Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros
digitais.
Hachette Book
Group, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, has a response. In a
document leaked today to Digital Book World by someone inside the company,
Hachette outlines just why publishers are relevant. The company has shown the
document internally to employees and externally to a limited number of agents
and authors.
“You have to take a long look at
what you’re up to and how you’re changing and adapting,” said a Hachette
executive who preferred not to be named and who confirmed the authenticity of
the document. “We’re all trying to come up with good messaging.”
A Comissão Europeia abriu uma investigação a cinco
grandes grupos editoriais que, em parceria com a Apple, terão manipulado e
fixado ilegalmente o preço dos livros electrónicos, os ebooks. Esta é a segunda
vez este ano que a Apple se vê envolvida num processo destes, depois de o mesmo
ter acontecido nos Estados Unidos.
As editoras em questão são a Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing, França),
a Harper Collins (News Corp., Estados Unidos), a Simon & Schuster (CBS
Corp., Estados Unidos), a Penguin (Pearson Group, Reino Unido) e a
Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck (que detém entre outras a Macmillan,
Alemanha) e, segundo o comunicado da Comissão Europeia, envolveram-se numa
prática "anti-competitiva que afecta a venda dos ebooks no Espaço
Económico Europeu". A abertura de um processo formal de investigação
implica que o caso seja tratado com prioridade.
Stross’s point
is that Amazon’s dominant market position makes DRM undesirable for publishers
because most customers prefer to trade with the largest vendor. In effect, DRM
is locking customers out of other e-book formats. This in turn increases
Amazon’s market share further, to publishers’ peril, as Amazon is no longer the
warm and fuzzy business it was when it started out. On the other hand,
publishers could make their books available without DRM, which would mean that
they could be viewed on any ebook device. Thus Amazon’s huge market share would
have a very strong #2 competitor: the sum of all the other e-book companies.
So, publishers, choose: DRM and Amazon’s growing market dominance, or no DRM
and a number of vendors able to compete on stronger terms with Amazon. And, yes, no DRM would probably increase
piracy. What’s better, the pirates or Amazon?
Portico and Cambridge
University Press have announced an agreement to preserve Cambridge Books Online
content with Portico. Portico is a not-for-profit organization offering
community-supported digital preservation service for e-journals, e-books and
d-collections for libraries and institutions. As part of the agreement,
Cambridge University Press will make “an annual contribution” to Portico to
support its e-book preservation service.
The addition of titles from
Cambridge Books Online brings the total number of e-books committed to the
Portico archive to more than 123,000. Beginning in 2011, Portico expanded its
preservation services offered to libraries with the introduction of separate
e-book and e-journal services, enabling libraries to choose where to invest
their preservation resources. Through
this agreement, Cambridge extends
its relationship with Portico, which began in 2006 with the publisher’s
commitment to deposit its entire list of e-journals in the Portico
archive.
Há cerca de 42 bibliotecas públicas portuguesas em testes
finais para implementação de uma plataforma que irá permitir aos leitores
acederem aos acervos de ebooks em qualquer dispositivo com ligação à Internet.
Deste grupo, "10 ou 11 bibliotecas académicas" deverão passar a
contar com a possibilidade até ao final do ano.
Atualmente, a plataforma já está a ser usada pela Faculdade de Economia do
Porto e pelos Institutos Politécnico de Leiria e de Bragança e, ainda antes do
Natal, poderá ganhar espaço no site da Biblioteca Nacional, que também já
assinou o protocolo para utilização do sistema, avançou o CEO da empresa que
assina o projeto.
Towards the end
of his Booker Prize-winning speech, Julian Barnes paid the following compliment
to the designer of his novel's jacket: "Those of you who have seen my
book, whatever you may think of its contents, will probably agree that it is a
beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we've come to call it, is to
resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying,
and something worth keeping. So my final expression of gratitude is to the best
book designer in town, Suzanne Dean."
Dean herself, creative director
at Random House, perhaps unsurprisingly concurs with his sentiments. "I
personally spend all day in front of a computer screen," she says.
"The last thing I want to do at night is sit in front of another to read
my book. I want the real thing." Dean has been a designer for 18 years
now, and has created some of our most iconic books, among them Ian McEwan's
Atonement, Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Useful is of
course the operative word here, I have no doubt that ereader makers will dream
up all manner of “useful” new functions for their ereaders to tempt us to buy
them, but I really doubt that they will actually add any real value to the
ereader
We have the odd situation of
possessing a device that is actually perfectly designed for its primary
function, and can thus not really be improved in any meaningful way.. Which is death for any consumer
electronics. They have to keep adding
goodies to it in order to stand out above the crowd and thus sell, and thus
survive.
