If "lean startups" these days are supposed to release a minimum viable product, get reactions from initial customers, and then rapidly iterate - might not a book about startups work the same way? Every Book is a Startup is Todd Sattersten's new book, published by O'Reilly, about the changing publishing industry. You can buy the first two chapters of the eBook today for $4.99 and get subsequent chapters as free updates as they are written. But if you wait for the full book to be completed and published in paper, the price will be $25.
It's a fascinating experiment in eating your own dog food but it's not without historical precedent. Many novels throughout time were sold by subscription (Dickens, for example) and Samuel Johnson once took nine years to write the Western world's first authoritative printed dictionary. It was supported by subscription along the way and the end product weighed 20 pounds. That project was initiated by the publishing industry in response to massive disruption caused by the proliferation of printed materials and a need for a reference book defining common words. Perhaps this period of technological disruption will be well suited for another experiment in a similar format.
New rules governing how iOS apps handle in-app purchases went into effect on June 30, and the date passed without much fanfare and seemingly without much compliance from many apps that continued to offer content for sale. These apps included e-reader apps with links to their associated online bookstores, as well as a variety of others that offered users the ability to subscribe or make purchases.
But over the weekend, updates were issued for many e-reader apps, removing links to their bookstores in order to comply with Apple's new rules. These stipulate that Apple receive a 30% cut from in-app purchases and subscriptions, something that many publishers balked at, contending that that cut was too high.
JK Rowling's announcement last month that she would finally be releasing digital versions of the Harry Potter novels was met with great excitement. That's no surprise as the series is much beloved and Rowling's announcement timed with the release of the final Harry Potter film. Fans, feeling nostalgic perhaps for the books themselves, are keen to see what happens when the magic of Harry Potter meets the magic of electronic literature.
But many industry analysts noted that Rowling's decision to bypass the traditional publishing industry - to self-publish, if you will, her novels on a new website called Pottermore - could mark another important shift in power. No traditional publishers. No traditional booksellers. No DRM.
How Pottermore would work remained a little unclear, particularly as Rowling promised that the content would be available for all e-reader formats. But news from Google today helps answer some of these questions.
One of the longstanding laments about our move to digital literature is how difficult and cumbersome this makes marginalia, those notes and annotations we make in the margins of printed text. A story in The New York Times earlier this year went so far as to call the future of marginalia "dim," not only due to our inability to write comments in the margins but because there's not been any good system by which to track and preserve our notes.
TechStars alum Highlighter believe it has cracked this nut, with one line of JavaScript (inserted into site's footer) that lets publishers enable marginalia on their websites and in turn allows visitors to highlight, annotate, save, and share passages and comments.
Amazon unveiled a Kindle Textbook Rental, giving students the ability to rent instead of buy digital textbooks. Amazon says that, "tens of thousands" of titles from some of the major textbook publishers - including John WIley & Sons, Wlsevier, and Taylor & Francis - will be available for this school year.
It's not just the selection that the company is touting, of course, it's the savings: "now students can save up to 80% off its textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store." Amazon's boasted savings for students has put the company at odds with brick-and-mortar college bookstores, and the National Association of College Stores has accused the online retailer of misleading students about the potential for savings when buying textbooks from Amazon.
Ownership of e-readers is exploding, according to a survey by Pew Internet Research. Over the past six months, ownership of e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook has grown from 6% to 12% of U.S. adults. E-readers are more popular than tablets devices such as the iPad or various Android slates like the Samsung Galaxy Tab which are owned by 8% of U.S. adults.
According to Pew, e-reader and tablet ownership is led by Hispanic adults, adults younger than the age of 65, parents of children below the age of 18, college graduates and households with and income of at least $75,000. While the Pew research is an interesting look in to the state of the mobile reader market now, it is important to note the timing of the survey and movement of the market to distinguish actual digital trends.
The American Library Association (ALA) has just released its 2011 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Survey, and among its findings, 67% of public libraries in the U.S. now offer free access to e-books for their patrons. That's up 30% since 2007. Of course, access to e-books ranges greatly from state-to-state: 100% of Maryland and Utah libraries offer e-books, while only 25% of ilbraries in Mississippi do so, for example.
But even in the states where e-book access is commonplace, when it comes to making digital literature available to their patrons, libraries face a number of challenges. We've covered many of these issues here. Most well-known among these obstacles was the controversial announcement earlier this year by publisher Harper Collins to have library e-books "self-destruct" after 26 checkouts, forcing libraries to re-purchase titles in order to secure more checkouts. This among other factors (including, of course, budget issues) has made the future of e-books in libraries unclear.
Author J.K. Rowling unveiled the plans behind the mysterious Pottermore website this morning, and fans that were hoping for a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter series or for a wizarding MMORG may be disappointed. But for those who've been waiting to read the novels on their e-readers, good news: Pottermore will involve, in part, the release for the very first time of the Harry Potter series in a digital format.
In what's an uncommon occurrence, Rowling retained all the rights to digital copies of her books. And until now, she had not struck any deals with publishers or distributors to make the series available digitally. All that will change when Pottermore officially launches this fall.
The publishing and bookseller world as a whole has seen substantial shake-up over the last few years: the rise of the e-book, the collapse of Borders, for example. And the world's largest bookseller Barnes & Noble has received its own fair share of mixed reviews lately as well. On one hand, the company announced last summer that it was putting itself up for sale in order to boost what it felt were undervalued shares. On the other hand, Barnes & Noble has had a string of wins in the digital realm, most recently when Consumer Reports ranked its e-reader the Nook over competitor Amazon's Kindle.
So eyes were on the Barnes & Noble quarterly earnings report today, particularly in light of an offer from Liberty Media to acquire the company. And again, the news was mixed.
Since the Kindle's launch, Amazon has heralded each new arrival into what it calls the "Kindle Million Club," the group of authors who have sold over 1 million Kindle e-books. There have been seven authors in this club up 'til now - some of the big names in publishing: Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts for example.
But the admission today of the eighth member of this club is really quite extraordinary. Not because John Locke is a 60 year old former insurance salesman from Kentucky with no writing or publishing background. But because John Locke has accomplished the feat of selling one million e-books as a completely self-published author.
