The Digital Reader

It was just five years ago when both NBCUniversal and News Corp stopped complaining about YouTube and decided to actually do something about it. They formed what is today known as Hulu.

It’s gone from being a skeletal ad-supported video streaming service to one with content YouTube can’t match and a premium tier that has over 1.5 million subscribers and prospects of future growth. How’s that for fighting back?

The formation of Hulu should have been a wake-up call to the Big Six of publishing. They too should have banded together to form a Hulu for Books.

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Just under  month ago Apple made a big splash with the launch of  new iBooks app, new iTunes U app, and the new iBooks Author.

That last generated  lot of fury because instead of generating a spec compliant Epub, iBA creates  custom flavor of Epub with any number of non-standard components. This upset  lot of people who work with Epubs, including me, but lately I’ve changed my mind.

I was reading an article in The Register earlier this evening that made me realize that it’s a little too late to complain about proprietary Epub formats; iBooks makes the 6th or 7th custom Epub format on the market now.

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That's not an index finger that Amazon is showing you.

Shortly after the time that the Kindle Fire launched, I discovered that Amazon had quietly blocked all their competitor’s reading apps from being seen in the Appstore on the Kindle Fire. That prohibition continues to this day (with one exception – Wattpad).

Well, today I got a hint that whatever Amazon may have hoped to achieve with the block, what they’re really doing is adding to the frustration of KF owners.

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I’m working on a review of the Jetbook Color at the moment, so of course I am reading on it. I happen to have the Laugh Lines collection open on it, and I just came cross this surprising bit of tea-leaf reading.

Ben Bova is an SF author that all should recognize. He’s had a career spanning decades, and in that time he’s made any number startling predictions, some of which have since come true. This prediction came from Cyberbooks, a novel that was originally published in 1989.

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Last week I offered the suggestion that Barnes & Noble (B&N) consider getting out of the brick-and-mortar end of the business and instead franchise its name and cut deals with indie bookstores to promote its Nooks and ebooks. The reception was varied, with some commenters thinking this was a great idea and others thinking it was a lousy idea, and yet a third group thinking it was — at least — an idea. Yet the overall tenor running through all the comments was that B&N will be steamrolled by the Amazon juggernaut no matter what it does.

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Ever since ebooks first appeared there has been an ongoing debate over how to best take advantage of the digital form. Ebooks can of course do things that are impossible for their paper brethren, but on the other hand, do all the extra gewgaws add to the reading experience?

This past week I came across a couple articles on this topic, both for and against.  Rather than take a position, I’m going to quote key excerpts from the articles so they can inspire your thoughts bout the issue.

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Random House met with ALA leaders this week in NYC, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that RH isn’t pulling their ebooks from library distributors (like Penguin), or restricting checkouts (like HarperCollins), but the bad news is that they are also going to be raising prices.

This news comes amid reports that the ALA is meeting with other publishers over ebook lending. There’s no word yet on how those talks went, but if we use today’s news as a yardstick, my guess is not well.

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This week (and possibly at secret locations), top officers and officials from ALA meet with publishing companies Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Penguin, and Random House publishers  in New York City. The announcement of these meetings has moved me to a place of cautious cynicism. As much as I had previously hoped for publishers to meet with the library community, I’m sketchy as to the possible results and benefits from these gatherings. [Read more →]