Leituras Digitais (14 a 20 de Agosto)

Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.

Is this the end for books?

  Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin's business. But there are reasons to reject the idea that the extinction of the printed book is just around the corner, just as there were reasons to reject the notion that e-books would never catch on because you couldn't read them in the bath and, y'know, books are such lovely objects.

Our Emergent Digital Future

  What will the digital world look like in ten years?  The trends are already clear.

  Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path.  The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist.  Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits.

  However, trends tell us very little.  It’s discontinuities that drive history.  Everything seems fine and then boom!  E-commerce comes along, then search engines, social media, smart phones and on and on.  Much like the flood that set Noah on his journey, such events, although driven by trends, take us in completely new directions and create new orders.

Have You ever Wondered if You Can Legally Share That eBook?

  New tools have been released as part of the Europeana Project that will help you calculate when a copyright will expire. The tools are free to use and they cover 30 countries (the 27 members of the European Union plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and can be found at http://www.outofcopyright.eu.

The E-Reader of Sand: The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover

  My point is that I, like a lot of other people, enjoy books as objects. Despite the difficulties that can arise from their accumulation, I like that they occupy physical as well as mental space. In fact, I quietly entertained the futile hope that the whole idea of e-books and e-readers would prove to be a transitory fad, that everyone would just somehow forget that books were cumbersome and comparatively expensive to produce and not especially good for the environment and that they could very easily be replaced by small clusters of electronic data that could be beamed across the world in seconds without ever taking up any actual space. I did not want what happened to CDs to happen to books. But then I took this small, smoothly utilitarian rectangle of grey plastic out of its box and fired it up. Within minutes, I was beginning to understand its crazy potential. In no time at all, I had downloaded a small library of free, out-of copyright classics. There is, obviously, something to be said for being able to walk around with the complete works of Tolstoy on your person at all times without fear of collapsed vertebrae or public ridicule. There is also, just as obviously, something to be said for having immediate access to a vast, intangible warehouse of books from which you can choose, on a whim, to purchase anything and begin reading it straight away. It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it (in the same way that Leonardo “invented” the helicopter and various other gadgets).

Multitouch and the quest to make ereaders more flexible than paper

  LiquidText founder and CEO Craig Tashman (@CraigTashman) says his annotation and document manipulation software began as an academic project, but commercial applications quickly became clear as students participating in the research started asking for copies. The software allows users to annotate, highlight and manipulate PDF content with multitouch gestures. It may be the next major step toward making etextbooks more practical for students — and it's another nail in the coffin for the "death of marginalia" debate.

Amazon strikes first 'major' publishing deal

  Amazon.com has made the first "major" acquisition for its New York-based publishing imprint, snapping up rights in bestselling self-help author Timothy Ferriss's new book The 4-Hour Chef.

The online retailer has moved aggressively into publishing over the last year, with imprints covering everything from romance to literature in translation and mysteries and thrillers. Earlier this summer it hired publishing bigwig Larry Kirshbaum, former chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group, to head up its New York imprint, and it is Kirshbaum who has spearheaded the world rights deal for Ferriss's work.

Digital companies "have stranglehold on publishing"

  Canadian novelist Kate Pullinger has said the power of Amazon, Apple and Google has put publishers in a "difficult situation".

  Speaking as part of BBC Radio 4's "The World at One" "Future of the Book" series, Pullinger said she did feel optimistic about the future of publishing. However, she added: "I think the big publishers have got themselves into a difficult situation with the stranglehold that Amazon, Apple and Google have on bookselling currently, but I think there are other ways. Just as long as the internet remains a kind of open territory there will always be other economic markets [and] business models for people to exploit; there are myriad of ways for readers to find writers and writers to find readers."

The Golden Era Of Books Isn’t Over. The Golden Era Of Books Is Now

  Once upon a time, hardcover books were the only way that book lovers could read new titles. This allowed publishers to charge a premium for a product — a big, shiny hardback book — that actually isn’t much more expensive to produce than a paperback. Today, most publishers release the ebook edition of a new title at the same time as a hardback. Ebooks are a cheaper, more portable, quicker way for fans to get hold of their favourite author’s latest work so it’s absolutely unremarkable that hardcore book buyers are migrating to that format. Sure enough, hardback sales have dipped in the past 12 months but, in the same period, ebook sales have soared. In terms of both unit sales (up 4.1% from 2008) and revenue (up 5.6% from 2008), American publishers experienced a bumper year last year.

