Happy New Year!
This year brought the release of the CyberKill enhanced mobile eBook app. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, please do. It’s FREE. And ask your friends and family to do so, too. I’d appreciate it very much.
So what’s the skinny on these new enhanced ebooks? Do a search on Google for enhanced ebooks and you will find that there’s a divergence of opinion on them. The main critique falls into three areas.
The first opinion states that enhanced ebooks with embedded video, sound and graphics, takes away from the enjoyment of the book because the enhanced ebook intrudes on the reader’s ability to imagine the story in his mind. The very popular Harry Potter books loved by children are used as a prime example.
This opinion states that any attempt to add greater dimensions to the Harry Potter story telling like the movies takes away from the imagination of the children. But that’s a false argument.
Sure, when a child reads a Harry Potter book, he or she congers up a vivid picture in their mind of the characters and environment in the book. Those critics hold that the movies made from those books somehow take away from that imagination process.
But if that were true, how do you account for the hundreds of millions of dollars each book in the series has generated as a movie? And most of the audience for these movies are the children that read the Harry Potter book. The children enjoyed both versions of the story telling and it did little to take way their imagination of the story.
Of course, the professional handling of the book material by the movie studio did the story justice. As in anything creative – it has bee done well.
The second critique of enhanced ebooks comes from those that say the imbedded multimedia and extended material interrupts the reading experience. They claim, rightfully so, that the embedded video, audio and links to the Internet within the text interrupts the reading of the book. But Trapdoor Books has recognized this problem and placed its multimedia and outside links in what is called the ‘marginalia’ that sits along the outside column of the text. This marginalia can be totally turned off and the reader can read just text.
The third critique has nothing to do with the reading experience. It has to do with economics — the cost of producing enhanced ebooks. This is a valid critique. It does cost more to produce an enhanced book. Thus the retail cost of the ebook is higher than the traditional ebook.
But Trapdoor Books has found a solution to that. Their enhanced books are FREE. They are advertising supported and that revenue pays for the production of the ebook.
So, Trapdoor Books has found the way to meet the objections of the enhanced book skeptics.
As a reminder, Cyberkill is available as an Enhanced digital mobile app on the iPhone®, iPad® and Android™ mobile devices including the Kindle Fire and the NOOK™. So if you have portable devices that run on those two platforms you can download the entire advertising-supported Cyberkill enhanced digital mobile app for free.
You can get the FAQs on the CyberKill app here.
If you enjoyed this new form of publishing, please rate my app in the Apple iTunes and App Store and the Android Market.
And Remember: You can still purchase the dead tree version of Cyberkill or the traditional e-book version for your Kindle, or Sony Reader.
OK. On to this month’s features.
First up, digital books continue to grow in numbers and traditionally published print books decline.
David Farland keeps a pretty much tab on the publishing industry. His comments here add to the belief that ebooks will be king of the hill in a few years.
Right now, the e-book market is growing at over 10% per year. Meanwhile, the sale of paperbacks and hardcovers is dropping disproportionately. In fact, sales last month on hardcover books were down more than 40% from just the month before!
Now, there are reasons for this. Part of the problem has to do with the collapse of the Borders bookstore chain here in America. That might account for a drop of 25%. Another drop of 10% might be claimed because of the rise in sales of e-readers that people got for Christmas. But that means that there is still a substantial drop that doesn’t make sense—another 8%, more or less. What’s going on? I think that there may be people who are delaying hardback purchases in anticipation of buying e-readers. After all, why pay $25 for a hardcover when I plan to buy a Kindle and then get the electronic copy for $15 on Mother’s Day?
He may be right. What do you think?
Then again, are print books really going away? Or will we soon be neck deep in them?
In the latest issue of WIRED Magazine, Clive Thompson took on the challenge of ebooks vs print books.
His conclusion?
Print books are NOT going away. As a matter of fact, we’ll soon be neck deep in them.
Why? How? Three little letters – POD (print-on-demand).
Did you know that the percent increase of POD and self-published books from 2009 to 2010 boomed to 169% – hitting a stunning 2.8 million unique titles! No wonder a new author has an almost impossible task of breaking through the clutter.
Anyway, back to Thompson.
Print-on-demand devices, like the Espresso Book Machine, do just what their name implies: You feed them a digital file and in minutes you have a good-looking paperback with a color cover. (Print-on-demand companies like Lulu or Blurb even produce hardcover and photo books.)
Mass publishers doing “big” books will continue to shift to the Kindle and its peers, while smaller outlets will use print-on-demand for formats that privilege physicality, like mementos, visually lush books, and custom-designed, limited-edition copies of novels. This trend will accelerate in 15 or 20 years, when, as some observers predict, your average home printer will be able to spit out paperbacks. “I see this fundamentally as a tabletop medium. It’s the photocopier of the future,” says Rick Anderson, a librarian who runs an Espresso machine at the University of Utah.
The fate of print books? We may soon be neck deep in them.
And by the way, if you like to read out of the ordinary fiction, sign up for Trapdoor Books newsletter and stay on top of the best of ‘geek’ fiction. If this interests you, join the Trapdoor community.
If you would like to be removed from my newsletter list and miss out on the news of the future of publishing, email me at frank@frankfiore.com with the words ‘Remove’ in the SUBJECT line.
That’s it. Cheers until next month – Frank