Textbook rentals on the Kindle

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on Jul 18, 2011 4:14:00 PM

ebook rentalsLast week as I was driving through Penn's campus, I noticed a sign for "ebook rentals." What did that mean and what is the impact was for publishers?

Today in eBook Newser I learn that Amazon is renting college textbooks on the Kindle. College students can rent textbooks from Amazon for any length of time. The bonus is that any notes students add to their textbooks will be saved via Amazon's Whispersync technology and the students can retrieve the textbooks AND their notes in the future if they decide to purchase the book or rent again.

While I see great advantages for students, I wonder what this means for college textbook publishers. Leave a comment below if you publish textbooks; we'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on this.

Topics: ebooks, textbook publishers

EPUB 3 Snapshot: Highlights Publishers Need to Know

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on Jun 1, 2011 3:47:00 PM

EPUB 3

<update>June 7, 2011</update>

Since announcing the release of the EPUB 3 specification, the blogosphere and tweet streams have been alive with the sound of music to publishers' ears. No doubt Amazon's news that it will finally accept EPUB also adds to the collective hallelujah chorus.

While there is already an abundance of information, news, and opinions on EPUB 3, this post aims to highlight what features and functionality are most important for publishers to understand:

 

  • Improved accessibility support---It's a big deal that DAISY is converging completely with EPUB 3. This will promote rapid take-up of the standard in education and government segments. 
  • MathML support---this alone garnered hoots and hollers from RSuite's tech team. No longer must STM publishers sketch out equations as art.
  • Embedded fonts---the look and feel of your PDF is maintained because publishers can deliver fonts along with the epub file.
  • Improved SVG support---vector graphics mean images scale with your pages and pages are "lighter" thus loading faster.
  • New and improved metadata---who doesn't love publication metadata that can include specific handling and distribution instructions!?
  • Video and audio support---publishers can synchronize audio with text. This will also raise the bar for all of us, e.g. enabling switching seamlessly between listening in the car and reading at home!
  • Javascript---scripting offers chances for interactivity, think forms, etc.
  • Layout---multiple columns, hello! Ladders and widows and orphans, goodbye!

We'd love to add your opinions on new functionality to the list. Leave a comment and I'll continue to add on to the bullets.

Topics: ebooks, publishing, epub, standards

News from BEA: Amazon.com hires Laurence Kirshbaum as publisher

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on May 24, 2011 3:12:00 PM

Last week Amazon announced that epub format will finally be accepted for the Kindle.

This week at Book Expo America, Amazon announced that Laurence Kirshbaum, former TimeWarner c.e.o.-turned-agent, would be heading up Amazon's publishing operation in New York.

If publishers only suspected it before, this appears to be a strong indication that Amazon is gearing up to become a frontlist publisher.

According to Bookseller.com:

"The news spread swiftly around the Javits Center even though the exhibition floor was not yet open, the first day of BEA being devoted to conference sessions. What people on the publishing side are feeling—(off the record for the most part)—is worried. Publishers, already feeling squeezed, have been feeling even more so since Monday morning.

[Link to full story on Bookseller]

What's this mean for your publishing organization?

Topics: ebooks, Amazon.com, book publishing

Batter up, Publishers! Really Strategies will be at SSP in Boston.

Posted by Sarah Silveri on May 20, 2011 9:00:00 AM

 

RSuite is exhibiting at booth #34 from June 1st through the 3rd at The Society for Scholarly Publishing (#SSP)!

 

Schedule your time with us today and see how publishers have done the following things with RSuite:

  • reduced book production time-to-market by 8 weeks
  • automated aggregation and distribution of journal articles to licensing clients
  • Increased website traffic by more than 35%
  • and much more

Tweet about us at #SSP using the #RSuite hashtag.

Topics: RSuite, CMS for publishers, ebooks, publishing, CMS, publishing industry, book publishing, revenue, book publishers, metadata, really strategies inc, STM publishers, journal publishers

How I learned to love XML, CMS, and EBooks

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on May 4, 2011 6:20:00 PM

RSuite Cloud - End-to-end book publishing solutionA Book Publisher's Guide to
Single-Source, Multi-Channel Output

A webinar from Really Strategies, Inc. [click here to register]

When: May 18, 2011 | 10:00 to 11:00 pm EDT

Snapshot: According to industry analysts Frost & Sullivan, 2011 is “The Year of the Tablet.”  For book publishers, this means that delivering content to devices like the iPad and Kindle is not an option…it's imperative.  Book publishers are recognizing that better content management will accelerate revenue and profit growth. Technology like XML and content management software are the enablers that produce ebooks.

In this free webinar, Dan Dube,  EVP of Cloud Solutions at Really Strategies, Inc. will present a case study that illustrates how publishers are producing and publishing to traditional and digital media from the same source content with the (literal!) push of a button.