Western Europe Sees Huge Shift Toward E-Books

  Europe has lagged behind the U.S. in widespread adoption of e-books, but a new report suggests that they are finally taking off. The e-book market in Western Europe grew by 400 percent in 2010, a new report finds. By 2015, e-books should make up 15 percent of total book sales in the region. (By contrast, in the U.S., they were already at 6.4 percent in 2010.)

Futuresource Consulting, a UK-based consulting firm, published the research on e-books and e-readers. “Despite all this rapid growth in demand for e-books in Western Europe, the market is still in its infancy, representing less than 1 percent of total consumer spending on books,” Futuresource market analyst Fiona Hoy said. “Moving forward, there are enormous opportunities within the market and our forecasts show Western European e-book revenues will reach €1.6 billion by 2015, accounting for 15% of total book spend and representing one out of every five books sold in the region.”

Four Key Lessons from the Yale Publishing Course

  As publishers are looking for new opportunities and areas of growth, US publishers are urged to take an interest in the rest of the world.

The agonies of self-publishing an ebook

 Alana cash, a successful filmmaker has written a long article for (http://www.insearchofdesign.com/) in which she describes the considerable problems she has experienced as she attempted to get her book TOM’S WIFE published as an ebook, and she has agreed to let me share some of her experiences with you guys, in a spirit of “I fell into the holes in the road, here are some warning signposts to help you avoid doing the same”.

  When she decided to publish her ebook herself, she had a look at the various online outfits who offer what is called Publish on Demand (POD), such as Smashwords, Lightening and CreateSpace (the last being the outfit who distribute her films for her) and that is when her problems began.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

  These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the August 28, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending August 13, 2011.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      NOW YOU SEE HER, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

2.                      THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

3.                      THE BLACK ECHO, by Michael Connelly

4.                      THE SILENT GIRL, by Tess Gerritsen

5.                      SMOKIN' SEVENTEEN, by Janet Evanovich

Complete List »

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

2.                      IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, by Erik Larson

3.                      BOSSYPANTS, by Tina Fey

4.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

5.                      SEAL TEAM SIX, by Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin

Complete List »

The Hugo Awards 2011 - Stream em directo da cerimónia

  Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, has announced on their Hugo Ceremonies page that they plan to provide live streaming-video coverage of the 2011 Hugo Awards ceremony. This is in addition to the live text-based coverage that we’ll be providing through CoverItLive and announcements on Twitter.

The Hugo Awards Ceremony is scheduled for 8 PM Pacific Daylight Time on Saturday, August 20.

The Public Domain Review

  The public domain is a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction. All works eventually enter the public domain – from classic works of art, music and literature, to abandoned drafts, tentative plans, and overlooked fragments.

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

By providing a curated collection of exotic scraps and marvellous rarities and linking to freely distributable copies of works in online archives and from far flung corners of the web, we hope to encourage readers to further utilise and explore public domain works by themselves.

We believe the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which – like our natural environment and our physical heritage – deserves to be explicitly recognised, protected and appreciated.

Foi recentemente inaugurado o website The Public Domain Review, que tem como objectivo a divulgação de materiais que se inserem no domínio público. Serão divulgados trabalhos de diversas áreas, desde a fotografia à literatura, sendo cada um acompanhado por um artigo de modo a contextualizar os mesmos.

Exposição Virtual - Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the image of a literary family

  Few families enjoy such a remarkable reputation for their contribution to the literature and intellectual life of Britain as the Godwins and the Shelleys. Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family explores how the reputation of this great literary family was shaped by the selective release of documents and manuscripts into the public domain. It also provides a fascinating insight into the real lives of a family that was blessed with genius but marred by tragedy.

A exposição, inicialmente realizada na Bodleian Library, encontra-se agora disponível online. A visita virtual permite explorar, entre outros elementos, biografias, manuscritos e uma árvore genealógica da família Shelley. O vídeo de apresentação pode ser visualizado abaixo:

Leituras Digitais (7 a 13 de Agosto)

Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.