Amid all of
2011’s obits for the 300-page object, it’s easy to forget just how limiting the
one-size-fits-all template has been for publishing (that one size being about
100,000 words). Why should magazine articles, horror stories for children, and
scholarly theses all be molded into one Procrustean bed? The great hidden
virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom
line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It
turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the
makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between
articles and hardcovers. It may even be the case that Americans can tolerate
serious policy work by academics (like economist Cowen’s e-book hit The Great
Stagnation) so long as it isn’t padded out to 500 pages.
This review
addresses the question of what exactly should we preserve, and how the digital
preservation community and scholars address this question. The paper first
introduces the much-abused-term “significant properties,” before revealing how
some scholars are of the opinion that characteristics of digital objects to be
preserved (i.e., significant properties) can be identified and should be
expressed formally, while others are not of that opinion. The digital preservation
community’s attempt to expound on the general characteristics of digital
objects and significant properties will then be discussed. Finally, the review
shows that while there may be ways to identify the technical makeup or general
characteristics of a digital object, there is currently no formal and objective
methodology to help stakeholders identify and decide what the significant
properties of the objects are. This review thus helps open questions and
generates a formative recommendation based on expert opinion that expressing an
object’s functions in an explicit and formal way (using didactic guides from
the archives community) could be the solution to help stakeholders decide what
characteristics/ elements exactly we should preserve.
New
York Times E-Book Best Sellers
A version of this list appears in the December
18, 2011 issue
of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending December
3, 2011.
1.
THE DROP, by Michael Connelly
2.
KILL ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson
3.
EXPLOSIVE EIGHTEEN, by Janet Evanovich
4.
11/22/63, by Stephen King
5.
THE LITIGATORS, by John Grisham
1.
STEVE JOBS, by Walter Isaacson
2.
HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent
3.
CATHERINE THE GREAT, by Robert K. Massie
4.
KILLING LINCOLN, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin
Dugard
5.
UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand
Wall
Street Journal E-Book Best Sellers (Week Ended Dec. 4)
Nonfiction E-Books
TITLE
AUTHOR / PUBLISHER
|
THIS WEEK
|
LAST
WEEK
|
Steve Jobs
|
1
|
1
|
Walter Isaacson/Simon &
Schuster
|
Heaven Is For Real
|
2
|
2
|
Todd Burpo with Lynn
Vincent/Thomas Nelson Publishers
|
JFK
|
3
|
—
|
L. Fletcher Prouty/Skyhorse
Publishing
|
Catherine the Great
|
4
|
3
|
Robert K. Massie/Random House
|
Killing Lincoln
|
5
|
4
|
Bill O'Reilly, Martin
Dugard/Henry Holt & Co.
|
Unbroken
|
6
|
5
|
Laura Hillenbrand/Random House
|
Don't Look Behind You and Other
True Cases
|
7
|
New
|
Ann Rule/Pocket Books
|
The Glorious Pasta of Italy
|
8
|
—
|
Domenica Marchetti/Chronicle
Books
|
Cool, Calm & Contentious
|
9
|
—
|
Merrill Markoe/Random House
|
Playbook 2012: The Right
Fights Back
|
10
|
New
|
Mike Allen, Evan Thomas,
Politico/Random House
|
Fiction E-Books
TITLE
AUTHOR / PUBLISHER
|
THIS WEEK
|
LAST
WEEK
|
The Drop
|
1
|
New
|
Michael Connelly/Little, Brown
|
The Hunger Games
|
2
|
2
|
Suzanne Collins/Scholastic
|
Catching Fire
|
3
|
4
|
Suzanne Collins/Scholastic
|
Wife by Wednesday
|
4
|
—
|
Catherine Bybee/Catherine Bybee
|
Mockingjay
|
5
|
7
|
Suzanne Collins/Scholastic
|
Explosive Eighteen
|
6
|
1
|
Janet Evanovich/Random House
|
Kill Alex Cross
|
7
|
6
|
James Patterson/Little, Brown
|
11/22/63
|
8
|
3
|
Stephen King/Scribner
|
The Litigators
|
9
|
5
|
John Grisham/Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group
|
Hunter
|
10
|
—
|
Robert Bidinotto/Robert
Bidinotto
|
Infográficos
Vídeos
Ideias em Estante: Manuel
Gonçalves Neves