Topics: Webinar, ebooks, RSuite Cloud, book publishing

EBooks are #1 Format According to Association of American Publishers

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on Apr 20, 2011 5:10:00 PM

ebooksAccording to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) ebooks ranked as #1 format among all trade categories for the month of February. The stats track monthly and year-to-date publishers’ net sales revenue in all categories of commercial, education, professional and scholarly books and journals.

A couple potent highlights from the AAP report:

 

  • February 2011, e-Books ranked as the #1 format (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback).
  • January/February 2011 compared with January/February 2010---e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M

[Read more here]

If you're not generating ebooks, start. If you are generating ebooks, take a look at your back list and bring it forward.

Have any interesting metrics that you can share?

Topics: ebooks, publishing, revenue

Publishing Business Conference and Expo - all about the ebook

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on Apr 6, 2011 12:05:00 PM

Publishing Business Conference and Expo 2011Really Strategies just returned from Publishing Business Conference and Expo in New York City where thousands of publishing professionals came together for 2 days of education and networking. While our cheerful staff pictured here had various  conversations with publishers, the recurring theme was definitely ebooks.

  • How do I generate ebooks for my back list?
  • How do I create ebooks and publish along with my print version?
  • How do I publish to multiple languages?
Hint: RSuite Cloud

Lightbulb moment for me was hearing so many publishers still ask, "what is XML?". Clearly the fact that I've been embedded in the technology aspects of publishing solutions for the past 15 years has made me overlook the fact that XML is still a mystery for many publishing folks. It's understandable. The great thing about RSuite Cloud, a cloud-based production system, means that XML can remain in the background. At the end of the day, publishers need to publish their work...output formats, file formats, technologies...these can stay in the background, allowing publishers to stay focused on the content.

I get in my car and drive to work everyday, but I certainly don't understand the details of my car's engine.

Learn how RSuite Cloud is helping publishers to publish to ebooks, print, and web in an automated way that improves productivity while reducing cost. Click here to recieve your free white paper.

Topics: CMS for publishers, ebooks, CMS, book publishing

Content farming, plagiarism, ebooks - AKA "The Kindle Swindle"

Posted by Marianne Calihanna on Mar 31, 2011 12:03:00 PM

Tighten up your ereaders..the spammers are coming. Publishing Trends details how ebooks are the latest frontier for spammers. I recently noticed some garbage coming through on the Kindle store and wondered what this is all about.

Products like Autopilot Kindle Cash promote a tool that generates "passive income" and "totally hands free cash." Because many ebook vendors don't check copyright on books that are submitted, people are stealing content from the web and using tools like Autopilot Kindle Cash to quickly create ebooks about the same topic from multiple angles (targeting different keyword variants), and publishing them. Putting the books on Amazon.com also boosts the spammers ranking in search results.

Read the full post on "The Kindle Swindle" at Publishing Trends here.

Topics: ebooks, book publishing

Learn XML in 5 Minutes!

Posted by Christopher Hill on Mar 15, 2011 8:24:00 PM

As product manager for an XML-based CMS, often I find myself answering the question "What is XML?" Not necessarily a simple thing to answer in passing - entire books and courses are dedicated to the subject - but in about 5 minutes most content creators can at least understand at a basic level what XML is all about. Here is my 5 minute XML class to give a first pass at answering this question. At the end most people should have a rough idea of what XML is and can start thinking about its potential.
   
Take a look at the following text:
      
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
This book tells the story of an English girl, Alice, who drops down a rabbit hole and meets a colorful cast of characters in a fantastical world called Wonderland.
      
Reading it, you probably can infer that the underlined text is a book title. The italicized text appears to be the author of the book (if you dropped the word "by"). Then there is additional text. If you are familiar with the book, you can tell that the text is not part of the book itself, but appears to be a short summary. We know all of this because of certain conventions we have been taught as well as contextual clues provided by the words themselves.
      
Let's look at the same text again:
     
Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
This book tells the story of an English girl, Alice, who drops down a rabbit hole and meets a colorful cast of characters in a fantastical world called Wonderland.

Even though the text looks quite different, we probably could still successfully interpret the author's intent. Now, imagine you have to train a robot to understand these two cases. What rules might you create to "teach" the robot how to decide how to successfully parse these two text examples and understand what parts of the text are titles, author names, and summaries? Even for these two limited cases, the list of rules is going to be quite involved, and will include rules based on formatting, language, and convention. And a robot will have to know that somewhere in the text are the three pieces of content, otherwise it probably has little chance of determining the nature of what it is looking at (Darwin the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer excluded).