Will print and ebook publishers ultimately be doing the same books?

  We could evolve so that the skills and organizational requirements to publish narrative content, if print becomes a small component of the revenue, will be quite different from what’s required to publish the illustrated content for which print remains an important part of the revenue. In that world, what constitutes a sensible portfolio of offerings for what we today call a “book publisher” might be defined quite differently.

The Guardian launches e-book series

  The Guardian has launched Guardian Shorts, a series of e-books based on its journalism. The series will feature topical news articles in several different subject areas such as sport, public policy and cultural events, with the first one entitled Phone Hacking: How the Guardian Broke the Story, which provides a “comprehensive account” of how the scandal unfolded.

  The e-books are all in English and cost between £1.99 and £3.99 depending on the subject, length and how much new content they contain and are available on the Kindle internationally and via the iBooks store. Some of the ‘shorts’ will also be available for free.

Amazon Quietly Launched a Kindle Social Network

  Twitter is a buzz Sunday night with the news that Amazon had added social networking features to the Kindle support site at kindle.amazon.com. Kindle users can now create a profile page, follow other Kindle users, share details about their reading habits, and so on.

All Eyes on Amazon Publishing

  For many agents, along with some booksellers, the real concern about Amazon Publishing has to do with what it could signal for traditional publishers. If Amazon lands enough bestselling authors, it could dominate traditional publishing the way it has come to monopolize online bookselling. Jeff McCord, owner of the Atlanta shop Bound to Be Read Books, thinks Amazon has long “wished to take over the book industry from top to bottom” and its recent foray into publishing is proof. “Amazon Publishing is a bigger worry for publishers than for bookstores,” he said.

1,000+ classic sci-fi and fantasy works to be epublished in September

  Early last month, publisher Gollancz announced that it was going to publish a new third edition of the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” online, and make it free for anyone to access. An executive for Gollancz told FutureBook that it had profit-minded reasons for doing this, but wouldn’t explain them at the time.

Here’s why: Gollancz is also acquiring the ebook rights to thousands of out-of-print sci-fi and fantasy classics, and will start offering them for sale this fall. The launch list includes over a thousand titles, and the publisher plans to have around 5,000 titles available by 2014.

Google avança com a digitalização na Europa

  Tal como havia prometido quando lançou o Google eBooks - a livraria digital que já se chamou Google Editions e foi lançada nos Estados Unidos em Dezembro -, o Google vai lançar na Europa a sua livraria digital. Será até ao final do ano, foi confirmado ao PÚBLICO.

  A empresa não quis divulgar ainda em que países e em que moldes isso irá acontecer. No entanto, o The New York Times noticiou este domingo, que o Google eBooks abrirá uma versão francesa ainda este ano. Se, nos Estados Unidos, continua a ser discutido em tribunal o projecto de digitalização de livros do Google, em França, um dos países europeus que mais batalharam para proteger os direitos dos seus autores e editores, a empresa norte-americana conseguiu avançar.

Kindle Cloud Reader now available for Chrome, Safari, iPad

  This morning saw the launch of Amazon response to Apple in-app purchase rules.

Kindle Cloud Reader is a Chrome and Safari friendly web app where you can read and (more importantly) buy Kindle ebooks. It doesn’t work on the iPhone yet, but if you download Chrome or Safari you can try it on your PC.

Hardback sales plummeting in age of the ebook

  Dramatic falls in hardback sales are turning the triumph of the ebook into a defeat for paper publishing, with readers in their thousands opting for electronic editions rather than expensive, dust-jacketed copies of the latest fiction titles.

  Sales of adult fiction in hardback so far this year have fallen by over 10% according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan: by this point last year, sales of the format had reached £29.7m, while this year they stand at £26.6m. Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%. Hardback sales have fallen in volume as well as value, BookScan said, from 2.8m copies sold by this point last year to 2.6m this, echoing a trend over the last two years: 8.5m copies of adult fiction hardbacks were sold in total in 2009, compared to just 7m in 2010.

