A Kindle version of Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road will run you $12.99, substantially more than the couple of bucks that a paperback version costs. But let's sidestep the "print versus digital" debate for a moment. Because for the same price as the e-book version, you can now purchase an On the Road app for your iPad, available today in App Store (iTunes link). Perhaps the next debate in publishing will be e-book versus app.
The new app contains the full text of Kerouac's 1957 novel, of course. And in what the publisher Penguin is calling this "amplified edition," you get a lot more, which begs the question: do all great works of literature really need all these extra bells and whistles?
Avid Harry Potter fans followed a series of online clues yesterday that led them to Pottermore.com - a fairly standard "coming soon" website with a magenta background and a couple of owls... oh, and a signature of one very famous author: J.K. Rowling.
There are plenty of pronouncements about "the future of the book" when it comes to the increasing popularity of e-books and the steady release of new digital literature apps. Indeed, the ability to add video, voice-over, animation, and annotation all point to the great potential when literature becomes electronic, and in coming years we're sure to see a number of new creations that will challenge our definitions of "the book."
But the while the possibilities of electronic literature and enhanced e-books sound good in theory, often they fail to deliver in practice. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs: it can be costly to add video or animation, and the integration with the text itself isn't always seamless or sensible.
With this in mind, there are a lot of reasons to expect why an iPad version of one of the 20th century's most important poems, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" could be a complete flop. It's "The Waste Land" after all, a 430-ish line poem that is both incredibly familiar and notoriously difficult. Indeed, Eliot himself seemed aware of the challenges in interpreting the poem as he included his own lengthy notes when the poem was published in 1922.
The number of people who check out e-books via their local library is still pretty small - less than 15% of people in a recent survey indicated that they turned to libraries for their digital content. In part, it's been difficult for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons, but as the popularity of the e-books and e-readers has skyrocketed, it's clear that libraries are keen to find a solution to make e-book lending possible. And an announcement today from the digital content distributor OverDrive is a huge leap toward making that possible.
Earlier this spring, Amazon announced that it would be working with OverDrive in order to make it possible for libraries to lend Kindle books to their patrons. OverDrive already provides digital content to libraries and schools, and by making the popular Amazon format an option, it was anticipated that many more people would be able to take advantage of library e-book lending.
As media consumption devices evolve, so too does the form content takes on those devices. A great example is a new iPad and iPhone app called The Atavist, which is changing the way nonfiction stories are created and sold. Co-founder Evan Ratliff told the audience at the AdAge Creativity and Technology conference yesterday that The Atavist was created to fill a hole in the publishing market.
The Atavist sells multimedia enhanced nonfiction stories. In length they're about halfway between an extended magazine article and a book. It's similar to the content in Kindle Singles, where simplified versions of stories from The Atavist are also made available. In The Atavist iPad app, which I tested out, each story (there are 5 available currently) is packaged into a rich, immersive experience. As well as text, there are photos, videos, audio, links which pop up contextual information, sharing options, and more.
I remember distinctly the moment during the official unveiling of the iPad last year that I knew I'd be buying Apple's new tablet device: it was during the demo of the comics app. I was sold. It seemed clear that this was the future of the genre.
Now there are a number of different ways in which fans can buy and read comics online - on their iPads, on their mobile phones, and on the web - as much like the rest of the publishing industry, comic publishing is undergoing a digital revolution. One major nod to this upheaval was the announcement last week by DC Comics that it would be distributing digital versions of comics the same day that the print issues arrive on store shelves.
But back to the iPad for a minute: while the future of comics is clearly digital, is it necessarily via a native app?
And to that end the digital comics platform Graphicly says it's "doubled down on HTML5," revamping its Web interface to greatly improve the reading experience. Graphicly says that it's worked closely with Google's Chrome team to build a site that not only makes the most of HTML5 but that also uses Chrome's offline file API and in-app payments system.
The Internet Archive is arguably one of the most important projects on the Web, with its mission to preserve the Internet and make available to the public the rich collection of all the digitized material therein: websites, music, videos, as well as public domain books.
It's the latter - the ongoing efforts to digitize books, something that many libraries, archives, and private companies are currently undertaking, that has prompted the Internet Archive to recognize the importance of not just preserving electronic copies, but physical copies of materials as well.
Much of the reading news from yesterday's WWDC keynote focused on the new features in iOS 5: the Instapaper-like Reading List in Safari and the new magazine subscription delivery system via Newsstand. But what about e-books, or iBooks rather?
Apple did tout the number of books that have been downloaded since the iBookstore opened - some 130 million. And iBooks, along with other digital content, will be able to be stored online via Apple's new iCloud service. But while iCloud will let you download your iBooks to any device, you can only read them via the iBooks app. And that app is only available on iOS.
When Apple unveiled its new Mac OS onstage yesterday, iBooks were not mentioned.
Google announced last week that it was shutting down its News Archive Project. Akin to the massive Google Books project, this was a plan to digitize the world's newspaper archives and make them searchable online. But if you're worried about the digitization and preservation of British newspapers, fear not. As The Guardian reports today, the British Library is moving forward with its plans to digitize some 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection.
Some 500,000 pages have been digitized thus far, and beginning this fall, this material will be available online. By then, the British Library hopes to have over 1.5 million newspaper pages available.
The incredible success of Kickstarter has demonstrated that alternative crowdfunding platforms can help fund a number of creative projects (over 7,000 projects in the case of Kickstarter).
Now a new startup from the U.K. aims to take that model and apply it to the book publishing industry. Unbound is both a crowdfunding platform and a publisher. Authors pitch an idea and if enough readers support it, the book will be published. Like Kickstarter, if a book doesn't get sufficient backing, then supporters' pledges are refunded.
