Jane Litte at Dear Author (@dearauthor) reports that Kobo is paying a 70% royalty on ebooks priced between $1.99 and $12.99, and a 45% royalty on ebooks below $1.99 or above $12.99. By contrast, Amazon pays a 70% royalty on KDP ebooks priced above $2.99 and a 35% royalty on those below $2.99. And she notes that authors can sell their books with or without DRM.
Mardel (@Mardel_Inc) retail chain has 35 stores in 7 states. Its store in Oklahoma City, OK is now “one of the first Christian bookstores that has a newly-installed Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), technology that offers patrons instant access to more than 8 million titles printed in any language, and allows area Oklahoma authors to self-publish their work on-site.”
“Now people have a source to print-on-demand all types of books in any language and genres, and to publish their own professional or personal writings,” said Kevin McDonell, merchandise manager of Mardel.
The EBM is “the only digital-to-print at retail solution on the market. With the push of a button, any book from EspressNet®, On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) digital catalog of content, can be printed, bound and trimmed, creating a paperback book that is virtually indistinguishable from the publisher’s version.“
Last November, Baker Publishing Group (@ReadBakerBooks) became the first major Christian publisher to make available almost its entire paperback list to the EBM network.
Zondervan (@Zondervan), the evangelical Christian publishing division of HarperCollins, has begun a new direct-to-digital imprint. Zondervan First (@ZondervanFirst) launches with the acquisition of a historical fiction title, Love in Three-Quarter Time by Dina Sleiman. The digital titles will be produced with editorial and marketing support from Zondervan.
Zondervan First will initially focus on fiction but will eventually include all the categories the company currently publishes. Submissions will be accepted for fiction, non-fiction, and Bible material suitable for kids, teens, and adults in addition to manuscripts geared for curriculum, church resources, academic, and reference books.
Zondervan First will not pay an advance, but authors will receive a 25% royalty from the first book sold. After an ebook sells 10,000 net copies, the author's royalty rate rises to 50%.
And Alive Communications literary agency for Christian and inspirational titles has launched “a sister epublishing company, Bondfire Books (@BondfireBooks).“
“We aim to be a game changer by working with other literary agencies and paying all authors a 50% net royalty, essentially double the industry standard of 25%. We will also offer 5-year renewable terms instead of the normal life of copyright,” says Rick Christian (@RicklyChristian), founder of Bondfire Books and Alive Communications.
Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid), editorial director of Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) asks how the publishing industry should standardize the term used to describe books comprised of digital content. In his article, he presents the results of his research, including:
Using the Google Adwords keyword tool, I discovered that “ebooks” has 13.6 million global monthly searches and “e-books” has 4.1 million, meaning that roughly triple the amount of people search for “ebooks” versus “e-books.”
Furthermore, the competition for “ebooks” is low (meaning there are fewer pages that try to rank for this as a keyword) versus the competition for “e-books,” which is medium, according to Google Adwords.
He discussed the way people use ebook readers and tablet computers, and how those devices are fitting into users' digital lives. His presentation below describes how 3 revolutions in digital technology – in broadband, mobile connectivity, and social media – have created a new social operating system that he calls "networked individualism." And he used the Project's latest findings to help describe how librarians can serve the new educational needs of networked individuals.
How does this new way of learning among your consumers impact your publishing agenda? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you sort it all out.
Consumers who own tablets are adopting new communications habits, but are also making fewer visits to stores, according to multimarket research.
InMobi (@inmobi), the mobile advertising network, and Mobext (@mobext), the agency run by Havas, polled 8,400 people in India, France, South Korea, the UK, and US, finding 69% of tablet owners shopped via the devices in the 30 days before the survey.
·Over 20% of tablet early adopters claim to have made less trips to brick-and-mortar stores after obtaining the device. A third of people yet to own such an appliance hope to buy one in the next 6 months.
·61% of the existing tablet community says this channel plays a key role in building brand awareness when used at home, as do 58% for "active evaluation," and 63% for completing transactions.
·58% of people with an iPad or similar offering access content - and especially rich media - in short bursts throughout the day, as do 56% of their smartphone counterparts.
·72% watch TV and use their slate simultaneously; 20% spend more time in front of the television having bought a tablet.
·51% of tablet owners say using it fills "dead time;" 49% share it with family members.
·44% "would not want to be separated" from their tablet.
·42% say tablets have "revolutionized" the way they communicate with friends and colleagues.
·Tablet users shop more on their device than PC and smartphone users.
According to an analysis by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) editorial director Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid) of a new study from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), some 25% of all people who read ebooks are now reading on tablets (as opposed to dedicated e-readers), up from under 20% at the end of 2011.
An industry insider says, as tablets put pressure on sales of dedicated e-readers, prices of the e-ink devices could drop until they hit zero.
The symposium, organized by two postdoctoral fellows in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, Amaranth Borsuk (@amaranthborsuk) and Gretchen E. Henderson, lingered most on what forms the book might take.
The answer varied from Christian Bök’s (@christianbok) The Xenotext, an attempt to genetically engineer a bacterium to store a poem in its genome, to Nick Montfort’s computational poem, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, to Bob Stein’s SocialBook, a post-print publishing platform that allows users to share comments and drawings on books and articles read in Web browsers.
James Reid-Cunningham, associate director for digital programs and preservation at the Boston Athenaeum, a private membership library, was the only speaker to proclaim the book dead, specifically the reference book. “Books that carry data will be dead; the phone book is already dead,” he said, and drew parallels to other “dead” technologies like the daguerreotype. Digitization may be replacing the codex, but one form that Reid-Cunningham thinks may be a future of the book is art books, which are in and of themselves works of art.
In looking at reshaping the book, Gita Manaktala (@sylviamath), editorial director of the MIT Press, the only traditional publisher on the roster, discussed the difficulties faced by scholarly presses. “Our authors live in a wiki world, where knowledge is produced quickly,” she said. Yet publishers have to figure out what content should be preserved. She also discussed the need for alternatives to peer reviews given that today’s authors put up content and solicit comments as they prepare their manuscripts.
Stein suggested that Manaktala use SocialBook, which is currently in beta, and invited her and all 240 attendees to sign up by emailing him at futureofthebook@gmail.com. The idea behind the platform, he explained, is that a book becomes a place where readers and authors can gather. “Google Docs, wikis, they’re great at letting you change the text. They’ve grafted social awkwardly on top of it. For us,” said Stein, “social is not a pizza topping, it’s the cornerstone of reading and writing.”
PaidContent’s (@paidContent) Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) reports, “New stats from the Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish) show that kids’ and young adult ebook sales grew by triple digits in February, while adult ebook sales appeared to flatten. But the AAP notes that’s partly due to the fact that so many adults are reading YA ebooks like the Hunger Games trilogy.”
