Friday, December 21, 2012

VIDEO: Can Print and E-Books Coexist? From @joshabla and @PBS



Tis the season for reading -- both print and e-books. But can the two really coexist? For this video report, I checked in with three bookstores in Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C., and asked store managers and customers whether they preferred print or e-books.

Some of their answers were expected, such as people's love of the smell of print books, and how they enjoyed having a break from staring into a screen. E-book users praised their devices for their portability, and enjoyed being able to carry multiple books with them without being weighed down.




What interested me most, though, were people who used both print and e-books. One person I spoke with said he would often have the same book on both formats, a print version for inside his home, and a digital version for when he was on the go. Other print book lovers praised e-readers for bringing back digital copies of hard-to-find and out-of-print books.

Original article here......http://wtr.mn/UVMkC0

Monday, December 17, 2012

More from Guy: Some Self-Publishing Advice from Guy Kawasaki. From @ChicagoLiterati

GUY KAWASAKI'S TOP 10 REASONS TO SELF-PUBLISH
Palo Alto, CA— Self-publishing is on the rise. The number of self-published books produced annually in the U.S. has nearly tripled, growing 287 percent since 2006. Established authors are abandoning traditional publishers to self-publish. The “Big 6” are scrambling to keep up by launching their own self-publishing arms, but traditional publishers’ mentalities and sensibilities are incompatible with self-publishing.
“The publishing industry is in upheaval, and it’s time to shift power to writers,” said Guy Kawasaki, author of APE: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, which was released today. “Self-publishing takes the opposite approach to traditional publishing, democratizing publishing so that unproven authors can rise to the top because of the quality of their writing and their moxie.”
Guy recommends the following reasons why authors should self-publish their books.
1.     Content and design control. Self-publishers can control what’s in a book, how long it is, and how it looks. They only answer to themselves for most aspects of their books.
2.     Time to market. Self-publishers can get their book to market in less than a week once it’s copyedited. Traditional publishers take six to nine months to get a printed book to market, and they will not release the ebook version earlier than the printed version.
3.     Longevity. Self-publishers can keep their book in print forever—or at least as long as it takes for readers to discover it. Traditional publishers stop marketing a book once sales decline.
4.     Revisions. Self-publishers can revise books immediately with online ebook resellers and printers that are working “on demand.” Traditional publishers can take months to fix errors because they print revisions after they’ve sold off current inventory.
5.     Higher royalty. Self-publishers can make more money. Amazon pays a 35 percent or 70 percent royalty to ebook self-publishers. On a $2.99 ebook, most authors make approximately $2.00.
6.     Price control. Self-publishers can change the price of their book at will. For example, they can set a lower price to try to sell more copies or set a higher price to communicate higher quality.
7.     Global distribution. Self-publishers can achieve global distribution of their ebook on day one. For example, Kindle Direct Publishing will list an ebook in one hundred countries. Apple’s iBookstore reaches fifty countries.
8.     Control of foreign rights. Self-publishers determine who buys foreign rights and for how much. They can make more money because they are not sharing foreign-rights revenues with a traditional publisher.
9.     Analytics. Self-publishers can receive real-time or near real-time sales results. Traditional publishers provide twice-a-year royalty statements—imagine running a business with two sales reports a year.
10. Deal flexibility. Self-publishers can cut any kind of deal with any kind of organization. Traditional publishers only sell to resellers except for bulk sales of printed books to large organizations.

Original post here.... http://wtr.mn/ZF4qha

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

RIP e-book readers? Rise of tablets drives e-reader drop. From @cnet


The rapid rise of tablets is driving the e-book reader market to an equally rapid fall, according to a new study.

IHS iSuppli said that after "spectacular" growth during the past few years, the e-book reader market is now on an "alarmingly precipitous decline," all thanks to the growing popularity of tablets.
How alarming? Well, the firm predicts that shipments of e-book readers will tumble 36 percent this year to 14.9 million units and then drop another "drastic" 27 percent next year to 10.9 million units. By 2016, IHS iSuppli predicts, the e-book reader market will total just 7.1 million units, equal to a loss of more than two-thirds from its peak volume in 2011.

According to Jordan Selburn, senior principal analyst for consumer platforms at IHS iSuppli:
The rapid growth -- followed by the immediate collapse -- of the ebook reader market is virtually unheard of, even in the volatile consumer electronics space, where products have notoriously short life cycles. The stunning rise and then blazing flameout of ebooks perfectly encapsulate what has become an axiomatic truth in the industry: Single-task devices like the ebook reader are being replaced without remorse in the lives of consumers by their multifunction equivalents, in this case by media tablets.

Read on here....http://wtr.mn/Sbuqyl