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Category ArchivePublishing

May the Best Titan Win!

 

Google’s entry into the highly competitive ebook market

 

I am not surprised that Google will launch it’s own electronic book venture called Google Editions. After all, why were they scanning every book ever published into digital form?

The Wall Street Journal and numerous other major publications, blogs and websites reported that Google is now nearing the launch of its massive new ebook venture and they hope to launch this year.

Instead of building another boat to navigate the ebook waters, they are diving into the water and going with the flow. Google says its books will not be tied to one particular device like a Kindle or iPad, but their books will be accessible from any device with an Internet connection.

Google is not running against the current trying to sell their own reading device with its own ebook store. Instead, they are the current ready to sell books to any device, in any format as long as those devices have a connection to the Internet.

And they won’t have just one web site where you have to go to buy their books, they will have unlimited websites paying commissions to anyone who directs traffic to a Google Editions book using the same model as their Google ads.

And some observers think they may have a competitive advantage over the other Titans in the electronic book publishing market.

It will be interesting to see which Titan comes out on top: Amazon, Apple or Google.

Take a look at the video for more – Rex Crum talks with Amir Efrati of the Wall Street Journal about what Google’s entry means for the online book market.

New Online Book Store Debuts Today

Outer Banks Publishing Group’s new online OBPG Book Store debuts today offering its titles directly to customers at special prices.

We have pre-launch specials for new titles and limited discounts on current titles.Social Media for Business, Martin Brossman, Twitter, Facebook, Outer Banks Publishing Group

Here are some special buys:

Order a pre-launch paperback version of Martin Brossman’s and Anora McGaha’s, Social Media for Business at only $9.95.

A great buy considering books of this caliber sell for $30 or more, and Mr. Brossman’s first edition sold for $15.00 with a special discount.

Social Media for Business is probably the most comprehensive and up to date reference on  the light-speed changing world of social media.

As Mr. Brossman so aptly asks the question, “…Are you part of the conversation? The worldwide presence of you and your business is becoming of greater importance. People want to know more about you before they trust you with their money, just as we pay more attention to what “others” have said about a product than the advertised description when we consider buying a product online.”

Not Another Business Book!, William Meloche, Outer Banks Publishing Group, Anthony S. Policastro, digital publishishing, B2BAnother new title published in September is William Meloche’s, Not Another Business Book!, the true story of a cutting-edge medical device company told in a parable that reveals a simple truth – many early phase businesses are no more than one innovative deal away from solid ground.

Mr. Meloche is CEO of The William Meloche Group in Toronto and he  may be the only consultant on the planet specializing in – Business Relationship Innovation – by helping C-levels create, close and implement groundbreaking B2B relationships.

He offers a hands-on approach to “building successful B2B groundbreaking relationships,” with a true story on how he helped orchestrate a revolutionary win-win situation for a medical robotics developer and a major medical facility.

“The coup-de-eta was when I suggested to the president that he donate one of his multi-million dollar surgical robots to a major teaching hospital. The hospital became the premiere leader in surgical robotics and the developer sold more machines than he dreamed would be possible,” Mr. Meloche explained.

And don’t forget to check out our fiction titles also at special prices in October.

Kindle Outselling iBooks 60 To 1?

Not hard to believe when you consider the Kindle was the first mass-market ebook reader and the iPad is really a computing tablet with an ebook reader.

The iPad appeals to a larger market segment overall,  but a smaller segment who just want the device to read ebooks.

Our own titles show sales on the Kindle, the Nook and the Kobo and none so far on the iPad.

Here’s the post from TNW.

By Alex Wilhelm on August 22nd, 2010

If you follow the ebook market you were likely stunned this June when Steve Jobs claimed to have captured 22% of the electronic book market overnight with the release of iBooks and iPad. Many of us who watch this market with carefuleyes were leery of the numbers that Jobs was tossing around, they sounded too good to be true.  more>

Barnes and Noble for Sale?

Image representing Barnes & Noble as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

When hardcover sales began to dwindle a few years ago, there was talk that Barnes and Noble would either sell or swallow up a major competitor.

The possibility of the sale of B&N comes as a surprise since they recently ramped up their digital book sales by opening an ebook store with more than a million titles and launching the ebook reader, The Nook, the most formidable competitor to the Kindle.

Have any idea who would buy B&N? I would not be surprised if it were Amazon. What do you think?

From Book Business magazine – Aug. 4, 2010



A “for sale” sign may soon be hanging in the window of bookstore giant Barnes & Noble Inc., the company announced today.