Even if all that was true, errors are likely to creep in. Do your rules allow the robot to understand that "by" is really a formatting cue indicating the following text is an author name? What about the meaning of an underline? Bold? Italics? Each example uses the same formatting cues but in different ways. 

When you write a document in a word processor or a desktop publishing program you mostly focus on how that text looks. Imagine after all that careful work making the text look right for your printer, you decide your content should appear on a Web site. Suddenly all that formatting needs to be re-worked to take advantage of the conventions of the Web. Now if you want to deliver to an electronic reader or a mobile phone your formatting may again need to be revisited. 

This is an expensive proposition when you start imagining all of the possible delivery channels that may require formatting changes. For many channels, all that formatting work needs to be scrapped and done again. 

The answer to this is XML: the extensible markup language. A short way to summarize the promise of XML is that it allows authors to indicate what the content is rather than how the content looks. XML does this using tags, essentially text-based labels that indicate what a particular piece of data might be. Here is the same example as XML. Even though you may not know anything about XML, you can make sense of this content.

<book>
<title>Alice's Adventures In Wonderland</title>
<author>Lewis Carroll</author>
<summary>This book tells the story of an English girl, Alice, who drops down a rabbit hole and meets a colorful cast of characters in a fantastical world called Wonderland.</summary>
</book>

Yes, angle brackets seem a little cold, but notice how they are labels making the meaning of the various pieces of text completely unambiguous. Notice how each tag (i.e. <book>) has a match (i.e. </book>). These pairs create a container. Everything appearing between matching tags is considered contained by them.

Now, imagine you want to deliver the content to a printed page, web site or mobile device. It is much easier now to write a set of rules that indicate how each should be formatted.

Rule for <book>:
start a new page
Rule for <title>:
one the first line, output the text as underlined,16 point Helvetica
Rule for <author>:  
start a new line, output the text in italic, 12 point Helvetica
Rule for <summary>: 
double-space, start a new line, output the text in 12 point Helvetica

These rules could be called a stylesheet. In reality, stylesheets are written in a more machine-friendly format that are beyond the scope of a 5 minute XML course, but this example should suffice to give you an idea of what a stylesheet's role in creating presentable XML content is. 

If I had hundreds, thousands or millions of book content items I could use this single stylesheet to output them all and be guaranteed consistency. 

If I decide I want to switch to a new look for my content, maybe using Garamond instead of Helvetica, then I just need to modify the stylesheet. Notice how the original book content exists completely independently of the formatting. And notice that changing the look of something doesn't require any editing of the original content.

Suppose I want to deliver my content to multiple channels. Each channel has its own conventions, limitations, and capabilities. People expect different formatting on a mobile phone than on their desktop computer. A web site typically looks different than the printed page. We used to underline book titles in print - but underline means something else on the web so often a different format is used. Helvetica may not even be an available font for many channels. 

Fortunately, XML makes supporting each unique channel straightforward. Instead of endlessly modifying my content, I simply develop new rules (a new stylesheet, or a variation of an existing stylesheet) for a new channel. The authoring process is unaffected. Existing content does not need to be re-edited to support the new channel. Instead, the new rules are applied to the content generating channel-appropriate output. And as the number of channels expand, XML serves as a content anchor point so that you can adapt content rapidly and in an automated way to the unique requirements of each channel.
XML as an anchor for multichannel publishing

If all of your content were clearly labeled by what it is, it is not nearly as daunting to support new output formats for new opportunities. Instead to a massive conversion of all your formatted content from one format to another, you just have to develop a new set of rules and you are ready to go.

That's XML in 5 minutes. At least as it impacts content creation and delivery. In the coming weeks I'll be posting additional quick lessons on XML-related technologies.

Topics: ebooks, publishing, XML, 5-minute-series

Really Strategies Announces RSuite Cloud

Posted by Barry Bealer on Feb 1, 2011 1:10:00 PM

"Push-Button Publishing System” for Print, Web, and eBook Production in 70 Languages

rsuite cloud 200wWe are pleased to announce the availability of RSuite Cloud - a complete end-to-end hosted editorial and production system for book publishers.  If you are looking to shorten your book production time to market, want to publish to multiple channels (print, HTML, eBook) at once, and publish in 70 different languages, I suggest you take a look for yourself.  Online demo here.

Here is what one of our clients said about RSuite Cloud:

“We saw the time to produce PDF proofs drop from a week to just a few minutes. This improvement in productivity allowed us to dramatically shorten our production cycle and even recognize revenue in 2010 for a book that was originally scheduled for 2011," stated Stephen Driver, vice president of production services, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. “We are excited about our ability to scale with this solution and the new scheduling flexibility that we could never have dreamed of in our old environment."

Topics: content management for publishers, content management, ebooks, CMS, CMS project, XML

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