clock, designed “to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” will tick once a year, its century hand will advance once every 100 years, and its cuckoo will come out on the millennium.

Mr. Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr. Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

...[Criticism does] nothing to sway Mr. Bezos, who is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. But he believes Amazon can be one of the biggest thanks to its unique culture and capacity for reinventing itself. Even in its original incarnation as an internet retailer, it pioneered features that have since become commonplace, such as allowing customers to leave reviews of books and other products (a move that shocked literary critics at the time), or using a customer’s past purchasing history to recommend other products, often with astonishing accuracy.

Read this in full.

Also see Bezos' long view approach in "Bezos team finds Apollo 11 rocket engines on Atlantic floor."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you set your leadership vision and take advantage of technology to advance your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Innovation and Leadership tabs.

A publishing mainstay capitulates to electronic technology. In The New York Times blog Media Decoder (@mediadecodernyt), Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) reports that “after 244 years, the Encyclopædia Britannica (@Britannica) is going out of print.”

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the website Wikipedia — Encyclopædia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The website is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Read this in full.

According to the Financial Times (@ftmedia), "The emergence of the Web decimated sales of Britannica. From a peak of 120,000 sets sold in 1990, sales fell sharply, with just 8,500 sets of the 2010 edition shipped."

A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs), who read the Encyclopædia Britannica from beginning to end and lived to write about it in The Know-It-All: One man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, says,

...the [printed] Britannica encouraged serendipitous discoveries. Look up Abbott and Costello, and you might be lured in by abalones or Absalom, who died after his luxurious hair got caught in a tree.

...physicality has its rewards....For decades, the Britannica served a symbolic purpose. Fill your living room shelf with encyclopedias, and you were announcing, "Yes, we are an intellectually curious family." A mounted moose head, but for the brainy.

Read the obituary he wrote in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the revolutionary changes occurring in 21st century publishing.

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

Julie Bosman (@juliebosma) and Matthew Richtel (@mrichtel) write in this New York Times (@nytimesbusiness) article about the many ways tablets – by providing too many options – can distract people from concentrating on the books they’re reading; fragmenting their experience or stopping it altogether.

Email lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled ebooks on apps from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

Read this in full.

The article focuses on apps and email being distractions, but we also ask the question, “When do you think the digital features and creative apps of an enhanced ebook cross the line from augmenting the book reading experience and become a distraction and interruption? Write your comments below.

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

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

In this article, senior writer and book critic for The New York Times (@nytimesbooks), Dwight Garner (@DwightGarner), spotlights Kindle Singles (submission policy): “works of long-form journalism (‘well researched, well argued, and well illustrated between 5,000 and 30,000 words’) that seek out that sweet spot between magazine articles and hardcover books. Amazon calls them ‘compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.’” Garner calls them “boutique mini-books” that may create a new genre: “long enough for genuine complexity, short enough to avoid adding journalistic starches and fillers.”

Amazon hardly has a monopoly on this novella-length form. Digital publishers like Byliner (@TheByliner) and The Atavist (@theatavist) are commissioning articles of this length that can be purchased and read on any e-reader, or on laptops or phones.

...Amazon offers 70% of the royalties to its Singles authors....So far Amazon has issued more than 160 Singles, at a rate of 3 per week....Barnes & Noble offers similar material in its Nook Snaps series, Apple has Quick Reads  on its iBookstore, and Kobo has Short Reads....

Read this in full.

See our previous blogposts, “Ebooks are the New Pamphlets” and "In the Year of the Ebook, 5 Lessons From  — and For  — News Organizations."

Also see paidContent’s (@paidContent) "E-Singles: ‘Journalism’s Extraordinary Challenges In An Entirely New Place’" and “Guide to E-singles”).

In keeping with the idea of short-form books or long-form articles (however you look at it), Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) has launched Christianity Today Essentials, a new series of “natural length ebooks,” described by editor-in-chief David Neff (@dneff) as content “longer than a longish magazine article, yet significantly shorter than the typical print book.” He says, “The format allows you, the reader, to go deeper and learn more than you could from a magazine article, without committing the time or money demanded by a full-length book.”

Leadership Network (@leadnet) is beginning a new series of “natural length experiences” under the brand Leadia (@leadiatalk). “Each piece is limited to 10,000 words and has live links to audio, video, and websites.” A Leadia app is available for iPhones and iPads.

And Patheos.com (@Patheos) has started Patheos Press, a “publisher of original ebooks.”

Capturing long-form content online is another aspect of this trend. Services such as Longreads (@longreads), Longform (@longform), and The Browser (@TheBrowser) help readers save and organize in-depth material on the Web.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you successfully navigate the world of digital publishing.

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

According to a new survey of technology experts, teens and young adults brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders.

Many of the experts surveyed by Elon University’s (@elonuniversity) Imagining the Internet Center and The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet) say the effects of hyperconnectivity and the always-on lifestyles of young people will be mostly positive between now and 2020.

But the experts also predict this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”

Survey respondents say it’s vital to reform education and emphasize digital literacy. And a notable number say trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, in danger of mirroring George Orwell’s 1984 of control by powerful interests in an age of entertaining distractions.

Read this report in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “Introducing Generation C: Americans 18-34 Are the Most Connected.”

How does this research and these predictions help you determine the future needs of your consumers and the ways you can publish life-changing content to meet those needs? Write your comments below.

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

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