According to a press release issued this morning, Barnes & Noble’s Board of Directors “intends to evaluate strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company, in order to increase stockholder value. The Board came to this decision based on the price of Barnes & Noble shares in the marketplace, which the Board believes are now significantly undervalued.” >more

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Will Literary Agents become the Next Ebook Publishers?

In an unprecedented move, the Wiley Literary Agency struck a deal with Amazon to publish 20 classic titles as ebooks on the Kindle. According to reports, this is the first time a literary agency moved into the publishing business.

Will this be a trenliterary agencies, ebook rights, ebooks, authors, publishingd as agencies struggle to survive in the dwindling print market? It might be. An agency would sign on an author, retain electronic publishing rights and then sell print rights to traditional publishers.

Agency revenues would increase considerably for ebooks, especially with the current structure where agencies only receive 15% of the author’s royalties.

However, the big question is will traditional publishers go along with this scenario or refuse to publish an author unless they retain electronic rights?

Will this be beneficial to authors?

Read Stephen Windwalker’s column for more information on this emerging development.

Read the report from The New York Times.

Is Our Literary Legacy Threatened by Electronic Books?

    We hear it all the time. The electronic book readers like Amazon’s and Sony’s eReader are going to be the downfall of printed books. If you believe that you may have been one of the folks in Columbus’ day who believed the world was flat. Don’t worry. It won’t happen at least for a very long time.

    The eReaders are just another distribution channel for books. If anything, eReaders are going to allow more people to access more content than ever before. We hear it from Kindle owners all the time that their Kindles are maxed out – they cannot fit anymore books on these devices.  Luckily for them Amazon allows users to store books online on their Kindle account. They just have to switch them out from the account to the Kindle. And people with mobile devices like phones and PDAs are only limited by the amount of memory in those devices.

    Well, for all those people out there who don’t like change, book eReaders and other mobile reading devices like the iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Palm Pilot and the entire family of Windows Mobile software devices are here to stay. Whether you passively ignore these devices or actively denounce them, the eReader trend is coming at you like a steam roller and there is nothing you can do.  Go with the flow or be flattened.

    A case in point is Amazon’s launch of the European version of the Kindle (See the story on Bloomberg.com). Before the launch, Europeans had to settle for the American Kindle version and could only download books after they downloaded them to their PCs. Now they can download books wirelessly directly to the Kindle in more than 100 countries all over Europe. Now Europeans like us Americans only have to think of a book and in less than 60 seconds they will have the entire book ready to read on their Kindles.

    And according to  TIME online, “2009 is a breakout year for e-readers,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. “But we’re still in the early stages.”

    More than 17 Kindle-competitors are already on the market or expected to hit the market by 2010, according to TIME. The major players include Apple and Microsoft, Asustek, a Taiwanese company, Samsung, LG, IREX, Interead and Fujitsu with a  full color e-ink display.

    Sony’s Family of electronic book readers – Courtesy of Sony

    Cool technology. Disruptive technology. Revolutionary technology. The voices are clear.

    So what does it all mean for our rich literary legacy? Will our literary future simply morph into something unrecognizable? Will it vanish completely? Maybe. Young people are writing novels on cell phones in Japan. Several authors have attempted to write and serialize novels on Twitter. Hundreds of books were first written on blogs and then turned into full length books in print.

    Most young people don’t read books; older people read books. Females read more books than males. A whole new language has been created for texting that uses mostly acronyms and makes understanding shorthand a cake walk.

    Again allay your fears.

    Clive Thompson, a writer for , reported in the September 2009 article, that a college professor found just the opposite – that young people are much more prolific than their parents and grandparents.

    isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at , where she has organized a mammoth project called the to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

    “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

    The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

    It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”

    She’s right about technology “pushing our literacy in bold new directions” – everything written is shorter, faster, more efficient. Books are shorter; chapters are shorter to reflect everyone’s busier, faster lifestyle and the writing is concise and targeted written to get to the point quickly and efficiently.

    Even , the former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of laments about the Internet in his article, ” in the Barnes and Noble Review.

    “(Speaking of shortness, the attention-distraction of the Internet and the intrusion of work into everyday life, by means of electronic devices, appear to me to have worked, maybe on a subliminal level, to reduce the length of the average trade hardcover book.)”

    Does that mean we will never see great classics like Charles Dicken’s, A Christmas Carol or Great Expectations? On the contrary. Writers are the bellwethers of our time, and their writings will reflect our lifestyles, our cultures, and our pace of living. Besides, when was the last time a friend proclaimed, “I just finished, War and Peace, and now I can start David Copperfield.”

    While books may be shorter, there will always be classics some already written, some to be written,  whether they are traveling at light speed as zeros and ones over the airwaves or inked permanently onto the printed page.

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