"Game of Thrones" Author talks about Dwarves, Dragons and Delving into eBooks

  It was an epic geekfest that could only be matched by the likes of a Comic-Con or a Star Trek convention: Googlers flocked to hear master fantasy writer George R. R. Martin talk at our Mountain View headquarters last month, in the first-ever live-streamed event for the Authors@Google series. Though you may have missed Martin live -- in which the Game of Thrones author took a variety of questions from Googlers as well as the general public -- you can now watch the recorded talk on YouTube.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the August 21, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending August 6, 2011.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

2.                      UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY, by J. A. Jance

3.                      NOW YOU SEE HER, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

4.                      COLD VENGEANCE, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

5.                      THE BLACK ECHO, by Michael Connelly

Complete List »

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      A STOLEN LIFE, by Jaycee Dugard

2.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

3.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

4.                      IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, by Erik Larson

5.                      BOSSYPANTS, by Tina Fey

Complete List »

Vídeos

Interview with Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins

Europeana Libraries highlights

Project Muse lança novo website

A versão beta do novo website do Project MUSE já se encontra online. O comunicado oficial:

  Project MUSE has released a beta web site previewing its combined digital book and journal content. The beta site, http://beta.muse.jhu.edu, will be available through the end of this year, allowing scholars, librarians, and students to become familiar with the newly enhanced platform before the changeover to accommodate MUSE's forthcoming eBook Collections on January 1, 2012.

The beta site showcases Project MUSE's sophisticated new cross-content, faceted search functionality, and allows browsing of books and journals side-by-side. A powerful new hierarchical subject structure permits users to drill down to the most relevant content, and encourages discovery. Over 300 digital books, from 27 publishers, are available for free sample access on the site during the beta period. The MUSE collections launching in January will encompass over 12,000 book titles from the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), a collaborative of more than 65 major university presses and related scholarly publishers. The beta site is still in active development, with many additional features planned for inclusion prior to January.

Project MUSE’s beta site also includes the complete content from the nearly 500 distinguished scholarly journals now available on the current MUSE site. Visitors to the beta site will have access to the same content for which they have rights on the current site, via their institutional affiliation and associated subscriptions. New easy-to-follow icons clearly distinguish content which is available in full text to the user, a free sample or open access, or restricted.

The new search functionality on the beta site provides a search box on every page, with an option for the user to search both books and journals or choose just one content type. Once search results are returned, facets allow for further filtering the results by research area, author, language, and content type, and to only material for which the user has full text access. Search results may include journal articles or book chapters, with multiple results from a single book title rolled up into a single cumulative entry. Efforts are ongoing to optimize the search function to return the most relevant results with the best possible speed.

Browsing of book and journal content is available by title, publisher, and research area. MUSE is implementing a new hierarchical structure of academic research areas, promoting discovery of pertinent content while moving from a broad survey through to specific sub-disciplines. With over 12,000 books anticipated for inclusion in MUSE's initial ebook collections, the new structure will provide a powerfully efficient path to the most needed material.

At the individual book level, users can browse chapter-level snippets and view pertinent details about each title. A "Search Inside This Book" feature allows for discovery within the book content without leaving the title's main page. Breadcrumbs leading back to the hierarchical research areas provide paths to related books and journals.

Many features are still in development on Project MUSE's new site and will be released over the next few months. The following will be available by the formal site launch on January 1, 2012, for both books and journal articles: enhanced Related Content links; improved saving, viewing, and exporting of citations; content-integrated "More by this Author" links; and emailing, bookmarking, and sharing capabilities. Support for OpenURL functionality and Shibboleth authentication will also be in place by January 1.

Project MUSE eBook Collections will provide libraries, researchers, and students access to a wealth of high quality book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's essential electronic journal collections in a user-friendly environment with rich discovery features. MUSE books will be released electronically simultaneous with print publication, in PDF format, searchable and retrievable to the chapter level. Frontlist, backlist, interdisciplinary, and subject-specific collections will be available for purchase, with perpetual access rights, unlimited simultaneous usage of book content, no DRM and no restrictions on printing or downloading. COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, as well as free MARC records, will be available for books on MUSE. Details on available collections, purchase options, and prices will be announced no later than October 1, 2011. The new, integrated Project MUSE web site, including book collections, will be live on January 1, 2012. More details are available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ebooks.

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide.